Inbound Calling Alert!

A post over at Service Untitled discusses how to avoid inbound calls. These are all pretty good ideas (1) better email support (2) better online self service (3) an easier to use product (4) alternatives such as click to call. I'd like to add a further spin to that: before you try to put in inbound call avoidance strategies think about why and when customers, or prospects, are phoning you in the first place. In a previous life I did some research on the reasons behind inbound calls and you know 75-80% of them had to do with order status, the "where's my stuff" question. Just by putting some customer self service checking into your extra-net companies could avoid all those calls. For particular sets of customers, or times, or late changes you might think of pro-actively calling customers to give them an update. UPS has done a wonderful job ot enabling companies to bring this capability to the desktop by enabling to get your alert to the desktop. The email company Zimbra had a nifty feature that allowed you to send an email with an "embedded live link" to data in the UPS systems so that when you checked an email that was send two hours ago, it contained Updated information on the product delivery status: i.e. it was live information. A neat solution. Could your outbound email system contain links to live order status and delivery information? could it contain click to call links to live operators available at that time?

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact