Knowing Why Your Customers Contact You

If you’ve read any of our blogs before, it is a mantra you may be familiar with: Understand your customers, and you are on the way to business success.

Gaining this understanding of your customers can be done in different ways. One part of your customer relationships worth getting to grips with is why they contact you in the first place.

Whether it’s to inquire about a product, report an issue, or simply provide feedback – knowing this information is a key which can unlock exceptional customer service, making your business perform better as a whole.

Read this article, and you’ll understand methods to track and analyse why customers contact your business. Then, you’ll be able to anticipate their needs, tailor your services more effectively, and, ultimately, become a more profitable business.

Customer contact reasons: Simple information, big impact

It sounds simple, because it is. Reasons why your customers contact you are not the most complex data you are ever going to gather. But knowing and analysing this information can give you these two huge benefits:

1. Improved customer service – Equipped with insights into the most frequent customer concerns, your contact centre agents will be better prepared to handle these issues efficiently and effectively. This leads to faster resolution times, higher customer satisfaction, and a more positive overall experience. It comes down to meeting expectations – research shows that 71% of customers expect businesses to know why they are calling.

1. Boosting efficiency –  When you proactively address common customer issues, you help to reduce the number of unnecessary contacts and free up your customer service team to focus on the highest-value interactions. It all adds up to streamlined operations with more overall efficiency and productivity.

Tracking customer contact reasons

So how do you do it? What’s the best way to unlock the potential of customer contact reasons?

The starting point is to establish a system for gathering and organising the relevant data. Here are some effective methods for tracking customer contact reasons.

Data collection methods

These may include:

• Surveys and feedback forms: Gather direct input from customers about their reasons for reaching out.
• Customer service logs: Analyse the records of past interactions to identify common themes.
• Digital interaction data: Use web analytics and chatbot logs to understand online customer queries.

Categorising contacts

Put in place a standardised way of classifying contact reasons (this is sometimes called a taxonomy). You may like to split them up into classifications such as product inquiries, billing issues, or delivery concerns.

Your customer service agents will be trained to classify and categorise a customer’s reason for contacting your business each time they get in touch. Many customer relationship management (CRM) systems will offer a method for categorising this information.

Analysing contact data

Now you’ve gathered and categorised the info, what’s left is the analysis and the action.

The next step is to analyse the information to uncover valuable insights. This process can involve:

Identifying patterns – spotting trends and recurring issues in the customer contact data, and determining the most common reasons for customers reaching out, as well as any seasonal or contextual variations.

Using analytics tools – utilising data visualisation and analytical software to sift through large volumes of contact data efficiently. You can also generate reports and dashboards that clearly showcase the key insights, making it easier to identify areas for improvement.

The power to anticipate customer needs

By understanding the reasons behind customer contacts, you can begin to anticipate their needs and proactively address them. This forward-thinking approach will upgrade the customer experience and streamline your operations.

You’ll be able to use predictive analysis, based on historical data on customer contact reasons to forecast potential customer issues and pain points. There’ll also be opportunities to implement AI-powered models to identify patterns and flag up problems that might be heading your way – a problem with a specific product, or an IT issue that is creating billing inaccuracies, to give you a couple of examples.

Then there is the ability to tailor your services. Armed with information on exactly why your customers get in touch, and how frequently, you could offer self-service resources to cut costs, or tweak your customer service so that it is equipped to handle the inquiries and concerns that your customers most frequently raise. You may be able to minimise abandoned calls, a big source of frustration for both customers and agents – they still account for 5-8% of calls to customer support call centres, and that’s 5-8% too many.

And your agents can get in on the act. With the right training, customer service representatives can be empowered to identify emerging trends and communicate them to the relevant departments.

Improving your business practices

Do you know what the best thing about this exercise is? Knowing and tracking the reasons why your customers contact you can be beneficial for your whole business, not just customer service.

Share these insights across the organisation, and you can drive meaningful improvements in several other ways.

Firstly, your training strategy is immediately optimised. Just by knowing which are the most common customer issues, you can refine training programs to equip teams with the right balance of knowledge and skills.

Ultimately, knowing frequent reasons for customers getting in touch will improve your operations and workflows while identifying and eliminating the root causes of common issues.

A powerful tool with a clear purpose

Let’s be honest – customer contact reasons are not the most complex data analytics many companies will undertake. It’s the collation and categorisation of straightforward information, followed by analysis and action based on the findings.

However, for something so basic, the payoff can be huge, especially when you consider how far-reaching the benefits can be for your business.

Put together a plan to implement tracking and analysis methods for your customer contact reasons. That’s a massive step towards better anticipating customer needs, improving products or services, and succeeding as a business.