4 Questions to Ask When Building a Flexibility Plan

Don’t let unpredictable call volume cripple your ability to drive customer satisfaction and retain your market share.

Every day your company is faced with unexpected challenges that impact your operations and drive higher call or interaction volume than expected. Not all of those challenges are negative – sometimes it’s an amazing sale that will yield more revenue – but none the less they impact your ability to drive an excellent customer experience. Whether it is a new product release, an uncontrollable weather event, or just an everyday unpredicted spike in volume, it’s important that you have a sound plan on how your operation will flex to meet the demand of the customer. Ask these questions:

1) How long will you make the customers wait in queue before you address their concerns with your products or brand?

2) Is it acceptable to have a 5% abandoned rate goal of customers?

3) If they don’t get in contact with you will they contact your competitor, or stop doing business with your brand?

4) What is worse than not answering the call to provide service when your customer reaches out to you?

These are some of the critical questions that need to be considered when building out your flexibility plan. Average speed of answer (or ASA) is a common metric in most customer service and sales environments, but I can’t tell you how many times I have seen organizations be strong-armed by unplanned events and miss this very important metric. While it may be true that ASA alone does not correlate to overall customer satisfaction, it is the first metric in your attempt to drive overall resolution to the customer concern. More importantly this has a significant impact on setting the tone the customer will have when dealing with your brand. Not to mention it can help avoid the Twitter hashtags that will be out there for all to see: #ImNotThatImportantToThem #SwitchingBrands.

Do what is right for your customer experience and brand reputation and put some serious thought on your flexibility game plan.