Rats and the Contact Center

Each year, my sister gives me a humorous calendar, the kind that you peel off a sheet each day and are presented with some new joke. This year, she gave me one that contains a compendium of “Stupidest Things Ever Said.”

Here’s the June 13 entry: “Rat complaints have gone up, but we look at that as a positive thing, because more people know to contact us.” The quotation is attributed to a “New York City complaints hotline bureaucrat.” Since there is no additional attribution, it is difficult to pinpoint when this statement was made, but perhaps it was during the war on rats a few years ago (non-New Yorkers: you can get a flavor of the effort in this NY Daily News article).

This entry made me think of a recurring request to improve customer care that I’ve seen from clients and prospects over the years. Here’s the gist of what companies have asked for: can we devise a tool that enables the call center to place their “best” customers into a priority queue for customer service but by bypassing the IVR and regular queues entirely?

The idea of providing added quality of service to one’s best customers is a laudable idea, so long as the basic level of customer service is also good. If, on the other hand, the help line is fraught with an arcane IVR system, call waiting times are lengthy, and abandon rates high, a company would be better off investing in better service for all callers.

One immediate challenge is that identifying a caller using Caller ID is more difficult these days, because people have so many telephone numbers. For example, I generally provide my home number to companies for their official records, but I can go months without ever dialing out from my home phone. Many people use mobile phones or call during a break from their office, and the same business location can display several numbers. If someone has not registered a number or used it on a previous call, it is difficult to identify the caller accurately without some additional information.

If we always had a match on Caller ID, looking up a caller based on their phone number and routing them appropriately would be trivial. Customers make execution difficult by not using the number on file. Which has led companies to our door, in the hopes that we can build a model or devise some other scheme to route customers directly to the priority queue (again, in a way that does not require the customer to identify herself).

In theory, one could build a model that assigns some probability that a person is a high-value customer based on the caller information. For example, if we know that in Fairfield County, Connecticut, 45% of customers meet the threshold compared to 25% nationally, we could create a rule that promotes all callers from that county into the priority queue. But that hardly seems much of an improvement, and in some applications, could even be discriminatory. Another approach could be to parse the elements of the Caller ID  information and attempt a wider match, but this method also would not be terribly accurate.

Our advice, given these challenges, has been to take the following pragmatic steps:

• Make sure that your base customer care service is acceptable. One should remember that if 20% of your customers are getting great service and 80% are receiving poor service (and complaining about it), you have a serious problem.
• If you do have systematic service issues, fix them. For example, if customers are complaining about the IVR system, reprogram it so that it becomes simpler to use.
• If you want to have priority queues for more valuable customers, consider creating a different number for them to call and promote the service in your other communications with those customers. And of course make it easy for them to get from the standard number or the web site to the expedited line.
• Recognize that in many cases, you will still need some self-identification from customers to route them. Make this easier by providing options that do not rely on the customer having an account number.

And it goes without saying that the most important thing is to make sure that the quality of your products and services are high. Increasing call volume usually points to some more fundamental issue.

Or stated differently: if customers are calling about the rat problem, do something about the rats.

What are your thoughts? How are making it easier for customers to get the help they need in the contact center or online?

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