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
Buffer external information and subscribe to updates
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel
Move activities to more appropriate places
Start implementing actions that can offset or counterbalance the environmental effects generated by business processes that cannot be changed.
Let customers interact with your organization whenever they want to.
Expertise-based task assignment
Match tasks to experts' specialized skills for efficiency
Reassign tasks along the organisational hierarchy
Allocate task based on past feedback or quality metrics
Empower workers for more decision-making authority
Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties