Business
Counting how many calls a service team handles rewards the very volume that signals problems. The core measure should be contacts per unit of business, such as per order, customer, or statement, and the goal is to push that rate down.
A large share of service workload, about 26 percent once handling time and cost are counted, comes from broken systems and confusing marketing messages. These contacts never needed to happen and should be removed at their source, not handled repeatedly.
Self-service shouldn't be a wall to keep customers away from staff. It should be designed to resolve most issues outright, aiming for roughly an 80 percent success rate, so customers choose it because it works.
Rather than dodging customers, make contact very easy, even letting them send messages straight to the top executive. Open channels are the best way to learn what is broken and what customers really want.
Several ongoing listening posts that capture what customers are already saying, including public online comments, give insight faster and cheaper than formal focus groups. The value lies in acting on what is heard, not just collecting it.
Most service operations accept the volume of incoming contacts as a given and build capacity to cope with it. The better move is to question why each contact exists and remove the cause, especially when customers contact again and again about the same problem.
Customers only reach out when something didn't work or wasn't clear, so each contact is a data point of dysfunction rather than a chance to shine. Nobody wakes up wanting to call their bank or utility; they just want things to work. The best service is the one the customer never needs.
The departments that generate customer contacts are usually not customer service but other parts of the company, such as billing, marketing, or product teams. Fixing the problem means finding those causing groups and making them share ownership of the fix.
Automated outbound messages, such as order and shipping confirmations or alerts when something changes or breaks, answer questions before customers have to raise them. Reaching out first removes the reason to call.
Companies often assume customers want an ongoing relationship with them and build elaborate service experiences on that belief. Most customers simply want to buy something and have it work, and because service is tied to things going wrong, they see these relationships as negative.