CONTACT CENTER STRATEGY
BY SCOTT KENDRICK, CALLMINER
ILLUSTRATION PROVIDED BY ADOBE STOCK
WHAT WILL YOU BE MEASURED ON? TO SUCCEED, YOU NEED TO TREAT CUSTOMER CONVERSATIONS AS INVALUABLE ASSETS.
Years ago, a manufacturer of protective phone cases had a support volume problem:
• Customers were calling about the charging port cover because it wasn ' t intuitive, didn ' t always seat properly, and, in some cases, failed.
• Calls led to troubleshooting, then to replacement cases and, for the company ' s waterproof products, potential phone warranty exposure.
40 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
The root cause existed in exactly one dataset in the company: what customers said on the phone. It wasn ' t in returns data, wasn ' t on warranty forms, and it wasn ' t in the ticket taxonomy. Nobody was filing a report that said the cover design was confusing. Instead, customers were describing the problem in their own words to the agents.
Conversation analysis then surfaced the issue; the finding went to Product Design and to Manufacturing, and the product changed.
The company reportedly avoided millions in warranty claims, but the more lasting change was procedural: product teams started coming to the contact center first because they understood that customer conversations contained intelligence the rest of the organization couldn ' t always see.