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
Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow
Order knock-outs by least effort and highest termination probability first.
Start implementing actions that can offset or counterbalance the environmental effects generated by business processes that cannot be changed.
Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to
Explore whether a process can easily be used for additional products or services
Preference-based task assignment
Let people do what they love to do
Delegate tasks according to resource cost
Allocate task based on collaborative experience: handover time, interactions, diversity
Empower workers for more decision-making authority
Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties