20 Ways to Reduce Call Volume in Your Call Center

For companies with customer service lines, call center cost savings is always an important topic. To reduce call center volume, businesses employ a variety of tactics with their digital properties and employee training. For example, your website should include self-serve options for customers such as frequently asked questions (FAQs), knowledge base articles, and how-to guides. Passwordless login is also a major time saver for call center teams.

While cost savings are always important, you also need to consider how your customer service offerings impact customer satisfaction. To paint a clear picture of this process, Ping broke down the topic of reducing call center volume into three categories:

• Effective Communication

• Digital Adoption

• Passwordless Sign-In 

Each of these subtopics includes granular approaches to call volume reduction that Ping uncovered through careful research. By following this detailed roadmap, you will cut operational costs while also boosting customer service.

Without further introduction, here are Ping Identity’s 20 tips for reducing call center volume:

1. Make Your Website Easy to Navigate

The most surefire way to lessen call center volume is to make the customer journey straightforward with clear communication. Not only should your website be user friendly, but your staff should also be able to resolve issues with customers quickly and easily.

Your website should offer easy-to-understand site navigation, clearly articulated CTAs, and effortless checkout steps. Make sure self-help options, such as chatbots or how-to guides, are easy to find and simple to navigate.

Answering frequently asked questions on your website (FAQs) is a great way to keep people from contacting your call center agents. Be sure to create FAQs that are easy to read, contain essential how-to topics, and are updated with the latest information so customers can easily find the answers they need.

Your customers won’t use self-serve options if they don’t know they exist. Be sure to promote the accessibility of your self-help tools on all channels, such as on your homepage, online chat, FAQs section, and interactive voice response (IVR) messages.

If customers go to your FAQs, chatbot, or contact center and receive the same answers at every touchpoint, they’ll realize that the self-help options are just as good as calling your contact center. In turn, this will encourage users to seek answers through your self-serve channels in the future.

If you’re experiencing technical issues or have changed a process that might spark customer calls, push out IVR messages that direct them to your digital channels. When customers see how easy it is to use your digital tools to get answers, they will likely avoid phone calls with future questions.

If you can pinpoint the reason behind your customer calls, you can be proactive and solve issues before your customer feels the need to call your contact center. Problems to consider include better website copy, more descriptive help text or instructions, and the inclusion of common user questions in your chatbot.

Another great way to lessen activity in your call center is to improve the resolution rates of customer inquiries. Importantly, your agents should solve customer issues during the first call. In turn, this will keep customers from reaching out a second or third time.

Digital adoption will help streamline your business operations, enhance your customer experience, and reduce high call volume. When digital tools are used to solve common customer issues, you’ll require less call center staff and lower your labor expenses.

8. Offer Personalized AI-Powered Assistance

AI-driven assistants like chatbots understand customer preferences through machine learning. By analyzing past interactions, AI delivers personalized customer services like product recommendations and answers to common questions. In turn, AI will help prevent calls to the contact center, while also increasing customer loyalty.

Keeping your customers informed and updated cuts down on call volume. Send automatic, real-time updates on your customers’ order status, order tracking, and delivery information via email or SMS. This digital follow-up enhances customers’ trust in your brand and reduces the number of status-related inquiries received by your contact center.

AI-driven systems intelligently assess incoming calls and direct them to the most appropriate support agent through skill-based routing. By automatically routing inquiries based on complexity and urgency, you optimize agent call time, minimize call transfers, and expedite answers to customer solutions.

When a customer calls your contact center, be sure to integrate your digital tools into the experience when possible. Encourage your call center staff to send customers an SMS message that directs them to a website form or help page. Educating your customers on convenient digital solutions reduces the likelihood of repeat calls.

While certain customer issues require the full attention of call center agents over the phone, digital channels are more appropriate for less demanding inquiries. With digital channels, customer service reps can handle multiple inquiries simultaneously via asynchronous methods like SMS, chat, and email.

Password issues with websites and mobile apps are among the most common reasons customers contact call centers. As such, implementing passwordless technology will lighten the workload of your center, while also enabling you to provide better customer experiences.

13. Mitigate Issues with Forgotten Passwords

Customers calling your contact center for lost passwords and subsequent resets can be a huge drain on resources. By implementing passwordless, you will greatly reduce labor expenses in your call center with customer inquiries, as well as SMS and email password resets.

Traditional authentication methods like usernames and passwords can be confusing for some users. If the setup process is cumbersome, customers may call your contact center for help. Passwordless makes the registration and sign-in process easier, thus lessening pressure on your call center.

In addition to forgotten passwords, users frequently get locked out of their accounts after too many failed login attempts. Frustrated customers may call your contact center to reset their passwords. Passwordless technology minimizes accout lockouts and reduces costs.

Call centers often spend a lot of time educating users about creating strong passwords and the importance of changing them regularly. With passwordless technology, this type of education and the associated calls become unnecessary.

Password-related issues can keep customers waiting on hold while they stop everything to make a phone call to your contact center. With a passwordless solution, this risk is diminished, ensuring the call center operates more smoothly and efficiently.

Passwords can be easily hacked, which opens the door to breaches and other cyberattacks. When this happens, customer confidence is eroded and you may experience a surge of complaints to the contact center. By eliminating passwords, you can mitigate the risk of these attacks, thereby reducing contact center costs associated with investigating and recovering from them.

Passwordless authentication systems can offer greater security, which may lead to fewer incidents of fraud. This, in turn, can lead to a decrease in the number of fraud-related calls and investigations, which decreases the burden on your call center.

In some cases, passwords for third-party applications (perhaps a billing system like PayPal or Affirm) can cause issues that result in calls to the contact center. Passwordless technology, when implemented across platforms, can help you avoid these problems.

The frustration of creating and keeping track of multiple different passwords comes at a cost. Fifty-six percent of consumers have abandoned an online service when logging in was too frustrating. Passwords are arguably the weakest link in security. Not only are they the leading cause of breaches, but passwords are difficult for users and call centers to manage.

Call center cost savings is always an important topic for companies with busy customer service lines. To keep call center expenses low, businesses utilize several methods related to their digital properties and employee teams. Generally speaking, these methods fall within the categories of Effective Communication, Digital Adoption, and Passwordless Sign-In. 

At Ping Identity, we have seen first-hand how costly a reliance on passwords can be. On the flip side of the coin, passwordless improves engagement, lowers abandonment rates, bolsters customer satisfaction, and ultimately drives higher revenues. 

Ping’s passwordless solution will help you deliver frictionless and secure experiences for your customers. Moreover, you will transform the efficiency of your contact center.

Contact Ping Identity for a Passwordless demo today!