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First-contact problem resolution

Establish a one-contact resolution for customer issues

Ensure that customers must contact the company only once to get their problems resolved

Frank, L., Poll, R., Röglinger, M., & Lea, R. (2020). Design heuristics for customer-centric business processes. Business Process Management Journal, 26(6)

Description

Companies should ensure that all information needed to solve customer issues are collected at the first encounter in the business process. This reduces the interaction effort on both sides and supports the fast and comprehensive identification of solutions.

Real-World Example

At Allianz, call center agents are instructed to serve customers in minimum time by prohibiting repeated calls, by permitting only one forwarding per call and by assigning the most appropriate agent available. This way, customers do not need to describe their problem or needs several times and get support as soon as possible.

Implementation

This heuristic can be realized by reducing the number of loops in business processes and by proactively assigning the most suitable employee or IT-based touchpoint (e.g. chatbots).

Performance considerations

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Foundational free Patterns

Combine activities

Combine small activities into composite activities

Reduce touchpoints

Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties

Work in customer teams

Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.

Empower resources

Empower workers for more decision-making authority

Isolate exceptions

Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow

Parallelize activities

Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel

Specialist-generalist

Consider to deepen or broaden the skills of resources

Offer temporal flexibility

Let customers interact with your organization whenever they want to.

Constraint-based task assignment

Allocate tasks considering business process execution constraints

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Connected to

Empower resources

Empower workers for more decision-making authority

Reduce touchpoints

Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties

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