Unified Customer Engagement Hub Blog

Get insight, news, best practices, and other opinions on trending, industry leading, and other technology topics.

All Posts

Customer Service and Pareto's Law

How many support organizations feel overwhelmed with an endless cycle of problems and support requests? For those of you that feel this way, what would you say if I told you that you might be able to solve 80% of your problems, with 20% of the work?

As it aptly applies to numerous business functions, Pareto’s 80/20 Law appears “spot on” with regard to customer service and support. It is commonly observed that roughly twenty percent of known issues (what we refer to as "simple and frequent") constitute approximately eighty percent of the total contact volume. Simply put, approximately 20% of your products and services are causing you 80% of the heartache.

This regular and predictable occurrence within the customer support function lends itself to the deployment of automated tools, an example being a diagnosis/resolution support process, deployed with or without the assistance of live agents. These common and frequent issues are often classified as "Tier 1" problems. The remaining twenty percent of contact volume stems from less common, and often more complex issues, requiring a higher level of training (Tier 2 & 3 agents).

Focusing operational efforts towards this "20 percent" can drastically help to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your call center. By applying process, through the use of decision tree software, agents are now able to easily solve these problems without the need for advanced training. Not only will your agents be able to solve more problems on the first call, it will be less expensive.

As soon as this 20% is processed, you can begin to focus on other areas of the support organization. Until then, it will be a continuous uphill battle that has you and your agents spending time and resources in areas that are less valued.

Related Posts

Reducing the Impact of Technology on Training

3 Ways to Reduce Training Time Using Technology If you really want to reduce training time, we challenge you to look at the technology your agents are using. Is it simple to use? Does it proactively help agents? Does it make their jobs easier? If you didn't answer YES to all of those questions, you could be complicating your training efforts out of the gate due to the technology your agents utilize to manage the customer journey. One of the unsung heroes of SpiceCSM's Business Process/BPM tool is the ability to reduce the amount of time agents need to start producing at the levels of longstanding employees. Typically when bringing new agents onto the team there's a period of training, usually involving some classroom knowledge transfer, exercises, role playing, and a variety of other methods to give the agents resources to solve requests efficiently. Depending on the organization and type of business, this could take anywhere from 1 - 12 weeks, or longer. In higher turnover environments this only exacerbates training challenges and emphasizes the need to make new employees more productive in less time. Here are 3 ways you can utilize technology to help reduce training efforts:

What is iPaaS: Explaining Integration Capabilities

What is iPaaS: Explaining Integration Capabilities What is iPaaS? iPaas is a cloud-based platform that allows businesses to connect their existing systems together. It provides a single interface where users can access their data from across different software platforms. This means they can view information from one application within another without having to switch between them. The platform also makes it easy for people to build new integrations by providing low-code tools that allow connections to be made with external systems.

Low-Code Application Platform: What is it??

LCAP - What is a Low-Code Application Platform The vision that SpiceCSM has from our inception was to have an application that provided the tools to customize the user experience easily and orchestrate data without the need for technical expertise. What we've been calling an "Enterprise Application Builder" is now being recognized by leading analysts as a Low-Code Application platform, or LCAP for short.