Customer Service Metrics is Different with IoT

Ask any manager in the contact center business and they’ll tell you that they live and die by the identical metrics reports they were using when they started the business: average handle time, first-call resolution, etc. And why not? If you handle a million calls a year and chop an average of 20 seconds off each call, that’s five full-time employees and a ton of money saved. If your goal is to minimize your support costs, you’ll be a hero. Except…is that really the best goal?

What if you added 2 minutes to each call and thereby stopped a 100,000 product returns? Sure, you’d have to spend another million dollars on customer support, but if by doing so you can add six million dollars to the bottom line… Isn’t it worth it? And that’s not even counting the additional value of extra sales from the hundred thousand customers who are now loyal followers to your company by the extra time invested in the personal care your customer support people gave.

That might sound like a crazy alternative universe back when we were supporting nothing but widgets, but in the interconnected world of the IoT (Internet of Things), when things are bought online and easily returned this situation is not only sensible, but now its compulsory. Yes, things are easier to return than ever before, and an astounding percent of products are being returned for refunds that are in perfect working condition but buyers couldn’t figure out how the new Smart Home devices worked. Since smart devices can “phone home,” it can be clear to a company when a device is experiencing technical issues or simply isn’t being used at all. Even before a customer calls to complain or attempts to return a product, the device can message the info to the OmniChannel contact center.

The only way of turning this around is to alter the current method of customer support. Instead, customer service can call the customer preemptively with a full understanding of what is wrong with the product or the knowledge that the customer doesn’t appear satisfied. From there, a conversation can ensue to create a positive customer experience, potentially even creating a brand advocate from a scenario that was simply unheard of prior to the IoT. To do that, we need to stop looking at contact centers as an expenditure and start seeing contact centers by the additional benefit they provide to the larger business.

Today above 80% of buyers of consumer electronics come upon some problem, and we can figure it costs 6-10 times as much to attract a new purchaser as it does to keep an existing purchaser. Roughly half of consumers say that they have returned at least one product because of no or low customer service. So spending money to make sure that the 80% end up pleased isn’t a necessary evil; it’s a required outlay in the most important metric of all: customer retention.

We are not saying to make your support operation as efficient as possible. Of course you do: Getting the same result at less cost is, quite literally, money in the bank.

What you don’t want to do is lose sight of the big picture by focusing too much on the cost side of support. Remember, it’s the benefit-cost ratio that makes customers happy.

Please contact us for any call center technology need or telecom challenge.

Thank you,
James Wilson, CEO
Call Center Pros
+1-404 936 4000
james@call-center-pros.com
www.linkedin.com/in/jameswwilson