A Call Reduction Strategy that Works

By: (Tue, May/22/2007)

Introduction & Overview

Critical to the success of any support operation is to

create and implement a detailed support strategy that
includes reducing and, wherever possible, eliminating call
volume. (And when we say call volume, we really are
referring to any type of incoming request at the support
center, regardless of whether that contact method is a
telephone call, email, Web based request, etc.)

And the strategy that I’m referring to is not a one-time

initiative, but rather the building of a continuous
improvement cycle that becomes a standard for how you
run your business. A Call Reduction strategy must be just
that – a strategy, a discipline, a process.

What can be accomplished by reducing call volume?

Reducing calls will improve financial and operational
performance metrics, and benefit your customer and your
support center.

What can be accomplished by reducing call volume?

Reducing calls will improve financial and operational
performance metrics, and benefit your customer and your
support center. A call creating strategies
A call reduction strategy should be focused on the
CUSTOMER. It should be sold as a strategy to positively
impact the business, making work happen smoothly for
customers and for the enterprise support operation.
Benefits should include but are not limited to:

• Minimizing a negative business impact through

increased employee productivity
• Increased service levels and customer satisfaction
• Lower overall support costs are lower
• Repositioning the support team to handle more
strategic, value-add and business critical types of
issues

Implementing Best Practices

Methodical implementation of tried and true best
practices for problem identification and elimination
consists of these best practice basics:

• Utilize your call categorization data (reporting) to

know what types of calls should be targeted for
reduction/elimination. Typically you will want to
concentrate your efforts on the issues that produce
the highest percentage of calls or highest percentage
of handling time using Pareto analysis.
• Guarantee that your analysis is based on sound
numbers first by 100% call logging. Every request
must be included to produce an accurate account of
the issues
• Sound numbers also rely on a proper
categorization scheme that professionals understand,
so that all requests are categorized correctly and
consistently.

Once the data is analyzed, determine if the cause of the

issue can be eliminated altogether or can this issue be
deflected from the support center to a self-service or
automated function. If you cannot eliminate it, you the
focus should turn to reducing calls. Some best practice
initiatives for call elimination or reduction include:

• Well-maintained, robust knowledge base with self

service and learning capability
• Training/educating the customer to prevent
problems or questions. One way to eliminate basic
how to questions is to conduct a simple basic training
for new employees
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) publication.
These are particularly helpful during a new roll out or
change process.
• While on the telephone resolving a call, Help Desk
Professional can use a training format to step the
customer through “how-to” requests, so the customer
won’t rely on the support center next time.
• Communication of global outages, presented in a
front-end phone message, intranet, and other means
of mass communication for customers.
• Web enable as many functions as possible to
eliminate calls, such as case submittal and status
checks.
The above are some of the basics for effective call
reduction, but don’t limit yourself to these. Be creative in
your solutions.

Build Prevention in the Process:

Analyzing call types and working to eliminate root causes

should be a continuous process, built in as a feedback
loop from customers’ calls to proactively prevent issues.
The continuous cycle for a Call Reduction strategy that
works consists of:

• Root cause analysis. Understand why your

customers are calling
• Measurement and reporting. Understand the
impact and determine where to focus efforts
• Interviews with repeat customers, support
professionals, and “owners” of problems, questions,
and requests
• Recommendations on what can be done to
eliminate reduce or deflect calls. These can come from
customers, the support team, or use of an impartial
third party
• Identify the 'owners' of the root of the
problem/question. Who can affect a change to the
eliminating the problem?
• Engage and get the buy-in from the owners to
work to eliminate or reduce the impact of the root
cause
• Formulate recommendations for solutions
• Implement solutions
• Train/education all involved parties on the solution
• Communicate and market the solution, business
impact and results to all involved parties. Each party
plays a part and benefits from a reduction of calls to
the support center.
• Continuously improve and reinforce use of
automated and self service tools
• Review Change Management process for
improvements
• Monitor progress and set new targets

The above steps should be repeated regularly to make

the process part of the way we do business.

It is important that the Enterprise Support leader sells this

as a cross-functional effort to minimize business impact.
 There are many people and functional teams and
departments that impact call volume and employee
productivity. The Enterprise Support team as a single
point of contact and central repository for all customer
problems, requests and questions has the responsibility
and accountability for identifying these calls that impact
the business and employees and report back to the
business what they are and their recommendations for
elimination or reduction.

Senior executives are already asking for this - surprise

them - present your call reduction strategy today before
they have to ask for it!

White Paper

Call Reduction Strategies

That Work
From STI Knowledge, Inc.
that the person on the other end of my ringing phone was my toughest
customer — the Chief Financial Officer of the largest business unit serviced
by my Customer Support Center. He was tough in that he demanded
a lot. He always wanted more, wanted it faster, wanted it cheaper, etc. It
was budget season, so I knew instinctively what he was probably calling
about. I answered the phone cheerfully, as usual, and asked what I could
do for him today. His response was quick and to the point: "I want your
Support Center expense line item on my monthly IT invoice to go away. I'm
scheduling a meeting with you for next Tuesday, and I want you to explain
to me how you are going to make that happen. See you then." Click.
Even in good economic times, this call would not be surprising. But in times
of economic uncertainty, this kind of call and business customer expectation
should be anticipated and planned for. In fact, this call gets to the
heart of one of the most critical "Key Success Factors" for any support center,
which is a Call Reduction Strategy. All support operations, regardless of
size, need to create and implement a detailed support strategy that
includes reducing, deflecting, and, wherever possible, eliminating call volume.
A Call Reduction Strategy must be just that - a strategy, a discipline,
a continual process.
TM

I could tell by the caller-id display,

Why Reduce Call

Volume?
The most obvious benefit of reducing call volume
is that if call volumes are lowered consistently over
the long term, you don't need as many staff to
answer the phones/emails, which can translate to
reduced expenses for salaries, benefits, training,
rent, etc. But there are many more benefits to this
kind of strategy:
• Reducing calls will increase the productivity
of each individual customer by reducing
time lost to problems and problem resolution.
• Reducing calls will increase customer
satisfaction.
• Reducing calls will improve financial and
operational performance metrics throughout
your company, providing benefits to your
customers as well as your support center.
• Overall support costs will go down
• Support staff can be positioned to handle
more strategic, value-added and businesscritical
types of issues.
• The image of the support center will be
transformed from that of a utility function to
a strategic business partner enabling the
rest of the business to do business better!

Devil’s Advocate
The devil's advocate may ask, "But if I reduce our
call volume, isn't that going to increase my cost
per call? Isn't that going to upset my customers
even more?" That would be true if we assumed no
increase in aggregate call volume, or no corresponding
changes in the support structure. The key
is to focus on each high volume call category in a
targeted fashion. The reductions must be measurable,
they must be linked to an initiative, and they
must entail corresponding communications with
both the customers and the support staff. The
intention is not to stop the customers from calling
when they have a problem, but rather to prevent
the problems that require the customers to call.

Where Do I Start?
The best place to start is with a good understanding
of the services you provide. Work through this
exercise:
1. List all the services you currently deliver.
2. Rank each service in order of
importance/value to the customer.
3. Categorize services into problems vs. requests.
4. Identify services where you add no value,
and look for ways to deflect or eliminate.
5. Estimate (ballpark) the cost to deliver each
service.
6. Map your team's skills to the services delivered.
Where are the strengths? Weaknesses?
Opportunities? Bandwidth to provide more
value-add services?
The foundation for an effective Call Reduction
Strategy is data. Every call must be documented
and categorized correctly and consistently in
order to produce meaningful reports that will help
you target calls for reduction or elimination.
At a minimum, the following reports should be
reviewed:
• Top cases logged by customer (Which part of
the business is generating the most calls?)
• Top cases logged by category (Within each
category, can you drill down to see what
types of calls are coming in most frequently?)
• Top cases by time spent (Have you used the
Pareto model -- call frequency X time spent --
to see what types of calls are most costly in
terms of your staff's time?)
• Top cases by value (Have you calculated the
dollar value of the most time-consuming calls --
call frequency X average length of call X
resource cost per minute -- to see which cases
have the greatest financial cost?)

Root Cause Analysis

Once the top cases have been identified, it is critical
to understand why they occurred and develop
an understanding of what can be done to prevent
recurrence. Work through each set of top cases
using a Root Cause Analysis process:
• What trends exist in each category?
• What triggered these calls from the customers?
• Identify the "owners' of the root of the problem
or question.
• Conduct interviews with repeat offenders and
"owners" of problems, questions and requests.
• Seek recommendations on what can be done
to eliminate, reduce or deflect calls.
• Engage and get buy-in from the owners to work
to eliminate or reduce the impact of the root
cause.
• Use a debriefing process on global outages,
such that the detailed chronology of events
can be reviewed and opportunities for
improvement identified.
• Formulate recommendations for solutions.
• Implement solutions.
• Communicate and market solutions, business
impacts and results to all parties (i.e., IT
community as well as customers).

Best Practices
Help Desk and Support Center practitioners have
accumulated quite a laundry list of best practices
that can help eliminate or reduce calls. Because a
Call Reduction Strategy is not a one-time project,
but rather an ongoing strategy that requires attention
multiple times a year (e.g., monthly or quarterly),
it is helpful to review Best Practices periodically
after producing "Top Cases" reports. What may not
have made sense for your environment last year or
six months ago may make all the sense in the world
now. Priorities change, budgets change, and workloads
fluctuate, so your perspective on the applicability
of Best Practices in relation to your most recent
Top Cases is likely to change. Here are some examples
from the "STI 500 Best Practices" to help get you
started:
• Develop a well-maintained, robust knowledge
base with self-service and learning capability for
your customers' use. In the same sense that
creating, maintaining and using knowledge
can increase first contact resolution among your
support technicians, knowledge can be used to
help your customers solve their own problems,
thereby reducing call volumes.
World Headquarters
Four Concourse Parkway, Fourth Floor
Atlanta, GA 30328
phone: 770.280.2630
toll free: 800.350.5781
www.stiknowledge.com
©2004 STI Knowledge, Inc. All rights reserved.
• Educate customers on the most frequently
called in problems so that they can anticipate
and be ready to solve those problems when
they occur. For example, conduct a simple,
basic training session for all new employees. This
could include a handout or use of your on-line
self-help tools for common email, internet,
intranet, or dialup problems.
• Publish FAQs for all new hires and when new
applications or significant changes are rolled
out to refresh the customer community on
solutions to commonly occurring problems.
• Reinforce the importance of your support center
technicians using a training format to step the
customer through "how to" requests while on the
phone. This will help teach the customer what to
do next time the problem occurs, and it will
hopefully prevent a phone call to the Support
Center. The corrective steps will be better
retained if the customer does them rather than
the technician.
• Communicate global outages and anticipated
down times via front-end phone messages,
portal/intranet announcements or other mass
communications for customers. Once the customer
is educated on the availability of these
tools, they can develop the habit of checking
them first when they experience problems.
• Web-enable as many routine functions as possi
ble to eliminate or deflect calls, such as nonemergency
case submittal, status checks and
password resets.
• Continuously improve and reinforce use of
automated and self-service solutions.
• Prevent problems from impacting productivity
by using auto-correcting features.
• Review the Change Management Process for
improvements.
• Always monitor progress, measure improvements
and set new targets.

The Bottom Line

There are literally hundreds of tactics that can be
used to reduce call volumes. What's important is not
which tactic you employ at any point in time, but
that you have a strategy. It must be a dynamic
process that aligns with the priorities of the business
organization, reflects the needs and character of
your customers, flexes with the changing technical
environment in which your customers do their daily
work, and produces measurable results.
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Top Three Cost Reduction Areas

The Call Center Learning Center is proud to present

a tutorial series focused on reducing the cost of call
center operations. This tutorial series will pull from
Prosci's research-based toolkits and best practices
reports. The first module in the series gave an
overview of the 3 top areas for reducing call center
costs. The next three modules look at each specific
area and what can be done to reduce costs. This
fourth and finale cost control module focuses on
ways to reduce contact volume.

Module 4: Reducing Contact Volume

Background

The following tutorial uses the Cost Reduction Diagram as a framework for controlling call
center costs. This model will provide a checklist for areas that impact the bottom line of
your call center. The checklist provided in this tutorial will allow you to evaluate your
current performance in optimizing contact volume. You may find this a useful tool for
discussion with other managers in your call center.

For an expanded view of the cost reduction model, click on the diagram below to open a
new window.

Cost reduction diagram

Reducing contact volume

Reducing the volume of contacts includes three primary areas as shown in the
figure above. The major branches include:

 eliminate reason for contact

 minimize misdirected calls
 reduce repeat calls
Area 1: Eliminate reason for contact

The best way to reduce contact volume is to remove or eliminate the root
cause of the contact. This strategy does not necessarily apply to contact
centers oriented toward sales unless they can identify ways to close the sale
without the contact taking place. Examples of methods to eliminate the root
cause of customer contacts include:

11 Reduce product defects.

11 Provide proactive notifications and status.
11 Make bills and statements easy to read.
11 Create easy-to-use product documentation.
11 Improve delivery of products and services including meeting
service commitments.
11 Make products easier to install and use.

This section - more than any other in the cost control tutorial series - is
dependent on why your customers are contacting you. Identifying the root
causes of the contact is the first step to removing the reasons customers are
calling, and these reasons are very company specific.

Note: Many of the root causes for customer contact may fall outside the
control of the call center. That does not mean that the call center management
should avoid these areas for controlling cost by reducing unwanted contacts.
The call center should initiate and support cross-organizational initiatives to
reduce contact volumes in cooperation with other departments in the
company.

Area 2: Minimize misdirected contacts

Some fraction of your contacts are most likely misdirected contacts intended
for some other part of the organization. These contacts not only add to the
queue but they also take time away from handling other contacts. Methods to
minimize misdirected contacts include:

11 Provide clear contact information on statements and bills.

11 Provide clear and accurate contact information on marketing
and product documentation.
11 Make menus in voice response system easy-to-use.
 111 Ensure accurate and easy-to-use phone directory listings.
111 Reduce inter-company transfers.

Area 3: Reduce repeat contacts

Call volume can be reduced by minimizing the number of repeat contacts

(referred to as call-backs for phone calls).

< by: improved be can contacts>

111 Improving first contact resolution rates.

111 Improve contact closings.
111 Using proactive follow-up processes.

For specific recommendations on how to systematically reduce the cost of

resources in your contact center including detailed information and checklists
 look in the Cost Control Toolkit. </&NBSP;< p>

For more information on cost control, check out Prosci's Cost Control
Toolkit.t.

Click here to find out more

Recommended Resources:

Controlling the Cost of Call Center Operations

How to cut costs in your call center; a systematic approach to expense
reduction, this toolkit provides over 50 initiatives to cut costs, including short-
term quick-hits, mid-term tactics and long-term strategies.

Call Center Best Practices - Operations Edition

Benchmarking report - Over 240 call centers from around the world share how
they have improved service quality, productivity and customer satisfaction. This
report shares lessons learned by call center managers regarding their most
effective management practices. It also identifies the operational changes that
are having the greatest impact on customer satisfaction and call center
efficiency.

Call Center Business Performance Packages

Find a call center package to meet your needs and save 20-25% off the list price!

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Call Center Learning Center

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Reduced Call Volume by 30%

Here is how I accomplished that:

Situation:
-Company consolidation had negatively impacted customer satisfaction, leading to significant
increases in call volume into the centers

Obstacles:
-Legacy call routing and handling processes didn’t always enable first call resolution
-Departmental disconnects between field operations and call centers

Actions:
-Redesigned call flows and escalation processes
-Refocused quality monitoring and coaching processes on the customer experience
-Actively partnered with field operations to support improved execution of service
-Consistently managed performance against a 90% Service Level and 2% Abandon Rate
goal

Results:
-Appropriate staffing with an elevated level of individual competence and performance
-Significantly increased first call resolution and reduction in issue-related calls
-Overall, a 30% reduction in call volume

kirk.lord@yahoo.com