It’s 81x more expensive to serve a customer in the contact centre, compared to resolving the customer digitally …

If that’s not a compelling reason for organisations to focus on improving digital self service, I don’t know what is …

HOW DID I CALCULATE THIS NUMBER? 📱

• Gartner found that live channels (phone, live chat & email) cost an average of $8.01 per contact.
  

• On the flipside, Gartner found that self service channels (FAQs, Chatbots etc) cost an average of $0.10 per contact.

Now whilst I fully appreciate that these numbers will vary across countries and organisations, digital containment / digital resolution is definitely a hot topic at the moment.

The goal of this week’s newsletter is to quantify the impact that poor digital resolution is having on your organisation. I’m hoping you can take this to your leaders to prove why it’s worth investing in solutions that will help change this!

QUANTIFYING THE BUSINESS IMPACT OF POOR DIGITAL RESOLUTION 🤔

• Let’s imagine you have 500,000 customers, each worth $100 seeking help on your digital channels every year:
  

  • According to businesswire, only ~50% of customers will end-up effectively self-serving. We know that the cost to serve on digital channels is $0.10, meaning that the total cost to serve 250k digital customers is $25k.
    

  • So if 250k customers service online, what happens to the 250k customers who aren’t able to solve their problem online?
    

  • Let’s assume that 20% (50k) give up on their journey entirely. According to Zendesk, 52% of customers will switch to a competitor after just one poor interaction.

    • To keep these estimations conservative, losing 5,000 customers would equate to $500k in lost revenue.
      

  • The remaining 80% (200k) of customers are going to contact the customer service team via live chat, email, or call. Whilst most contacts will be resolved on the first call, there will also be a small proportion of customers who take multiple contacts to resolve. Overall, Gartner estimates that the cost per contact for a “live” channel (email, webchat, call) is $8.01. This would mean that the cost to serve 200k customers in the contact centre is $1.6m. 

So to summarise things,

• Cost to serve 250k customers digitally: $25k

• Cost to serve 250k customers non-digitally: $2.1m

  • _{Lost revenue from customers who churn: $500k}

  • _{Cost to serve in contact centre: $1.6m}

Doing some quick maths on the above, you could argue that the cost to serve customers non-digitally is actually 84x more expensive once you consider the lost lifetime revenue from customers who churn.

Now … if you’re able to allow 10-20% more customers manage their interactions on digital channels, you would be able to save $500k-$1m. This presents a huge opportunity for all organisations to solve.

8 TIPS TO IMPROVE DIGITAL RESOLUTION ⚔️

When I was doing research into this topic, I found that the most common reason for operational inefficiencies was the fact that teams didn’t speak together. It is not commonplace for the digital, chatbot & contact centre teams to collaborate with data & insights.

In fact, CMSWire found that 72% of CX leaders stated that their top digital customer experience challenge was “cross-department alignment” or “siloed systems”.

Below are 8 tips to improve digital resolution:

1. Use Behavioural Analytics To Identify Friction Points On Digital Journeys - use products like Adobe & Medallia Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) to understand the digital body language of all users who interact on your digital channels. This will allow you to easily identify friction or breaking points in the journey.
   

2. Measure Whether Customers Were Able To Complete Their Purpose Of Visit - a simple exit survey asking customers whether they achieved what they intended to achieve could provide an extremely valuable metric for your business. If you understand why customers aren’t able to complete their reason for visit, you will be able to rectify these systemic issues.
   

3. Introduce A Concierge To Your Website - With the evolution of AI (particularly generative AI), I firmly believe that websites should be reimagined. Too often, customers land on your website and try to find what they’re looking for. We use web analytics to “assume” their intent. Instead, I believe that more websites should act similar to a Google Search engine, where a customer tells the website what they would like to search for, and the website produces options according to that intent. Imagine a chatbot that acts as the quarterback, or orchestrator for the customer.

4. Measure & Analyse FAQ Effectiveness - FAQs are such an important (but often unloved) element of any website. You should regularly be trying to understand the effectiveness of FAQS. After all, if the FAQs aren’t helpful, it’s highly likely that customers will seek help in another channel.
   

5. Analyse ChatBot Interactions - I’m going to be honest here. 99% of chatbots are crap. They often provide generic and non-intelligent answers to simple questions. There are 2 primary ways that you can analyse the effectiveness of chatbot interactions:

• Survey - ask the customer after the chatbot interaction whether the interaction was helpful
  

• Text Analytics - analyse the entire chatbot conversation in a text analytics tool to determine break points in the conversation.

6. Ask Customers About Their Digital Experience In The IVR - A simple question in the IVR could allow your organisation to measure the proportion of customers who have attempted to self-serve before making contact. You could combine this metric speech analytics & call disposition codes to uncover the key drivers of digital contacts.

7. Contact Centre Speech & Text Analytics - Automated NLP tools will allow you to uncover the reasons for contact across 100% of interactions (chat, email & web). You can use these tools to uncover key “self-service” contacts which are driving unnecessary volume into the contact centre. If needed, you can attribute a “cost per contact” volume to each interaction to quantify the impact that these calls are having.
   

8. Connect The Dots Between Digital & Contact Centre Data - As I mentioned above, digital & contact centre teams often act in silos. There is technology out there today which would allow you to track a user all the way from a website to the contact centre. At scale, you can begin to analyse customers who interact across multi-channels, quickly identifying the friction points that they encounter. For example, if someone landed on your website, speaks to the virtual assistant and then decides to trigger a live chat, these data points could be stitched together (at scale) to identify key friction points across the entire journey.

So to summarise … It is extremely expensive to manage digital customers in your live channels. Not only that, it is also a poorer customer experience. Customers are going to become frustrated with the more touch-points that they have to engage with you on the same query AND it’s highly likely that some customers will give up altogether.

To paint the above picture in numeric terms, check out this visual I created recently. Note that the numbers are slightly more conservative, but the premise is the same!

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