5 Ways to Kill Customer Service Costs (Without Wounding Customer Experience)

Posted by Omar Zaibak on September 1, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Contact centers and customer support organizations are always pressured to cut service costs. This is especially true during these difficult economic times. Unfortunately, cutting costs without taking the customer experience into account is a recipe for disaster. The contact center outsourcing craze many North American companies recently went through is a prime example of this. Cost savings were offset by an increase in customer churn stemming from lower customer satisfaction levels. Not surprisingly, these same companies have shifted back to in-sourcing customer support.

This highlights a key challenge to most customer service organizations: How to cut costs without negatively impacting the customer experience?

Here are 5 Ways to Cut Customer Service Costs.

1. Reduce Agent Turnover
Customer service agents account for the largest single expense in contact centers and support organizations.  With average annual turnover rates hovering around 40%, huge costs are sunk into hiring and training new agents. Lowering agent turnover results in reduced hiring and training costs. Better yet, lower agent turnover rates is an indicator of happier and motivated agents. This typically translates into better interactions with customers.

2. Launch A Self-Service Portal
A self-service portal lets your customers and employees resolve their issues 24/7 without requiring an interaction with a customer service agent. It deflects service requests away from telephone and email channels to the web. Cost savings are realized by reducing the number of support agents required in the contact center. To avoid negatively impacting the customer experience, ensure that channel escalation options are provided in case the self-service portal does not resolve the user’s issue.

3. Implement Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) With Screen Pops
Computer telephony integration with screen pops automatically delivers relevant customer information to the agent’s screen. This lowers the average call handle time (AHT), resulting in cost savings. Customer service agents become happier because they don’t have to ask repetitive identification questions each call, reducing agent turnover. Customers are happier because they don’t have to answer these repetitive identification questions, improving their experience. This is a winning combination for agents, customers, and contact center managers.

4. Streamline Your Support Process Workflow
A significant and under-utilized method of cutting customer service costs is to streamline the workflow of your customer support process. The questions to ask are: how are issues handled and escalated throughout my support organization, and how can they be resolved faster? Create flow charts and map each customer support process, identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Formulate a strategy to address and optimize weaknesses in the support process. This results in cost savings by decreasing the number of agents and back-office users required to provide support. It enhances the customer experience by resolving issues faster and more effectively.

5. Reduce Customer Service Agent Training Time
The average annual turnover rates for North American customer service agents hovers at about 40%. This high turnover creates a significant training cost to the contact center. Reducing agent training time is a great way to cut costs, but cannot be done at the expense of the customer experience. Fortunately, there are two ways to reduce training time while improving the customer experience:

• Implement a knowledge base for agents. It is a great training resource that lowers agent ramp-up time while providing customers with more consistent and accurate answers to their inquiries
• Implement easy to use support software. Many CRM and other support solutions today are complex since they provide functionality that is not required by customer service agents. This results in increased training time, even for relatively simple tasks like creating a support request. Invest in software focused on customer support functionality and that is designed primarily for the customer service agent.

Tags: contact center, customer experience, customer service, knowledge base, web self-service