Recently the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that their customer service is about to “get worse”.
(insert “How is that possible?” joke here)
Peer a little deeper into the IRS challenge and you’ll find an organization that doesn’t have enough representatives needed to fulfill incoming contact volume. Or do they?
I frequently speak with leaders of service and support organizations who tell me that they’re struggling to keep up the increasing volume of live service and that the complexity of those live interactions is increasing, too. But adding more headcount is a nonstarter. So what solution exists?
What if I told you that you likely already have what you need? Your company website.
You see, most customers begin their service interactions on your company website, but many of those same customers fail and end up resorting to live service to fix their issue. And that’s a lose-lose outcome: loss for the company because it’s more expensive & loss for the customer because it’s a poor service experience.
The simplest and fastest way to discover what opportunities exist to most quickly improve the likelihood that your customers “stick” in the Web is to ask them two simple questions:
After your frontline rep resolves the customer’s issue simply ask the customer: (Q1) “Did you try to resolve this on our website before you called?” The question is low burden for the customer and only requires a “yes” or “no” response.
Then, for those customers that answer “yes” the rep asks the follow-up question: (Q2) “What happened?”
Now, of course, your reps will be a bit more diplomatic than that, but the intent should be clear: quickly and easily identify why your customers leave the Web and land in a more expensive channel that results in a higher effort experience.
This survey typically takes about 5-7 business days’ worth of information gathering before you have “good enough” data to begin making smart decisions about Web improvements.
Then, once you make those improvements to boost Web stickiness you should shift your attention to guiding your customers to low-effort experiences. This means identifying the low-effort channel that will most likely resolve your customer’s issue and then guiding the customer to that channel. And one example that CEB has profiled showed a nearly 13x ROI by making one simple change discovered through this 2-question survey process.
Truth be told, the IRS website is actually pretty solid. It offers some guidance along the top of the page and aims to steer customers to self-service solutions. Now, if the IRS would deploy the 2-question survey to discover why their customers don’t “stick” in the Web, maybe they’d discover that there ARE enough representatives to handle their live volume.
Do you have enough reps to handle your live volume?
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