Contact Deflection ... What Does It ACTUALLY Mean? 🤔

Hi Team,

2023 is the year of the rabbit. And that must be the reason that your customers are hoppin’ away from your digital channels into the contact centre ha ha …🐰

But in all seriousness, digital containment or contact deflection is a hot topic right now. There’s a lot of pressure on contact centre teams to “deflect” contacts into self-serve channels and from what we’re hearing, teams are really struggling to quantify the impact that their initiatives are having.

As such, we’ve put some thought into ways you could begin to measure the effectiveness of contact deflection within your business.

SO … WHAT IS CONTACT DEFLECTION? 🤔

According to techsee.me, contact deflection is the “strategy of transferring customers to a different channel than your call center agents to find resolution. The goal of deflection is to reroute them to an alternative service channel that can serve them faster and more efficiently”

Unfortunately, too many organisations don’t treat contact deflection like the definition above. Instead, they try to make it AS DIFFICULT AS POSSIBLE for customers to get in contact with their customer service team. This has knock-on effects to the brands public reputation (as customers will go online to complain) and often creates more harm than good.

INTRODUCING SELF-SERVICE EFFECTIVENESS 💥

An article posted by servicexrg.com introduced the concept of self-service effectiveness. They defined this as “the rate at which automated and self-help resources satisfy service demand that would otherwise be handled by assisted service staff”.

Instead of trying to measure contact deflection (which will likely drive the wrong behaviours within your business e.g. hiding the “contact us” button), we think you’re better off trying to measure self-service effectiveness.

Let’s think about this logically for a second. It’s hard to deflect a call from the contact centre by the time it arrives within the contact centre. It’s highly likely that the customer is using this channel because it is:

a) their preferred channel OR

b) a channel they’ve switched to because they weren’t able to find what they needed on their preferred channel

In any of the above scenarios, it’s going to be extremely difficult to switch the customer back to a self-serve channel in that exact moment.

As such, businesses should actually start to measure the effectiveness of self-service. This will allow them to fixing the root cause of the issues i.e. the core reason as to why someone switches from a digital channel to a human channel.

In recent research published by Medallia, 60% of consumers stated that they are willing to only spend 10 minutes or less on a company’s website to find an answer before taking another action.

Before you begin to point the finger at the contact centre for not deflecting enough calls, ask yourself this question - do you really think your digital self-service channels allow customers to easily answer any type of question they have within 10 minutes? If your answer is yes, we bow down to you.

9 WAYS TO MEASURE SELF-SERVICE EFFECTIVENESS  👍️

These are some “back of the napkin” ideas we’ve had about self-service effectiveness measures. If you have others, please reply to this email so we can collaborate!

For any of these measurements, it would be relatively easy to attribute a cost to each measure which would allow you to demonstrate ROI on any improvements (or decreases) that are made.

Measures Using Digital Data 💻️

#1 - Transfer Rate (%) From Digital Channels To Customer Service

• Tools like Adobe & Google Analytics have the capability to track the origin of customer service requests. For example, Adobe would be able to leverage an identifier to track individuals who started on a digital property and transitioned to the contact centre. For further information on how this works, see here.

• Holding Digital teams accountable for this metric would ultimately lead to improved content on digital channels. It would also be helpful to leverage speech & text analytics for these customer service contacts in order to pin-point the common reasons for channel switching.

#2 - ChatBot Issue Resolved / Success Rate (%)

• According to this article, chatbots handle full conversations around 69% of the time. We’re personally skeptical about this number and feel that it is a lot lower than this. No matter what the industry standard is, your digital (and contact centre) teams should be regularly monitoring this metric in order to identify opportunities for further optimisation.

#3 - Did You Complete Your Purpose Of Visit? (%)

• Simply asking customers whether they achieved what they set out to achieve when they landed on your website is a great way to understand the user experience. This metric is commonly measured by triggering a survey just before the user leaves your site.
  

• Digital teams are often too busy trying to optimise for conversion that they forget about the original purpose of any website - to provide useful, relevant & easily accessible information about your business, eliminating the need for customers to find this information elsewhere!

#4 - Users Who Move From “FAQs” to “Contact Us” Page (%)

• What is the main reason a user would move from FAQ pages to the “Contact Us” page. It’s probably because they were not able to find what they needed on the FAQ pages.
  

• Instead of directly asking customers about their experience on the website, you can use behavioural data to stitch together journeys which indicate digital deflection.

Measures Using Contact Centre Data 📞

#5 - Self Service Contact Volumes (%)

• Text & Speech Analytic tools are easily able to identify contact volumes which relate to potential self-service activities i.e. password reset, website not working, delivery ETA.
  

• The above analytics tools can be used to quantify the proportion of contacts which relate to digital channels, whilst also attributing a cost to each of these contacts. For example, password reset contacts may cost $4 to serve within the contact centre compared to $0.02 digitally. This will provide contact centre teams a way to quantify the impact of these contacts, whilst also demonstrating cost savings when these contacts are reduced over time.

#6 - Customers Who Couldn’t Find Answer Online (%)

• It’s common practice to send a survey to a customer post-interaction. Why not ask them 1-2 survey questions as they wait to speak to an agent?
  

• By simply asking a customer whether they attempted to find an answer online before calling, you are able to get a representative view of digital performance from the customers who are experiencing the pain first-hand. This would be invaluable data to share with the digital team.

#7 - Marketing Campaign Contact Volumes (%)

• Whilst marketing teams always have the right intentions, they are often unaware about the side effects that a marketing campaign may cause. Contact Centre reps are often bombarded with questions about a marketing campaign which they know little about, primarily because the landing page (and email content) did not articulate the value proposition well enough.
  

• By creating a measure which quantifies the impact that marketing campaigns have on the contact centre, it will ensure cross-collaboration from different areas of the business, increasing efficiencies all round.

#8 - Actual Resolution Of “IVR Deflected” Contacts (%)

• In 2023, most contact centres have “Smart IVRs 🤖” which try to guide customers through problems without needing to speak to a representative. There are often times where a customer is removed from the call queue as the smart IVR determines that the customer has been resolved. The operational data will mark this as a successful contact deflection, however the customer may still be unresolved.
  

• To mitigate the above, we recommend that you send a post-contact survey to customers no matter whether they spoke to a customer service agent, or if they had been “resolved” by the smart IVR. This customer resolution metric will give you a true insight into the effectiveness of IVR deflection tactics.

#9 - Repeat Digital Callers (%)

• So let’s imagine a customer had experienced an issue on your website. He / she calls the customer service team and has this problem resolved. What will be the behaviour of this customer when they need assistance in the future? We predict that they will resort back to the easiest resolution in their mind, which is the customer service team.
  

• Similar to long covid, we anticipate that poor digital service will lead to long self service deflection. What we mean by this is that customers who switch out of digital channels will likely remain in the analog channels until they are convinced otherwise. Having a measure of repeat customer behaviour will be a good way to quantify the ongoing impact of this channel switch.

We hope this newsletter has been helpful and (somewhat) thought-provoking 💭💭. If you have any additional thoughts or ideas on how to best measure contact deflection, simply respond to this email to keep the conversation going!

Cheers,

Ben @ What’s CEXy.