Banishing Avoidable Contact to Room 101
‘No news is definitely good news’ in the case of stopping
avoidable calls from customers. Reducing avoidable contact will
improve efficiency and save both the business and the customer time
and money.
Ask anyone what they would like to put into ‘Room 101’ and high
on their list will be those frustrating calls they have to make to
call centres that should not have been necessary. It is in the
interest of all organisations, in every sector, to look into why
avoidable contact is still happening.
The question is how does the company go about recording avoidable
contact and analysing the findings so that it can sort the problem
out? The results of a recent survey are of interest here. Rostrvm
Solutions surveyed how Local Authorities are responding to the
challenges of National Indicator 14 (NI 14), for which they attempt
to record levels of avoidable contact. The results build on
Rostrvm’s 2008 survey and show how 61 local authorities have fared
in their first year of data collection.
UPDATE APRIL 2010: Following the UK government's
budget last month it has been decided to remove National Indicator
14 (Avoidable contact: The proportion of customer contact that is of
low or no value to the customer). This means that measurement of
avoidable contact in government contact centres is no longer
mandatory.
Our view is that, whilst identifying avoidable contact may not
required, it is still an excellent building block for "Doing more
with the same... or doing the same with less".
It was found that many public sector call centres are still not
making the most of technology such as computer telephone integration
(CTI) to improve efficiency. Rostrvm identified that a third of the
local authorities surveyed used manual methods to record and analyse
avoidable contact.
Chinwe Achebe, Sales and Marketing Researcher, says, “Whilst manual
collection might appear to be an easy and cost-effective method of
collection, it is fraught with problems - the biggest of which is
increased workload and higher overheads for call operations. In some
situations manual collection can heighten the risk of
inconsistencies and can also make it difficult to analyse data
accurately. Without trustworthy data, it’s a waste of time.”
Just over a quarter of councils surveyed using manual methods of
collection did so because of issues with their CRM, such as
flexibility restrictions and/or problems accessing reports.
Rostrvm found that of those councils using computer applications to
support their data collection, a third purchased additional software
to help. The remaining two-thirds had to make significant, costly
changes to their operating systems to capture avoidable contact.
Straightforward software solutions can save considerable upheaval
and expense, especially at a time when cost-saving measures are high
on everyone’s agenda. rostrvm CallGuide (a desktop
IT application) can be bolted onto existing systems like a CRM
and is being used by public sector and commercial organisations to
support contact processes and record contact outcome data.
CallGuide is very flexible and can be applied simply to record
outcomes and full contact-flow management or, linked in with a
contact management system and databases, will help with analysis by
producing detailed and user-friendly reports that can highlight
where the avoidable contact is coming from. It can also be deployed
on any desktop, not just in the contact centre, meaning that every
avoidable contact can be recorded.
Software such as this results in less avoidable contact, more
efficient call centre operations, improved cost-effectiveness – and
a less frustrated, happier customer. Some news is good.
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