It might seem counterintuitive in a call center to want to deflect calls. After all, that’s what keeps you busy, right? But there are quite a few reasons why deflecting calls is actually good for call centers—and can actually contribute to an even better customer experience.
For example, let’s look at call volume. If you can reduce the number of incoming calls, that frees up support agents to spend more time on complex calls. That way, they don’t end up rushing to a solution that might not be quite right, or even sending a tech to save time.
As another example, effective call deflection can also contribute to some of your support organization’s major KPIs, including wait times and customer experience.
So how do you deflect calls in a way that helps you maintain your customer experience?
The key is self-service support.
Whether they’re struggling to get a signal in a certain room, or they just can’t get a smart speaker to connect, customers like to try and sort things out themselves before they call in. Over 60% of them will, in fact, look up their problem before they pick up the phone.
The trouble is, most of the information they find is either generic or doesn’t help. Typically, this happens because either it’s user-shared information on forums, or it comes from general FAQs or help articles. There’s no way for the customer to know if the problem they see online is exactly the problem happening on their network.
Naturally, providing your own information through self-service support options is a good start. But beyond that, these options need to be specific. They need to understand the precise nature of the problem and explain to the customer what will solve that problem. Equipped with that information, your customers will be able to resolve their own tech issues on the first try.
These options also need to be easily accessible. You can have all the information in the world, but it doesn’t do any good if your customers can’t use it or find it. For self-service support options to deflect calls effectively, they need to be simple to use, accurate, and highly visible.
Because when customers know they can solve their own problems right away with personalized information right from the source, they won’t need to call in—and they’ll still attribute their great experience to you.
