How to Reduce Customer Support Calls

When customers call they are upset, frustrated, and/or confused. It’s the primary objective of every customer service team to assuage their concerns and use the interaction as an opportunity to build customer loyalty.

This is not an easy task, let’s be honest. 

What your customers are seeking at that moment are answers. They have an issue and they want to solve it quickly. They are satisfied only when they receive clear instructions and they are able to follow them through to a resolution. Businesses know that keeping customers happy translates to revenue, which is why they invest in customer service reps. However, operating a call center comes at a significant cost.

Cost of Call Centers

The standard 80/20 rule for call centers means 80 percent of calls are answered within 20 seconds. That is a common goal for many call centers. Service level indicates whether a business has enough resources to connect all customers to agents and resolve their issues in a timely manner.

LiveAgent reports the standard cost per call can range from $2.70 to $5.60, depending on the industry. For example, a CPG business will have a lower average cost per call than a complex financial services institution. And if a customer’s issues aren’t resolved in one call then there are significant costs associated with repeated callbacks. Therefore, being able to resolve your customers’ issues upon the first contact can help you reduce your handle times and cost per call. 

This has led many businesses to adopt new ways of providing customer support. The focus now is on giving customers an option to resolve their issues without the need to contact a customer care agent. It not only gives customers confidence and empowers them, but also lifts the load off your agents’ shoulders.

A New CS Model

There are many ways to evolve your customer service model that reduce the number of support calls while still serving your primary objective: retaining customers. This evolution begins with your company adopting a new philosophy of what it means to support customers. On-demand resources, such as tutorial videos and instructions for commonly asked questions allow your customers to self-enable.

Below are options any business can mix and match to suit unique needs.

• Conversational AI chatbots, or chatterbot, is a software application used to conduct an online chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. More than half of call centers, 56 percent, plan to invest in artificial intelligence (AI), according to research from Deloitte.
• Video chat enables agents to offer face-to-face service online. Thiry-one percent of call centers plan to invest in video chat, according to research from Deloitte.
• Cloud-based contact center, which is a central point in an enterprise, hosted on an Internet server, from which all inbound and outbound customer communications are handled. Cloud contact centers make interactions through voice, email, social media and the web accessible from virtually anywhere. The cloud-based contact center market is forecast to reach $24.11 billion by 2023 at a CAGR of 25 percent, according to Market Research Future. 
• Help Resource Center is a digital experience  or series of digital experiences with answers to commonly asked questions, tutorials, product manuals, and step-by-step instructions. It can incorporate multimedia content from videos and articles to infographics and audio. Digital experiences can be created to build a comprehensive customer experience journey.

Where to Start

As you begin evolving your customer support model to incorporate solutions that enable customers to find answers to their questions, Lumavate has you covered. Lumavate offers more than a dozen Customer Support Templates, enabling you to build digital experiences faster.

• Warranty Registration Template Text WARRANTY to 586828* to see this template in action and how it can be used to increase your warranty registration rates.
• Product Onboarding Template Text ONBOARD to 586828* to see an example of how this best-in-class digital experience can be used to provide your new customers with an exceptional first-time experience.
• Product Information Template Text PRODUCTINFO to 586828* to see an example of how this best-in-class template can be customized for your brand.

A Case Study

The University of Montana modernized its approach to providing students and alumni with support by implementing a live chat tool, Olark. The Registrar’s Office utilizes the live chat to help students and alumni get information faster. Live chat helps them limit the number of walk-ins and phone calls coming into their office which typically takes much more time than a 30-second chat. Their agents can also handle multiple chats at a time making it a much more efficient system.

*Msg & data rates may apply. May receive up to 2 msgs. Reply HELP to 586828 for help. Text STOP to 586828 to cancel. For terms and privacy, click here to learn more.