Primary Customer Service KPI: Reducing Customer Contact Rates

When choosing the KPIs for your customer service operation, one metric to focus on is your customer contact rate. A customer contact rate is usually measured by taking the number of customer inquiries that occur through your ticketing and phone system in a given time period, like a month or a year, and dividing that number by the amount of paid orders during that time. The result is your contact rate. For example: if you have seven customer contacts and 100 orders in a month, your contact rate is seven percent.

The best way to reduce contact rates without sacrificing customer experience is to provide your customers self-service tools. You see, many of your customers don’t have the time to resolve their issues with a phone call, and other customers don’t want to wait for an email reply that may take up to 24 hours to get. These customers need an immediate resolution to a relatively simple challenge, and for them, self-service options work best. Effective self-service tools provide the added benefit of freeing up your customer service agents to handle more complex inquiries.

These self-service options can range from Frequently Asked Questions to forum postings to how-to videos with installation or technical support instructions. Pinpoint your most common customer inquiries, and then build your self-service pages from those issues.

For example, if customers have issues activating their software, provide copy and paste instructions or a simple video explaining the installation process.

Do customers often need their order redelivered? Provide an order lookup using just their email address so the customer can retrieve their software.

To cut your contact rate, make the most relevant information for your end users as readily available as possible.

Other ways to reduce your customer contact rate involves monitoring:

• Contact rates by region—If you notice that inquiries from certain regions have a recurring issue, then provide localized content geared toward that market. Empower your end users to find their answers quickly online and resolve the problem through self-service options.
• Contact rates by product—Are you seeing higher technical support requests for only one product? Identify the problem, and offer detailed instructions and screenshots in a FAQ or provide a simple video.

“After a positive experience, more than 85 percent of customers increased their value to the bank by purchasing more products or investing more of their assets; just as tellingly, more than 70 percent reduced their commitment when things turned sour.” – The ‘moment of truth’ in customer service, McKinsey

Secondary Customer Service KPIs: Answer Speed and First Contact Resolution

If reducing contact rates is your primary KPI, you should also monitor a couple of secondary KPIs that directly influence the primary one. These are your answer speed (how long it takes you to pick up the phone and how long it takes you to respond to an email), and your first contact resolution (FCR) rate (out of all your customer contacts, the amount that are solved with only one exchange between customer and customer service representative).

Answer speed

How quickly do you want a customer service agent to answer a phone call? We all know from personal experience how frustrating it is to sit and wait to speak to an agent on the phone. Is this really the feeling you want your customer to leave with? According to research from McKinsey, “After a positive experience, more than 85 percent of customers increased their value to the bank by purchasing more products or investing more of their assets; just as tellingly, more than 70 percent reduced their commitment when things turned sour.”

How important is it to you that your customers receive a response to their emails within twelve hours? To phrase this in a more meaningful way, how important is it to your customer? If a customer isn’t receiving a response to their email within a reasonable time frame, they may continue sending emails to your team or may even contact your customer service department through a different channel. This delay increases your customer contact rate, eats up your resources, and diminishes the customer experience.

First contact resolution

A higher FCR eliminates longer wait times, redundancy and multiple tickets. Investing in training for your team translates to satisfied end-users who receive their answer in the first contact rather than a chain of emails. Well-trained customer service representatives who can identify problems and provide answers quickly lead to shorter phone calls, lessened hold times and a more positive customer service experience.

Quality assurance (QA) is often only measured for phone support. However, if you’re looking to reduce your customer contact rate, then you should analyze QA in all aspects of direct customer interaction, including live chat and email. A long email chain may appear thorough, but it also means interacting with several customer service representatives. This wastes time and resources while providing a relatively convoluted answer for your end user. A thorough response would resolve the inquiry the first time, and provide further information which prevents any foreseeable questions or issues.

Keystone

Using key performance indicators to reduce your customer contact rate will not only improve the customer experience, but will also create a more effective customer service team.

Emily Oney is an Email Marketing Coordinator and former CSR at cleverbridge

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While improving checkout processes, quality of support and refund policies is intuitive to an extent, there are some details worth mentioning if your goal is to leave a positive, memorable impression on your customers.

Checkout

In short: Your customers want a fast, simple process that leaves them feeling confident and not anxious about their purchase.

In general, major obstacles to completing checkout include too many clicks/pages/steps, mandatory registration, security concerns, surprise shipping costs/delays, and the inability to get a quick and easy answer to “one last question.” You’ll need to resolve these (though shipping should be irrelevant for software vendors) before you can turn your attention to creating a remarkable customer experience.

Live chat is your best option for moving the needle here (full disclosure: I work for a live chat vendor). It makes help immediately available, and it offers the flexibility and problem-solving of an actual human rather than a pre-generated FAQ that may or may not actually address this customer’s issue. You don’t want a customer with “money in hand” navigating away from checkout in the first place — and you definitely don’t want them getting increasingly frustrated and impatient as they struggle to find the simple and obvious information that makes them feel comfortable completing their purchase.

Additionally, putting in the time and effort to craft a purchase confirmation email that reflects some personality is just good marketing.

Support

In short: Your customers are bleeding patience and good will towards your company, so treat what’s ailing them as quickly and as painlessly (from their perspective) as possible.

Elan nailed the solution to support on the head: quick response times and self-service options. I’ll get into a little bit more detail on those, but the only thing I want to add to what Elan already covered is authenticity. Empowering your customer service agents to personalize their interactions can make a huge difference in the customer experience. Be careful though, because if this isn’t done right, it comes off as unprofessional, rather than as authentic. If you’re interested you can read more from me on authenticity here.

But how do you optimize quick response times and self-service options?

The three metrics your support team cares the most about (apart from volume of support sessions) are most likely time to response, time to resolution, and the percent of contacts resolved in the first session with support.

Self-service reduces the time to response to practically zero, but if the self-service tool isn’t designed well, it may actually exacerbate the time to resolution and the percentage of contacts resolved in the first session. You may argue that in the instance of self-service, these metrics don’t apply as the customer isn’t actually engaging an agent — such a response is a great indicator that you have missed the point. These metrics are designed to measure team effectiveness and efficiency, yes, but ultimately they are designed to help you improve the customer experience. From the customer’s perspective, they are still struggling for answers. You can read more about how to do self-service well here (registration required).

Your second best option for a quick response time is live chat software. With pre-chat surveys, tiered systems and premade messages, live chat software makes it very easy to direct customers to the agent who can best help them and prepare that chat agent/support rep for whatever it is they’re about to assist with, improving your time to resolution and the percentage of contacts resolved in the first session. Some chat vendors will also provide reporting that can help you improve this process, integrate with your ticket system, and provide other benefits that makes things easy for you and for the customer.

Refund Policies

In short: Your customers should leave with the impression that you care more about serving them well than you do about making a buck off of them.

Graham Charlton of Econsultancy put together an article late last year that covers some key points about improving refund policies. The article is geared towards online retail vendors but some of the principles apply to software vendors as well, namely:

• Make your refund policy easy to find and understand
• Offer free trials and free refunds (though, obviously, you’ll want to place a time/usage limitation on free refunds, especially if you offered a free trial)
• Provide user reviews
• Discover why customers seek refunds

I would add to this last bullet point that you should also document why customers seek refunds. Over time, that data offers valuable intelligence about your target market and informs your product roadmap.

In addition to appreciating transparency from vendors, customers have also come to appreciate companies that would rather “release” a customer who isn’t satisfied with their purchase rather than “trap” a customer who feels swindled and leave them stuck with their bad decision. This gets a little bit more nuanced with software, as bugs will always be an issue and customers can sometimes overreact. Ultimately, you want to convey to your customers that it is more important to you that they are satisfied rather than feeling that you exploit them for as much money as you can get from them.

By offering a free trial, being transparent about how customers can get a refund if they aren’t satisfied and offering unbiased user reviews, you are letting your customers know that you care about quality and about providing value to them.

Keystone

A positive customer experience means fast, simple and convenient (from the customer’s perspective) processes. Checkout should increase confidence and decrease anxiety. Support should be painless. Refund policies should be easy to find, and your language should convey more about satisfying customers than protecting yourself.

Chris Fras­cella is the Con­tent Direc­tor at Velaro Live Chat, where he is respon­si­ble for pro­mot­ing the improved per­for­mance and advance­ments of live chat soft­ware. Before join­ing the Velaro team, Chris was inte­gral in the con­tin­ued advance­ment and mar­ket­ing of outcomes-oriented, case man­age­ment soft­ware at Social Solu­tions Global.

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Contact Rates By Region

The Internet made it simpler to deliver software to customers around the globe. The challenge with selling to an international market is providing adequate support to all of your customers. The graph below represents a composite software company’s monthly performance in terms of order volume and customer contact rates. You’ll notice that Russian customers provide a significant amount of orders, but they also provide a disproportionate amount of customer service contacts.

An acceptable customer contact rate hovers between six and eight percent. In the example above, Russian customers generate a 21 percent contact rate, bringing almost 700 more contacts per month than the U.S. customers who generate three times as many orders. It’s clear from the graph that these Russian customers are experiencing challenges that U.S. customers are not. What can be done to reduce the rate of these customer contacts?

Customer Contact Reasons

Part of the process of reducing contact rates is understanding why customers are contacting you. This is just as important as understanding which customers are contacting you.

To discover why customers contact you, you’ll need a database for each customer contact that includes a record of the reasons behind each contact. Your database should eventually be able to find the answers to questions like:

• Are customers receiving their orders or not?
• Are they having technical problems installing or using your software?
• Are they confused about a bill on their bank account statement?
• Do they want a refund?

The composite graph below breaks down the various reasons customers engage with software companies. In this case, it’s clear that delivery inquiries are a major issues, along with technical support and product information issues.

Once you know which customer segment is increasing your contact rate and the reason these customers are contacting you, it’s time to decide the best way to optimize your offering.

How To Reduce Customer Contact Rates

One way to handle escalating contact rates would be to hire more staff for foreign language contacts. But this is a stop gap measure at best and does not address the underlying cause of the spike in contacts. Also, finding staff to handle the different languages your customers speak can be time consuming and fairly expensive.

Instead, try reducing contacts by improving customer service on your website, shopping cart, confirmation page and help section of your product.

Focus on providing information regarding the issues you uncovered when analyzing contact reasons. Most importantly, focus on localizing texts for your highest volume markets. This includes content for all the elements of your shopping cart, confirmation page and customer support section of your website, such as:

• Contact information
• FAQs
• Download instructions
• Activation instructions
• Login instructions for SaaS product
• Payment information
• Refund policy

Customer Contact Methods

After identifying why certain regions generate an inordinate amount of contacts and then localizing your customer service offering for those regions, it’s also important to understand the costs and benefits of your various contact methods. A fully functioning customer service department that responds to hundreds of questions and comments a day should minimally be equipped with:

• A phone number – Phone calls are important because they are much more communicative than an email or website. A two minute phone call can often provide customers clearer information than a chain of a dozen emails.
• An email address – Emails are useful for providing customers a variety of information that is easily stored and accessed. With software purchases, emails are doubly important as they often contain access to the software product itself.
• A website – Your website should include a focus on customer service by including a page with contact information, a list of the hours of operation, and estimates of response times. This is a highly efficient and cost effective tool for customer service. The more customer service information you incorporate into the website, the more you can reduce customer contacts. Your website is probably the most cost effective tool in your customer service arsenal. It therefore should provide any information that a representative might give to a customer on the phone or by email. Just be cautious about being too comprehensive. Too much helpful information can be turn out to be not helpful at all.
• Social networks – These include business pages on social networks like Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Facebook. They are better used as reference pages than as a direct channel to deal with customer inquiries. Think of your social channels a table of contents for all your marketing material. As far as customer service, social networks are useful as a method for pointing to more efficient channels like the website, email or phone.
• Staff – Ultimately, a sufficient amount of staff is required to operate all these tools efficiently.

Customer Retention

Clever business-minded people know that the key to long-term profitability is customer retention. If you want customers to remain loyal to your brand, you need to provide them excellent customer service.

Keystone

You can not afford to throw away the revenue from customers because of poor customer service. Reduce your customer contacts and churn rates by localizing customer service channels for regions that bring in significant revenue and above average contact rates.

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