We analyse calls to both our internal and customer-facing support desks all the time in an attempt to identify what causes the most calls. Theory being that fixing whatever-it-is would significantly reduce call volume and thus expenses. But do we ever analyze who is calling us? It may be a single problem that reoccurs. It may be ten little problems indicative of a bigger issue. It may be someone who is trying to avoid work and booking offline time on the line with the help desk (it’s been 20 years, but I used to generate a report for each call center manager of their director reports’ tickets & resolutions each week because it was so common a technique for a freebie 20 minutes off the phones and the manager didn’t have visibility into the ticketing system to determine if the calls were legitimate or not).

Multi-million dollar accounts (or senior company execs) get dedicated liaisons who walk issues through support channels. What if we had a small team of transient white glove support liaisons? People who have cultivated the same process knowledge and contacts that major accounts managers and exec support managers have. The top five callers for the week/month get rung up and their issue fixed. That may be calling around to get the proper support organisation looking at the issue. It may be replacing the thing that keeps breaking (replace the employee’s PC, replace the customer’s DLS modem). Even if you break even, there’s a much better experience with “yeah, I called in five times. But then so-and-so rang me up, took ownership of the issue, and fixed it” than “I have called eight times a week for the past month, had to explain the problem two dozen times, and these dolts finally managed to fix it”.

The other thing the metric could give you – and maybe a company would never use this – is how much a customer is *costing* the business. 800 charges, support staff man-hours … someone who has a 5$ a month account but uses ten hours of customer service time is costing the company money.