Customer Experience Trumps Efficiency

I just read an interesting article in 1to1Media's 1to1weekly, "Register.com Replaces Computers...With People"  [registration required]. Register.com is a surviving dot.com prodigy that offers domain name registrations and related services. As they grew they naturally put an IVR system in their call center to increase their efficiency and control costs in handling the burgeoning volume of incoming calls. Problem: call abandon rates kept climbing as customers became frustrated with IVR menu hell and the delays in speaking to a live agent.

So here's the cool part: in the name of customer experience, they replaced the IVR front-end with a "triage team" of agents whose job is to take all calls immediately, dialog with the customer, and determine which core team of agents to route the call to for the best service (which still may require some hold time). The proof that in this case customer experience trumps efficiency: call abandon rates are down dramatically, and call center revenue generation is up by 20 percent over the IVR days.

I don't know how much of a business case Register.com's VP of sales and customer care (Sandy Ross, Mr.) had to build before this was attempted. It would have been tough to prove in advance. But notice that they definitely had the pre and post metrics to prove it worked.

Sometimes doing the right "customer experience thing" takes the courage of conviction, and the data are only going to come in after the fact.