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)
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.
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.
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).
Foundational free Patterns
Consider automating activities
Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Move activities to more appropriate places
Offer a green alternative with the same outcome, utilizing different steps, resources, or partners, while retaining the previous existing process
Offer customers the possibility to choose among privacy settings
Reassign tasks along the organisational hierarchy
Experience-based task assignment
Delegate task according to experience: execution frequency, case involvement, interactions
Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement
Empower workers for more decision-making authority
Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties