Call Deflection: Reduce Your CX Costs By Up To 80%
Most CX professionals have experienced the horror of a surge of calls from customers. It’s stressful for their agent team because customers are frustrated and complain when they wait for too long. Waiting on hold is painful for customers and expensive for brands. The average cost per call is 3 to 5 dollars because agents can only talk to one customer at a time. According to Harris Interactive, 75% of customers believe it takes too long to reach a live agent.
Angry customers give bad customer satisfaction scores in surveys like CSAT and NPS. Annoyed customers don’t recommend your company to their friends. Some customers may start to look for your competitors.
This is why the best CX managers monitor hold times and look for ways to reduce call volume.
For e-commerce retailers, most calls can be resolved faster through self-service or chat. These channels typically have 90+ NPS scores. The cost of self-service is almost zero. The average cost to resolve a ticket with chat is around 1 dollar because agents can talk to multiple customers at the same time.
One of the top reasons customers call is because they find your phone number as the first result on Google Search.
Customers search for your phone number on Google when they need help
Unfortunately, marketers and CX professionals can’t control Google’s user experience. However, they can control what happens when their customers call the contact center. They can offer call deflection.
Call deflection is any mix of techniques to reduce wait time by giving customers the option to switch to a faster channel, like self-help or chat. It’s a critical part of any customer experience strategy.
Self-service and chat tend to be lower-cost channels, especially for quick questions like “where is my order?” Agents can help multiple customers at the same time on these channels; the conversations are fast. As a result, customers are happier
Old Fashioned Call Deflection
The most common technique for call deflection is to pre-record a message about other channels that plays while customers are waiting on hold. Have you heard this before?
Thanks for calling! Did you know you can also email us or chat with us on our website? Please hold for the next available operator…
This approach is out of date in today’s world. Most people have smartphones where they access your chat and self-help channels. Why ask them to hang up and search (again) for a different channel? Instead, you can instantly send them a direct link to their preferred channel.
Call Deflection, Best Practices
Chatdesk Shift automatically detects if a call is coming from a cell phone and then automatically offers to send the caller a link to a faster channel via text message. These messages are:
- Customizable with your brand’s copy
- Can be triggered by the time of day, including times when the call center is closed or when call wait times surge.
- Link with your Live Chat, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or your self-serve tools for returns and order status.
Shift integrates with 40+ customer service tools on the market such as Zendesk, Gorgias, Kustomer, Talkdesk, Five9, InContact, and More!
Chatdesk Shift also has advanced analytics about what happened after the call is deflected. Customer experience managers can use this data to identify which SMS conversations are taking a long time to resolve.
Call Deflection Use Cases
Order Status
Some brands receive a lot of calls about delivery and order status. One of our customers, Living Spaces, ships furniture nationwide. They have a self-serve tool on their website, where their customers could check their order status. They use Chatdesk Shift to deflect some of their inbound calls to the self-help tool. When a customer calls the Living Spaces’s support number, they offer to send a link where their customers can check their order status.
Returns and Exchanges
Other brands offer items where customers call a lot about returns. This tends to occur among fashion and clothing brands, where customers order multiple items in various sizes so they can see how they fit.
As a result, returns and exchanges are one of their top call drivers. Jaanuu, which offers medical scrubs, uses a self-service returns tool called Happy Returns. It allows customers to set up their own returns and print their own return label. Jaanuu uses Chatdesk Shift to send customers a text with a link to the webpage where customers can handle their returns by themselves.
Chat, SMS, Facebook, WhatsApp, or Apple Business Chat
Finally, some brands prefer to talk to their customers directly by chat, SMS, or social media. These brands take a concierge or clienteling approach at scale. A good example of this is Thinx, which sells underwear for women for when they have their periods. As part of their customer experience strategy around talking about periods, they want more interaction when their customers have problems. They use Chatdesk Shift to deflect inbound calls to SMS or chat, where they can talk to their customers quickly.
Call deflection is an essential part of any customer experience. Chatdesk Shift enables brands of all types to deflect customer service calls to faster channels while improving their customer satisfaction. This equals happier, more loyal customers who are more likely to repeat purchases.
