People always prefer talking to people…

This is another “myth” that I find puzzling and is just not sound business. Phone calls are more costly than other methods of incident resolution. Plain and simple fact. Most serivce centers have to find ways to scale without increasing headout (i.e. Productivity gains). There are many companies that are utilizing “phone free” technologies with huge ROI and even improved job performance of customer service reps (CSR). Here is an example.

A client in the enterprise software space had one CSR who was a borderline performer. Always closed just enough incidents to stay out of hot water but was by no means a rock star. Then our application was deployed. He was taken off the phones and put to work only doing online assisted service. The application gathered telemetry from various sources and presented the CSR with answers to the “20 Questions” that they normally asked. His productivity soared and earned him the nickname of “8 by 11”. He was now closing 8 incidents by 11 AM — more than he would in a typical day on the phone. The positive feedback from the customers he serviced nearly quadrupled. In this case, people perferred not talking and so did the CSR!