Have you ever taken the time to ask yourself this question?

Quite often, when setting up a customer service department, the importance of looking into this question is overlooked. It’s an unfortunate mistake that can cost you time and, quite possibly, money.

In this post, we’ll look at:

• Why it’s crucial to consider this question
• The impact on the customer experience
• 3 concrete examples to measure the impact on businesses
• Data from a customer survey
• Action Plan to implement

Let’s try to understand why it’s crucial to consider this question from the outset.

Knowing the reason why a customer contacts you, and above all measuring the frequency of contact, enables you to work on the root cause of these enquiries. In this way, you can make every effort to reduce or even eliminate them.

Let’s take an initial example: 

Let’s say you operate on an online marketplace, and a customer calls you after placing an order. The reason for the call is simple: the customer wants to follow up his order.

This type of contact seems easy to handle and only takes a few minutes to deal with. The customer seems satisfied, and the employee who took the call did not encounter any particular difficulties. 

The customer experience seems perfect.

However, let’s break down what contact means from the customer’s point of view:

• 1. The customer has to contact you during your opening hours.
• 2. He has to look for your telephone number or email address.
• 3. If he contacts you by phone, he has to answer security questions.
• 4. He must provide the order number he previously looked up.
• 5. He explains the reason for his contact.
• 6. He waits for the agent to find the information requested.
• 7. he receives order information.

Are you still convinced that this is the best experience for your client?

The best customer experience is the one chosen by the customer, not the one decided by the company. This is one of the fundamental mistakes we all make at the beginning. The most important thing is to offer the customer a choice, even if your aim as a company is to be efficient and profitable.

According to a report by Aspect Software, 73% of customers want to solve product or service issues on their own. The same report says that customers would rather clean toilets than contact customer service. 

In conclusion, this means that customers generally don’t want to talk to you – they prefer to use self-service.

And you, as a business, would you rather spend time and resources on contacts or invest them in developing your sales?

Let’s do some simple maths. Let’s imagine that your company is already successful with tens of orders a day, generating a contact rate of 10%. This means that, on a daily basis, you receive an average of ten calls for every 100 orders. Let’s assume an average duration of 6 minutes per call for order follow-up. This means that you will be investing 1 hour of an employee’s daily working time for this reason. To this will be added other types of contact, of which you have no idea.

By not tracking the reasons for contact, it will be difficult for you to understand why your customers need you. As a result, you won’t be able to tackle the root of the problem: the customer would like to track the progress of his order in real time, and by himself.

Now that you have this information, you can decide to prioritise the development of a follow-up tool for your customers, improving their experience while reducing the number of repetitive tasks for your teams and allowing them to dedicate their time to other tasks.

Here’s a second example: 

During one of my last missions as COO, my first task was to restructure the customer service department. The first thing I noticed was that there was no structure and monitoring of the contacts. So we created an exhaustive list of possible reasons for contact. We set up a centralised, multi-channel tracking system, including email, phone and chat. One month later, we noticed that 25% of contacts were related to requests for information on current cases. This was a law firm where customers had a crucial need to feel reassured.

We decided to improve the customer portal, which initially only allowed documents to be uploaded. So we added a real-time tracking tab. Two months later, this reason for contact only represented 11% of the total.

The impact is significant for both the customer and the company. 

Let’s take a look at the benefits we’ve created:

For the customer :

• Time savings.
• They can check the status of their case at any time.
• We improved customer experience and satisfaction.
• And they have more Autonomy.

For the company:

• Time savings.
• Greater profitability by avoiding the need to increase staffing levels to respond to these contacts.
• And we Improved brand image.

Are there any disadvantages?

For the customer, there are none, because if they want to contact customer service, they can always do so.

For the company, the only short-term disadvantage is the financial investment required to think about, study and implement the reasons for contact. In the medium term, action will be needed to deal with the reasons that impact customers and, by extension, our company. However, these costs are quickly offset by the reduction in contacts and the fact that there is no need to increase the number of employees in the customer service department. What’s more, by knowing your customer better, you improve the service or product provided, which has a positive impact on your brand image.

Here’s a final example: 

I’ve also observed strategic errors due to a lack of contact monitoring. This particularly concerned the B2B customer retention department in a previous mission. 

In autumn 2017, an internal survey was conducted by the product department among Account Managers. The question was simple: based on feedback from our partners, what features do we need to develop as a priority? The internal survey showed that we needed to develop A, B and C, and this was all based on how the Account Managers perceived all the contacts they had received. 

The problem was that nothing was structured, and there was no categorisation of the feedback.

Three months later, the same product department sent the same survey to our partners. The result was different: they said we should prioritise D, E and F.

As you can see, if we hadn’t carried out a second survey, the strategic choice would have been wrong, and we wouldn’t have prioritised the real needs of our users. It is therefore essential to be vigilant with regard to the perceptions of our teams and to prioritise structured monitoring of contacts and customer feedback.

To sum up:

It is essential to understand why a customer contacts us because :

• 1. It allows us to detect and quantify the reasons for contact.
• 2. We can study the root cause of a problem to try to eradicate it, or at least reduce it.
• 3. Once the problem has been dealt with, this will improve the customer’s experience and, as a result, reduce their need to contact us.
• 4. With fewer contacts, you can dedicate more resources to other priorities (sales, loyalty, innovation, etc.).
• 5. If sales increase, you won’t necessarily need to increase the size of your customer service team because you’ve reduced the number of upstream contacts.
• 6. You are therefore more efficient and more profitable in the customer service department.

Actions to be taken:

• 1. Set up a system for monitoring reasons for contact.
• 2. Regularly analyse the data to identify trends.
• 3. Use this information to improve internal processes and services.
• 4. Encourage customer feedback for deeper understanding.

To conclude:

Understanding why customers contact you is a strategic investment for any business. By measuring and acting on these reasons, you can maximise profitability, boost customer satisfaction and build a solid foundation for future growth. Don’t underestimate the power of understanding your customers – it’s the key to success in today’s business world.

So, are you going to set up monitoring of the reasons for customer contact?