At the end of every call, our customer service agents choose a reason from a list in the contact centre system. There are twenty two reasons, from tracking a delivery to closing an account. The figures feed a monthly report that shapes a good deal of what my department builds, because the reason customers ring is the clearest sign of what our systems fail to tell them.
For two years the top reason was where is my order, at about forty percent of calls. On the strength of that we spent most of a year on tracking: delivery time windows by text message, a live map on the website and a tracking page that needed no login. All of it worked, and customers used it. The share of calls about orders barely moved.
That puzzled us enough to listen to calls. A team lead and one of my analysts took a random sample of three hundred recordings and categorised each one themselves. Fewer than one in five was really about where an order was. The largest single group was billing: invoices customers did not understand, credit notes they could not find, a direct debit taken twice.
The cause was the list. Where is my order sat at the top, it was pre-selected when the screen opened, and the agent's next call was already ringing. Picking another reason meant scrolling through twenty one others. Most agents chose carefully most of the time, but anything rushed, unclear or mixed stayed where it started. The report had been counting the default.
Nobody had misled us. We had built a screen in which the easiest answer was one particular answer, and then read the totals as the customers' voice.
The list now opens with nothing selected and cannot be saved empty. The reasons were reduced to twelve, grouped under four headings, and agents can search them. Every month two hundred calls are sampled at random and categorised by somebody who did not take them, and the report shows that sample next to the agents' figures, so any gap between the two is visible. Billing is now the top reason, and it is where the next project is going.
A list with a default answer collects every answer nobody had time to think about. Before trusting what a form reports, it is worth asking what it reports when nobody chooses.
– Serguey Shinder
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