Home arrow Whitepapers arrow Whitepaper: The Best Service is No Service
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Whitepaper: The Best Service is No Service Print E-mail
Improve call centre efficiency

In most cases customer satisfaction would be significantly improved if customer service wasn't needed. If that were the case think about how much money would be saved by scaling back contact centres and customer service centres.

  • Since 1999 Amazon.com has applied the philosophy that the Best Service is No Service and has delivered 30% year on year reductions in the need for customers to contact them
  • Over the same period it also had the highest customer satisfaction of any services company in the American Customer Satisfaction Index
  • Banks, Insurers Telcos and Utilities in Europe, North America and Australia have achieved between 10% and 25% annual reductions in the need for customer service contact

In this white paper Bill Price, the Global Vice President of Customer Care who achieved these results at Amazon.com describes the approach they took.

 

What You'll Learn

  • How to analyse why customers need to contact you as part of the routine management process
  • What's the 'killer metric' that will drive the contact elimination process
  • How to get the parts of the organisation who create the unnecessary contacts to eliminate them
  • The roles of the front line staff, supervisors and managers, and executives in making the process work

 

 Download Now

Case Study at a Glance

As the head of customer service, you’re under constant pressure to cut costs and be more efficient, improve customer satisfaction and turn contacts into revenue. Where do you see the next wave of efficiencies coming from?

Take a moment to think just how much of the workload in your customer service operation is caused by other parts of the enterprise, or what proportion of time is spent handling contacts that neither you nor your customer wants to make. The number is surprisingly constant across a wide range of industries - typically between 20 and 30% of the workload of most contact centres. It is far more when back office functions are taken into account. If you could eliminate the need for customers to have to make these ‘frustrating’ calls in the first place just think how much your costs would reduce, how much more time you would have to focus on generating revenue, and how much happier your customers would be.

Surprisingly though, few customer service leaders are able to quantify the workload associated with the various events that cause a customer to contact them. Without this visibility, they can’t grab sufficient executive attention to drive the crossfunctional collaboration that is needed to reduce these unwanted contacts. Furthermore, organisations end up wasting money by expensively automating the handling of contacts that should never be occurring in the first place

This case study describes ‘Skyline’, a process pioneered at Amazon.com that focuses senior executive attention on reducing contact demand. It helps you develop a leaner contact operation by eliminating unwanted contacts at the root cause - with the help of those parts of the organisation that cause the problems.

It is now being applied in some leading banks, telecommunication companies, insurers and utilities around the world, demonstrating that its application isn’t confined to online businesses. In Australia it is already being applied at ANZ Bank, Australian Health Management, Origin Energy, and BUPA Australia.

Download Now