Reduce call volumes by using Tethr to reduce channel switching

At Tethr, we talk a lot about reducing customer effort and the research that went into The Effortless Experience. Our Chief Product & Research Officer, Matt Dixon, wrote the book on it and we invested in training the Tethr Platform to listen to your customer calls like Matt’s researchers would at scale. Research shows that minimizing effort is critical to customer loyalty and improving the overall customer experience. Only nine percent of customers who experience a low level of effort display disloyalty behavior compared to 96 percent who have had a high-effort experience. And while most of the companies we talk to agree with this on the surface, some have trouble connecting the dots between how a focus on effort reduction is going to directly impact their bottom line.

The four core pillars of an Effortless Experience are eliminating channel switching, next issue avoidance, frontline control and experience engineering. Two of these four aim to reduce effort explicitly by preventing calls from happening - channel switching and next issue avoidance. Let's talk about how to reduce channel switching in a way that you can prove directly reduces call volumes, while dramatically improving the customer experience.

You need to reduce channel switching

Channel switching occurs when a customer is forced to bounce between multiple channels in an attempt to resolve an issue because they couldn’t find a solution on their first try. Every time a customer attempts to resolve an issue through self-service channels, fails and is forced to pick up the phone, it costs you money.

There are countless reasons your self-service channels may be failing, from overcomplicated and confusing design, to an overwhelming number of self-service channels to choose from to lackluster information. The good news is, you don’t have to guess at which of these self-service shortcomings are causing your contact center’s unnecessary calls—your customers are telling you.

With the help of the Tethr Platform and our Effort Library, it’s easy to get to the root of what’s causing this behavior and measure the impact it has on overall call volume over time. A logical first step is generally to use Tethr’s channel switching categories to identify just how many calls your organization is receiving in a given time frame from customers who first mention trying to resolve their issue through another channel. This gives you a baseline to measure against and gives you a sense of the potential reduction in call volume you could achieve by preventing these calls from happening.

Analyze patterns and unlock answers

The next two data points you may want to examine are which channels they mention switching from and their reason for call. Maybe you find that a large percentage of customers in this call set needed to update their billing information and tried to do that in your customer portal before calling. Or maybe they had a question about installing a product add-on and looked in your knowledge base for the answer before calling. While all sources of channel switching should eventually be addressed, this helps you prioritize where to start to make the most impact.

Once you zero in on the most common channel switching situations, you can dig deeper into the transcripts to understand why their attempts to self-serve failed. You might see things like “I couldn’t find where to update my credit card information” or “the knowledge base article was really confusing.” These findings may lead you to build reports that capture more categories for things like “couldn’t find” or “confusing.” With Tethr’s conditional categories, you can link these categories together into specific sequences to track only calls where a customer expresses confusion immediately after mentioning their channel switch to more effectively filter out false positives.

As you repeat this process for each set of channel switching scenarios that you discover in your calls, you’ll continue to dramatically reduce or eliminate the occurrence of certain types of calls. You'll significantly reduce channel switching, saving you and your customers time and money. Considering that research shows more than half of customers who call a company visited the website first, efforts to eliminate channel switching have the potential to make an enormous impact on reducing call volumes while minimizing customer effort and improving the overall customer experience.

Request a demo to learn how reducing effort directly impacts your bottom line.