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Ensuring constant availability is a major challenge for customer service teams, but achieving 100% reachability is an attainable goal with the right approach and partners. The key lies in a combined strategy, optimizing phone channels through Visual IVR and call overflow rules to prevent saturation. Continuous improvement is essential to keep up with technological advancements and evolving customer expectations, ensuring an optimized customer relationship. With a methodical approach and the right tools, permanent reachability becomes a competitive advantage rather than a challenge.
Providing a solution that meets 100% of requests relies on an efficient Visual IVR, capable of pre-qualifying contact intents and directing each call to the appropriate agent. The traditional IVR allows customers to specify their needs at the start of the call, ensuring they are routed to the most relevant advisor. The Visual IVR, on the other hand, is particularly useful for low-value calls or those that go unanswered (outside business hours or during peak times: “All our lines are currently busy…”). It redirects users to digital solutions and self-service pathways, preventing frustration.
Too often overlooked or unfamiliar to callers, digital channels actually provide a seamless and instant experience, allowing customers to get immediate answers while significantly reducing call volumes. This approach not only optimizes costs and customer service resources but also enhances overall customer satisfaction.
It is essential to regularly adjust call distribution between the appropriate departments to ensure efficient handling. When a change in business hours results in calls outside operating times, it is important to anticipate this transition by offering digital alternatives to customers. Similarly, when introducing a specialized service, accelerating its adoption by integrating it into the IVR prevents sales teams from acting as unnecessary intermediaries. Optimized call routing ensures that all calls are handled, reducing business losses and guaranteeing a smooth, frustration-free customer experience.
Creating a Flow Control Tower allows real-time supervision and management of customer interactions, whether through calls, emails, or chats. Acting as a true interface between customer relationship management and customer service teams, it provides a comprehensive overview and facilitates resource reallocation based on the efficiency of routing rules. This approach ensures continuous team adaptation to newly deployed solutions and organizational changes, such as schedule adjustments or the creation of new competency centers.
A virtuous cycle quickly emerges: by reducing the number of calls handled by agents through suitable solutions, they gain more availability to manage complex requests where their expertise is indispensable. Thus, technology becomes a strategic tool that serves human interaction, enhancing both operational efficiency and the customer experience.
Faced with a surge in calls, implementing the right tools helps smooth out peaks and significantly improve the answer rate. However, in the long run, response capacity remains directly tied to the number of available agents: statistically, a team of 20 advisors can handle more calls than a team of 5.
Rather than systematically redirecting overflow to chatbots or centralized customer relationship centers (CRCs), a more cost-effective and accessible alternative is to rethink call handling rules. Expanding management perimeters beyond commercial entities (branches) and enabling overflow at a geographic sector level or within a group of nearby entities can optimize interaction distribution. However, this approach requires a positive shift in call reception practices to ensure seamless and consistent customer service.
Remote service (or sales) approaches are neither innate nor natural; they result from learning, reflection, intention, and managerial action. Advisors must adapt their methods handling requests, asking the right questions, presenting arguments, and engaging in conversation all differ between phone interactions and face-to-face meetings. While the pandemic has reduced the instinct to schedule in-person appointments, advisors still need time to adjust their practices.
In this context, a personalized approach is essential to identify each advisor's specific needs through a digital maturity assessment, support them with tailored role-playing exercises, and ensure long-term monitoring of posture development.
This process also requires adapting management practices, which can sometimes challenge managers themselves, as they may not always feel comfortable guiding their teams in remote customer interactions.
Ensuring First-Contact Resolution
Answering a call is one thing, providing an immediate solution ensures customer satisfaction. Resolving requests on the first interaction reduces repeated contacts and call volume, improving both the customer and employee experience. Advisors handle fewer repetitive, low-value inquiries and encounter fewer frustration points. Ultimately, what matters most is not the answer rate but customer satisfaction, driven by the speed and quality of responses.
Advisors should always treat customers as if they were their own. While facilitating customer sharing can be challenging, this approach significantly improves first-contact resolution. Adopting this mindset often requires rethinking delegation rules, performance metrics, sales processes, and even compensation structures to remove barriers to customer sharing and ensure a seamless, high-quality service experience.
Most existing monitoring generally relies on a mechanical calculation, that of a pick-up rate that rather reflects an internal view of the advisors' activity, itself closely correlated to their availability and presence, rather than real reachability.
An effective indicator must take into account, in addition to the means implemented, the result obtained, as obtaining a solution or a response at the first request for the caller. A completion or first-time service rate usefully complements a quantitative approach with a qualitative aim.
It is important to combine a technical approach and behavioral training, quick wins, and longer-term measures, while ensuring the coherence of the training, management, and monitoring system.
A Reachability project is a real corporate project. It does not depend on the size or means of the company, fundamentally, but rather on its ambition in terms of customer experience.
Achieving optimal reachability is not a utopia but a realistic goal with a clear strategy and coordinated actions. By combining advanced technology, evolving practices, and continuous adaptation, companies can turn reachability into a powerful driver of customer experience improvement. This challenge, though demanding, is a key opportunity to enhance customer satisfaction, advisor efficiency, and overall competitiveness.
