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Staying contactable, always, all the time: that's the challenge facing customer services. A challenge? Perhaps not. 100% reachability is an achievable goal with a little method and the right partners.
The key is to act simultaneously on :
levers for transforming the telephony ecosystem (technical solutions, such as IVR, Visual IVR, call overflow rules, etc.),
the human aspect (through advisors' reception postures, incentives, etc.),
the organization of continuous change to adapt to new challenges.
Implementing a 100% solution for requests via a Visual IVR: Directing calls to the right person involves a system capable of qualifying contact intentions in advance.
IVR for calls: Allows clients to qualify their intention to get directly to the person best able to respond to their request.
Visual IVR for low-value or unprocessed calls (such as busy lines): Directs calls to digital and autonomous pathways to avoid disappointing experiences. Digital channels, often unknown to callers, allow for a positive experience for the end customer who gets an immediate response, and significant savings for the company by reducing call volume.
Smoothing Activity by Redirecting to Asynchronous Channels
The habit of calling remains strong, but with the emergence of digital solutions, it's possible to encourage the use of autonomous solutions for low-value requests. Asynchronous channels (messaging, call back, forms, etc.) should be favored for non-priority issues when customer service cannot handle the flow. This helps manage peak periods by smoothing activity over quieter periods.
It's crucial to think about how calls are distributed among different competent services. Anticipating changes, such as altered opening hours or the creation of specialized services, and proposing to switch these calls to digital channels can prevent loss of business and negative customer experiences.
In some cases, establishing a function for the supervision and management of flows (including telephony, emails, or chats) can be essential. This function acts like a control tower, serving as an interface between customer relations management and the customer service team. It takes a comprehensive view of the distribution of tasks and can suggest reallocating resources as needed based on the efficiency of the routing rules. This role ensures:
As a result, a virtuous cycle can quickly be initiated: fewer calls handled by advisors means more availability to respond to requests. Technical solutions thus serve to augment human capabilities, freeing up time for tasks where human skills are irreplaceable.
Facing an influx of calls, implementing tools can smooth out peaks and significantly improve the pick-up rate. But over time, the response level remains, after all, proportional to the number of employees able to handle calls: statistically, 20 advisors will handle more calls than 5… While some choose to systematically divert to chatbots or centralized CRCs (customer relationship centers), it is less costly and more effective in terms of reachability to revise the rules for handling calls on broader scopes than commercial entities (agencies) by facilitating overflows at the geographical sector level or a group of nearby entities. However, this approach implies a virtuous evolution of telephone reception attitudes.
The attitudes of service (or sales) at a distance are neither innate nor natural. They are the result of learning, reflection, willingness, and managerial action. In this regard, they require advisors to adapt their methods: handling the request, questioning, arguing, bouncing back, all this is not done in the same way on the phone and face-to-face. The pandemic has certainly restricted the reflex of physical appointments, but advisors still need time to evolve their practices.
To this end, a personalized approach is necessary to:
Such an approach also requires adapting management rules which sometimes constitute a real challenge to the posture of managers, who themselves are not always comfortable with supporting their employees in remote relationships.
Facilitating a Response to the First Request
Picking up is good; responding to the request immediately guarantees customer satisfaction. This limits repetition and therefore call volumes: this not only improves the customer experience but also the employee experience, as the latter deals with fewer recurring or low-value-added calls and faces fewer irritants. What matters is not so much the pick-up rate, but the customer satisfaction rate through the speed and quality of the response provided.
The advisor must always respond to the customer as if they were their customer. Facilitating customer sharing is not always easy, we know, but this approach greatly favors service at the first request: responding to the customer as if they were mine generally implies revising the existing rules of delegation, objectification, sales, or even remuneration, to "erase" the obstacles to customer sharing.
Most existing monitoring generally relies on a mechanical calculation, that of a pick-up rate that rather reflects an internal view of the advisors' activity, itself closely correlated to their availability and presence, rather than real reachability.
An effective indicator must take into account, in addition to the means implemented, the result obtained, i.e., obtaining a solution or a response at the first request for the caller. A completion or first-time service rate usefully complements a quantitative approach with a qualitative aim.
It is important to combine a technical approach and behavioral training, quick wins, and longer-term measures, while ensuring the coherence of the training, management, and monitoring system.
A Reachability project is a real corporate project. It does not depend on the size or means of the company, fundamentally, but rather on its ambition in terms of customer experience.
Article co-signed by Adrien Lesage (CCO DialOnce), Gerald Manzanares (Director of Advice New Data) As an advisory actor, New Data supports you in defining flow patterns adapted to your organization, your trajectory, the implementation of monitoring tools, and the training of your employees and managers. DialOnce is the omnichannel orchestration platform and Visual IVR enabling the implementation of this strategy.
