Repeats — Metric your contact center should eliminate

In all my interactions with customer support teams as well as during data deep dives, repeat always comes up as one of the main customer detractors. In general sense this is someone doing something more than once to complete an activity rather than finishing it at the first go.

Imagine those back to back calls to a customer support only to be told they are working on it without a definitive answer and to have to call again and again for an update.

It is as annoying and frustrating as it sounds. One of the most frequent themes that I have seen in CXO escalations & consumer forum cases is not that customers face an issue or how the final answer was not what they were expecting but rather how customers repeatedly reached out for support but never got a timely response or assurance or a closure. Leaving customers in a limbo never works out in the long run. It leads to customer churn and bad brand press apart from high customer support costs for repeated customer contacts.

So what is the definition of repeat?

Simply put in the customer support ecosystem, repeat is defined as a customer reaching out more than once from their end for resolutions. In an ideal scenario even if the resolution cannot be provided on first connect, the process should have such finesse that customers do not feel the need to contact the support team again but rather have the trust that the support team will do multiple contacts proactively to resolve the problem.

[Taking this one step ahead and defining repeat for internal teams as well where getting any information for effective customer resolution takes more than one exchange between two different teams (cue to those repeated emails to finance or logistics team for refund or delivery updates) (more on this later)

But solving repeat is not as easy as it sounds. Most organizations fail to even track and measure the inefficiencies in their system due to repeats and what’s causing customer churn. While themes like call handling time (long hold time on call anyone?), first response time (how soon do they even pick up the call?), etc. are common metrics which everyone will show in leadership decks, repeat always takes a backseat.

At times repeat may not happen through a single support channel itself. Customers might reach out through call, email and chat at the same time showing criticality of the problem but organizations are missing out on this as there are very few of them tracking an end to end customer contact for an issue type. This just shows the low trust customers have on the platform.

Does repeat only impact the customer support team?

Apart from bad customer experience, repeats lead to significantly high contact volumes (amount of back and forth connects) needing a much larger support team. This directly translates to bottomline impact on any business due to additional manpower costs. In OTA business, I have seen high losses as well if the team does not solve a problem quickly which leads to higher fares later on or higher cancellation charges (which needs to be borne by OTA if the error is on the business side)

With high repeats, ultimately customers do not transact again on the platform leading to low LTV & ever increasing CAC.

What leads to these repeats?

Broadly repeats can be categorized based on their source of origin or cause. Few of the top ones which I have come across are as follows

• No tracking for customer repeats (if this is not there then all the below fails to be recognised)
• Inefficient first call handling by front line team (lacking in soft skills (uninterested tone?), unempathetic, no assurance for quick resolution) leading to frequent repeat calls
• Incomplete standard operating procedures (SOPs) for handling different issues leading to internal dependencies for answers
• Unorganized issue tracking & resolution (documentation gaps leading to missed context, untimely or missed follow-ups, erroneous resolutions to maintain SLAs)
• Incomplete stitching of customer contact through all support channels (usually due to channels running in silos)
• High dependencies on internal teams for providing resolutions
• Bad support experience for past issues
• Customer experience vision gaps in internal teams and lack of coordination & support (leading to less priority to customer support queries)

(Let me know if I should write more in detail about above problems in some other article)

Repeats due to internal dependencies

While repeats due to internal teams are last on the list, this probably is the most difficult to solve and also causes the most nasty escalations.

For instance when we launched Buses on Cleartrip, our customer contacts were through the roof. All this was due to misses in processes and information passing from backend teams to front line executives and ultimately customers. We were able to reduce a whopping 43% of the contacts in just 2 months by streamlining processes and information visibility to the front line team and ultimately the customers.

Another time we realized refunds for customers were causing a huge repeat in the system. Due to internal communication as well as frontline team’s training gaps we were overcommitting on resolution timelines but at the same time face multiple back and forth internally for processing refunds. When we solved this after proper RCA of all misses, we reduced repeats by 40%. And not only did repeat go down but TAT for refund processing went down by 65%+ since the team looked at an issue only once leading to better productivity and response time.

What I learned from solving for internal repeats

It’s fair that there are feature defects and gaps (which app doesn’t have it?) which makes customers call the customer support team but what matters for a good customer experience is if everyone is aware of it and acknowledges it in full spirit.

In all my cross team RCAs, the final reason for misses always comes out as the same (not just here in Cleartrip but even in Flipkart)

1. Information gap : Teams do not know what other teams do and what is the best way to reach out to them. New launches done without informing dependent teams is also fairly common.
2. Absence of clear & aligned SOPs : Teams make SOPs for themselves but fail to cascade it to other dependent teams. This leads to wrong expectation setting for support when the other team does not even know what is the support required
3. No clear tracking mechanism : Whenever teams track issues through emails, calls, chats internally without having a proper ticketing mechanism, misses are bound to happen. There is TAT tracking for figuring out misses or even knowing what is pending for resolution

Final thoughts

Tracking repeat is fairly easy (anyone with basic excel skills can set up an initial dashboard quickly) but solving it is what becomes a challenge. There is somewhat a certain level of persistence that is needed to completely eliminate it from the system but as long as an organization identifies it in the system they are on the right track. I have had the most challenge but also the most learning working on projects revolving around reducing repeats especially those due to internal teams.

Let me know your thoughts in comments or let's connect offline for a detailed discussion