3 Reasons Call Deflection Is Crucial for Your Customer Support Efforts

For some retailers, the holiday season can represent as much as 30 percent of their yearly sales. One of the best ways businesses can capitalize on this connection with customers is in your organization’s customer support operation. According to the Harvard Business Review, “Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does, [and] acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.”

As it turns out, building a successful rapport with customers is contingent on providing outstanding support. However, successful rapport doesn’t mean spending hours on the phone with customers answering every question under the sun about your product or service. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Studies have shown that decreasing the time your support agents are speaking to customers is a far more effective way to maintain happy customers. Call deflection; that is, answering customers’ questions without needing a person to physically answering the call, is one of the most important actions businesses can take to improve their customer satisfaction, and one of the chief reasons companies choose to implement Attivio.

Here are three reasons why call deflection is important for customer support.

1. Customers prefer to solve problems themselves

Self-service is the fastest growing trend in customer support because customers themselves are fiercely independent. For the customer, being able to answer their own question means there’s no going on hold, no talking to a stranger for hours, no feedback loops; there are just immediate answers. It’s also the fastest and most effective way for the business to answer the question since they literally never hear from the customer. Using Attivio’s platform, support organizations can automate many high-frequency, low-touch customer interactions by building out smart answering systems that return the most accurate answer for any customer query. As more customers ask the same question, the answers improve while the customer gets a fast answer and can get on with their life.

2. The cost savings can be huge

Studies of the Association of Support Professionals show that small companies spend nearly 20% of their revenue on customer service and technical support. That’s a huge chunk of money on something that can easily be resolved by integrating an intelligent system like Attivio to help customers answer their own questions. While your organization’s knowledge base may evolve as you continue to identify and resolve more issues, Attivio’s system works to continually improve the quality of answers and allow customers to help themselves, thereby freeing up support staff to make more efficient use of their time and avoiding costly tech staff deployments. Better yet, while Attivio helps more customers help themselves, the savings can allow you to perfect your technical training, improve onboarding practices, and ensure your support staff are all absolute authorities on your product or service.

3. Frees up support agents to solve the truly complex problems

Speaking of competent, well-trained support staff - call deflection increases self-service, decreases the number of support tickets, but perhaps most importantly, it allows agents to use their time to develop a more nuanced understanding of customer issues and know how to answer the most complicated questions that an AI system may not be able to. When tickets are submitted, a powerful call deflection system also allows agents to focus on the more time-sensitive tickets that are critical to meeting and maintaining service level agreements (SLAs). This is especially crucial in particularly busy business seasons like the holidays or in the event of a broader company mistake. With a well-trained, knowledgeable customer service team, supported by an intelligent solutions platform like Attivio, call deflection initiatives evolve as better support agents feed the machine learning algorithms with better solutions, creating a positive feedback loop that will boost your business and retain happy customers.

Interested in learning more about deflection? Join our webinar on December 19th, Extreme Call Deflection with Intelligent Search.