Contact channels often shift from e-mail and phone to chats, messaging, and social media. “We received 25,000 fewer inbound calls thanks to the launch of live chat.” This isn’t a reduction of 25,000 calls, this is the substitution of one contact channel for another.

It seems obvious, but many organizations miss the point.

Mini-Case
A large travel company won many awards for its excellent service on social media. Website visitors began contacting this company via social media for topics they previously resolved online. Social media support drained this company’s resources. As a consequence, the quality of its self-service website (where most service attempts occurred!) deteriorated. The company thought that it was improving through digitization, but it achieved exactly the opposite.

A shift in contact channels might facilitate contact reduction. For example, it is easier to extract contact reasons from a live chat (text) than from a call (audio). However, it is much quicker and much cheaper to investigate and fix the contact reason than to implement a contact channel shift and then fix the issue.