Best Service is No Service - Bill Price

Insights from our Contact Center 360 Summit today:

First up "The Best Service is no Service." - with Bill Price, formerly of Amazon.Com

- "The best service is no service," was Bill's response to Jeff Bezos' question about his philosophy of customer service when interviewing for a job leading Customer Satisfaction for Amazon. Bill gives voice to something many of us have been thinking about for years - think of a call to a contact center as a breakdown in the service model.

Bill calls non value adding calls "dumb contacts."

• Dumb contacts are ones that are not valuable to the customer or the business.
• If a contact is dumb it should be automated.

Companies that get this are measuring there % of Self Service. Many target as high as 90%, but Bill suggests using 80% as a workable goal. % Service provides a much better focus for service program than FCR or other traditional contact center metrics.

Bill relayed great examples of how self-service adds value based on knowing the customer's needs: Two struck me as wow:

• The Autobahn breaking into your FM radio program with an automated message warning off raffic ahead and then activating your GPS to show you where to get off

• MM's allowing online requests of personalized candies for special occasions.

Each example drove home the need for innovation in service design.

Here is a real gem about dealing with an age old challenge at call centers - How to melt "snowballs." Yes, snowballs. Snowballs are repeat contacts because once they start rolling each call comes in with a bigger and bigger AHT Key to "melting them?" Unlimited Handle Time allowed for specific question types to do as much research as required, as long as it takes...to get to a First Call resolution.

Bottom line on Bill's talk:
Great service is table stakes.
Value comes from innovating ways to take the service call out of the equation.