Getting Too Many Calls Can Collapse Your Contact Center - Here’s How You Can Avoid That

It used to be every growing company’s dream to have calls flooding in from potential customers and product support cases. Until everyone realized how this could actually damage customer experience. 

When this happens contact center agents experience inhumane amounts of strain, while your costs almost always go through the roof.

What if you could still get the success everyone imagined came with high volume calls, without hurting customer experience and/or your agents. 

Is it worth it? Well, given that 96% (almost everyone asked) of customers confirm that service plays a key role in their choice of (and loyalty to) brands, a smart company would give a damn.

When done right, reducing your call volumes translates to longer customer retention periods. Consequently, customer service teams become an integral part of both your marketing and customer retention strategies.

In this post:

• How to reduce your contact center’s call volume
• How to spread out incoming calls
• How to move queries away from phone calls

Part 1: How to reduce your contact center’s call volume

Let’s start at the beginning.

The problem you want to solve is ‘too many calls’. So the most obvious solution is to take fewer calls.

Right… but how do you reduce call volume?

Easy! Here’s how.

Prioritize First Contact Resolution

Low First Contact Resolution (FCR) figures have a bigger impact on call volume than most companies realize. Between 20-30% of all calls are thought to be about previously unresolved issues. Here’s the proof.

Why so high? Look to agent performance metrics for the answer. The more AHT (Average Handle Time) is emphasized, the lower your FCR is going to be. 

It makes total sense; if you reward agents for keeping calls short rather than finding solutions, they will respond to that incentive. However, you miss out on properly educating your customers on issues dear to them.

It’s a vicious circle. High call volumes add pressure on your agents to wrap up each call. That, in turn, equates to fewer good resolutions and even more calls!

What should you do?

First, make sure you’re tracking FCR – and tracking it properly. For example: five repeat calls from a single caller might represent bad FCR… or they might be five calls about five different issues.

So you need to guarantee that your agents can record the difference.

Second, it helps to follow up with customers to confirm that their issue was resolved (to their satisfaction, not yours). 

You can make this part of a feedback request, so that’s two birds with one stone!

The simplest way to handle this is with automated outbound SMS messages.

(Want to learn more about automated SMS? Read ‘SMS is the unsung hero of call center technology!’)  

Roll out pre-emptive service

Good FCR takes your calls-per-issue from 2+ down to one.

On the other hand,pre-emptive service takes your calls-per-issue from 1+ down to zero.

How does that work?

It’s actually simpler than it sounds. 

I’m willing to bet that there are a handful of small issues which drive an outsized number of calls?

AT&T had exactly this problem. Customers were often confused by the first bill, and would call the contact center for clarification.

The contact center solved this problem by sending every new customer a link to a video that explained their first bill. In one swoop, almost 10% of their calls disappeared!

(As an extra bonus, good pre-emptive service increases customer retention by 3-5%.) 

What should you do?

Automate the resolution of frequently asked issues. 

Look at the reasons why the customers are making that call that seems to go according to script., then take the solution to them before they call. 

Billing queries are a great example. (There will always be some customers with questions about their bill.) 

Video content, FAQ pages or even a UX-focused redesign are all cheaper than thousands of phone calls… certainly more peaceful at the very least.

Order tracking is another good example. 

Ask yourself this: from a customer’s perspective, is a phone call currently the easiest way to access information about their delivery? 

If so, what alternative can you put in place?

With pre-emptive service, you will often cross into the territory of a different team or department. 

Look at the AT&T example again. Their contact team identified the issue; the billing team provided clarification; the brand and marketing made the video.

It’s a creative and collaborative effort across the floor. 

Part 2: How to spread out incoming calls

If you’ve done part 1 as advised, expect a massively reduced incoming call volume. Good work on that part.

However, you may still have a high volume of calls coming through. Particularly at specific times.

The next step is to spread out incoming calls so your traffic is consistent – no peaks and troughs.

Set up virtual queuing

Say a customer calls but all your agents are busy. What do you do?

An “un-smart”, yet common option is to put them on hold. 

The bad muzak kicks in, and an automated message tells them how much you value their call. (Contrary to the evidence…)

 At this point you’re just testing your customer’s patience.

A good 70% of customers say waiting on hold is ‘extremely frustrating’. 

So now you’ve got a paying customer, who didn’t want to call in the first place, getting increasingly annoyed on hold.

What should you do?

Virtual queuing is relatively simple to set up. It’s really just a remix of call techniques that you already use.

To start with, your IVR needs to offer the option: does the caller want to receive a call when an agent is available, or wait on hold?

It helps if you can offer up this contextual information:

• If they opt to wait on hold, how long is the current hold time?
• If they want to receive a call, when will that happen? Is it first in, first out? Or will you schedule the call for a specific time, after your busy period.

Let’s assume the caller chooses virtual queuing. (About 75% of customers prefer this option.) 

Next, you place that caller in your virtual queue. (As we’ve already covered, this might be asap or a specific scheduled slot.)

The caller moves through the virtual queue until they reach the front. When it’s time to talk to that customer, your auto dialer places an outbound call. 

Lastly, the agent handles the call more or less the same as if it were an inbound call!

Let customers book their calls

Virtual queuing lets you move your incoming calls. But what if you could go back further, before the customer calls?

By now we’ve established how much customers hate waiting on hold. So why not take another step into blended contact center service and offer a guaranteed, no waiting outbound call?

The trick is to offer bookable slots at times when you’re not usually busy. 

If your phones are usually silent between eleven am and three pm, those are the times you could be making pre-booked, outbound calls. 

No more waiting in long queues listening to music they don't even like.

What should you do?

This is also pretty easy to set up. All you need is a simple scheduling tool that integrates with your outbound dialer.  

You can offer customers appropriate appointment times, through resources like your business chat bot or via SMS. (Either way, you should use outbound SMS to remind customers that their slot is approaching.)

At that defined time, a portion of your agents switch to blended/outbound service. The dialing process is automated; they just do the talking.

Part 3: How to move queries away from phone calls

Now you have fewer calls, and they’re spread more evenly over the day.

We’re almost there… The final step is to prevent those contacts from ever becoming phone calls.

Get more customers using self-service

Self-service can bring down your contact volume further still – and it’s easily the most affordable way to handle queries.

The good news is that customers want self-service too. Around three-quarters of customers believe they should be able to solve most problems on their own.   

What should you do?

There are a lot of different ways to turn contact center services into self-service these days.

Let’s go through some of the most widely used.

Interactive Voice Response – IVR 

IVR gets a bad rap – but that’s changing rapidly.

The change is due to the increased uptake of conversational IVR. Making it smarter than we all know it was not too long ago.

Basically, a lot of the old problems with IVR – the endless option menus, the tricky navigation – are solved by an IVR which users can talk to. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

Consider some advantages and downsides to adopting IVR;

Pros

• You probably already have IVR
• It’s easy to integrate with other systems
• Practically anyone can use IVR (especially conversational IVR)

Cons

• There are still some negative associations
• Some businesses think of IVR as a routing tool, not a self-service tool

SMS

You might not find a lot of millennials or Gen X’s still using SMS to stay in touch, but – pretty much everyone has access to SMS. It would be crazy not to use it in your service.

SMS has a high open rate and has banked a lot of trust over the years.

Marketeers have been wise to the power of SMS for a while – and now service is starting to catch up. So should you.

Just like IVR, SMS also has pros and cons. Assess these when considering implementation;

Pros

• SMS is available to everyone
• It’s trustworthy
• It’s easy to integrate with other systems

Cons

• Reasonably high cost per message (although still cheaper than a phone call)
• Limited to short messages

Social media automation

Of course, you might want to make sure that social media is an option too. As is the trend.

You’re going to need all the help you can get from the younger generations in your team with this one. 

If a new platform is where your customers want you to be – and if it means offering a cheaper service – go for it.

Pros

• Everyone sees your ‘wins’
• Can handle enormous volume
• Your brand wears a human face that customers can relate to.

Cons

• Diversity makes integration more challenging
• Everyone can see your ‘failures’

A common theme across all the ideas suggested is automation.

It goes without saying that automation will play an enormous role in taking the burden off your contact center.

Everything from handling calls, to pre-empting problems, to moving contacts through self-service is reliant on automation.

If you want to learn the fundamentals of contact center automation, here’s where you start: Your (free) Guide to Contact Center Automation.