While some might argue that every customer contact is a selling opportunity, the truth is that not all customer contacts are valuable or even necessary. In a world of increasing costs and increasing competition, it is essential that organisations develop effective deflection strategies that reduce or eliminate easily avoidable contacts and allow contact centres to focus resources where they can drive the greatest value.

There is no single element in a deflection strategy though – rather, the strategy needs to address multiple threads, such as:

• Reduce progress chasing (where is my order, when will you pay my refund) – addressed by means of automatically produced pro-active outbound updates using email and SMS text.
• Reduce requests to correct errors and mistakes – addressed by business process improvements to avoid errors at source.
• Reduce requests for common information – addressed by automated FAQ management through web and email.
• Reduce requests to do something – addressed through the provision of a wide range of self-service capabilities through multiple channels.
• Reduce follow-on requests for unresolved issues – addressed by improving first time resolution rates through improved quality and effective case management.

Balanced with all of these options, however, should be a consideration that the fastest way to lose customer loyalty is to impose clumsy self-service obstacles to personal customer service. That is, self-service and deflection is something the customer should chose to use for his or her own benefit, rather than something imposed to benefit the contact centre (such as the many ill fated IVR systems)!

numero is arguably unique in the fact that it offers fully integrated support for all of these deflection strategies, as well as everything required to streamline and add maximum high value to customer contacts for both the contact centre and back office.