Colonial Delhi had a problem with cobras. There were too many of them. The British governor decided to do something about it. He offered a reward to anyone that captured and killed a cobra.

What happened next? People started farming the snakes to make money. Realising his mistake, the governor rescinded his scheme. But now, with their financial incentive gone, the farmers released their cobras back into the wild. Delhi’s snake problem was bigger than before.

What does any of this have to do with the contact centre?

It’s all to do with unintended consequences.

In our first article about optichannel, we revealed the many customer service options now available to enterprises and mid-market businesses in the UK.

Thanks to cloud contact centre tech (CCaaS) it’s easy and affordable for most businesses to offer customers a choice of web chat, voice calls, SMS virtual bot chats, social, e-mail and more.

But this menu of options makes it all-too tempting to assume more channels will automatically make customers’ lives easier. In fact, it might make them worse.

Hence unintended consequences.

Here’s a scenario based on real life. A car hire company wants to reduce the call volumes to its contact centre. It decides a great option will be offering an automated chat on its web site. To encourage usage, it creates a pop-up that appears as soon as a customer arrives at the site.

But here’s the thing: the web site already contains a lot of the answers people want. Now, though, visitors don’t go looking for these answers. Instead, they start a web chat. Many find the virtual assistants can’t answer their queries. So what do they do? They ring the contact centre. Result? Call volumes go up. Or, worse, they give up and seek out a more receptive supplier.

Regrettably, this anecdote is not unusual. Statistics show that for most customers, the plethora of communications options has not resulted in speedier answers.

A 2018 study by IDC revealed the stark truth. It said:

• 42 per cent of issues or transactions are not resolved on first contact.
• 40 per cent of people want human assistance to return a product
• 45 per cent want human assistance to file a complaint
• 56 per cent of consumers require access to a specialist rather than a general customer services rep
• 27 per cent of people said it was “not easy to get to right person.”

And what makes this widespread dissatisfaction more alarming is that it’s now so easy for customers to share it. In an age of Trustpilot and social media your bad service can go viral.

However, it needn’t be this way.