Rate Your Routing

Dr. Jon Anton

The ten characteristics of customer-centered companies match the ten characteristics of companies that are good at call routing, so let us take these ten criteria and assess your organization's abilities in each of them. What we will be doing here is looking at what the great companies are doing and comparing it with what you are doing now.

1) Economic Segmentation Who are your profitable customers? As you will no doubt have heard before, for most customers it is said that 20% of the customer base can account for about 80% of your bottom line profits. When they (the 20%) call, you need to know and do something different in the way you respond to them.

For me, the most obvious example is based on the fact that I fly a lot: when I call my airline from my home or office they recognize the number and route me past the queue to (typically) the same agent each time I call. If I call from a payphone down the hall in the Purdue campus, I join the queue.

Do you know the demographics and psychographics of your customer base so that you can anticipate their information requirements? Have you identified and segmented your customers and can you then treat the most profitable customers differently? (Rate yourself 0–10 on the chart).

2) Institutional Memory This is critical for routing. By 'Institutional Memory' I mean that customers are logged, processed and tracked every time they contact you, so that those contacts are easily available at the next point of contact. So, every time I knock on your door or ring your phone, the information about that contact is available the next time I 'visit'. How good are you at that? Rate yourself honestly from 0–10.

(Editor's note: see question 4 for how well your different 'channels' or touch points are aligned so that information from, say, an email contact is instantly available to a telephone agent subsequently).

3) Customer Collaboration How closely do your processes change, based on customer input? Is feedback from different level/value customers acted upon? Do you use the information about past transactions and contacts to look to increase wallet share, in the style of 1to1 marketing (as popularized by Don Peppers)?

This can, of course, include acting on information gained from self-service. So, rate yourself 0–10 on this area, which is, like the rest of the factors here, critical if you are to get any good at routing.

4) Touch point alignment The most common touch point for most organizations tends to be the phone. But, email is moving up the scale rapidly, as our own research at Purdue university into how customers want to contact organizations shows. At Purdue we have identified twenty–three technological touch points through which customers can reach companies. You are probably only using up to eight at most. Are these channels aligned so that if I emailed you yesterday and call you today, your agent knows that I emailed yesterday and what the outcome of that contact was? This takes great software, but the beauty is this kind of software is out there and available now. So, the question is, how well are your touch points integrated? 0–10.

5)"Once and Done" contacts Our research at Purdue shows the two most desirable features for customers are these: firstly, that they can reach whomever they want in your organization by calling just the one number; secondly that they only have to call once and the issue is resolved. So, "once and done" is one of the highest drivers of satisfaction and efficiency in the call center environment.

The thousands of call centers analyzed on our database at Purdue show best practice running at around 85% "once and done". It would vary from industry to industry but, as a rough guide, you could say 85% is a "5" on the 0–10 scale (Editor's note: A "5" because, best practice or not, the score is based on customer expectations). If you do better or worse than that, rate yourself accordingly.

6) Real time information management Real time information access means contact data is immediately available, not historically, and certainly not once a month! Actionable reports are sent to key managers for decision–making, which then changes the routing process if necessary. In particular, here you need to focus on caller information management. So, how well does your company do when it comes to instant access to a lot of information? (0–10)

7) Listening points Do you strategically listen to the different levels of customers? These need to be immediate listening points, as in caller satisfaction surveys that are carried out immediately after the call rather than one month later.

Are your listening points close to where the action is? For example, if the customer is contacting you through a web hit, is there an easy way for them to leave a comment about the quality of the contact there while they are online?

Are these mechanisms of minimal cost in terms of time and expense to implement (for the customer) and do they deliver instant feedback to the managers involved?

If you have all of these capabilities in place – in other words, if you have a consistent, embedded strategy to listen, take data and feed that into the system so that you can use that information to route subsequent incoming contacts from that customer – then give yourself a 10. If you do the usual once a year "how much do you love us" survey, give yourself a 1.

8) Balanced customer scorecard This means you take the results of customer scoring of your service and have the ability to combine them with business drivers to form a single, multi–view e –commerce performance index.

This kind of index allows you to answer the question "How well are we doing in this non–face to face customer contact environment?" (Editor's note: The Balanced Scorecard concept, originally devised by Kaplan & Norton and described in the Harvard Business Review, is a 'dashboard–style' approach to measuring business performance, in which you combine different metrics such as customer satisfaction with profitability and other measurements to achieve a rounded view of how well a particular business unit is performing)

9) Closed–loop customer processes Here's an example of a '10' scoring closed loop routing system: I called one of the large automobile companies with whom I have a car loan. By putting my loan number into their automated system, I was able to obtain the payoff amount myself. That in itself is clever automated routing. But, it went further.

After I rang off, their computer called the dealer (triggered by my request for the payoff figure) automatically to tell them that I was obviously considering paying off my loan and therefore probably trading in my car, so they should try and get me into the show room!

So, this is a fine example of closed loop routing in which action by me resulted in new actions within the company. Can you do this? Do you have the capability in which every customer contact, whether by email, phone or in person, generates one of a multiple number of closed loop scenarios? If so, give yourself a 10. If partway there, score yourself accordingly. If not at all, you know what to give yourself.

10) Total Experience Management The concept here is that life events of the customer and their use of your product or service are studied. It involves the end–to–end planning of how your customer interacts with you throughout the cycle of their use of the products or services you offer, and then knowing and anticipating the contact points that will occur along the way.

If you have the capability to know exactly where a customer is in the cycle and, consequently, what the best options are at that point for meeting the customer's need, that would be a '10' (Editor's note: i.e. you anticipate the customer's needs, at any point in the cycle, because you have mapped out exactly how customers use your product or service, and can anticipate what a customer is likely to be calling about at a given point in the relationship eg a loan renewal).

Article copyright Jon Anton. Edits copyright eCustomerServiceWorld.com. Dr. Jon Anton is with the Purdue University Center for Customer–Driven Studies in Indiana, USA and is recognized as a leading authority on contact center management and technology. He has helped dozens of organizations improve the quality of their customer contact and customer management.