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
Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases
Determine whether activities are related to the same type of case and, if necessary, distinguish new business processes
Establish a case-based mindset
Remove batch-processing and periodic activities from your business process
Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties
Elevate physical constraints by applying new technology
Delegate and optimize your operations
Replace underlying resources with eco-friendly alternatives
Workload-based task assignment
Allocate tasks based on individuals' incomplete workload
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