Response times and handle times measure how well support copes with contacts. They say nothing about why the contacts exist. The best service, as Bill Price and David Jaffe titled their book, is no service: the contact that never has to happen.

The Amazon number

Price was Amazon’s first global vice president of customer service. The metric his team put in place was contacts per order: every call, email and chat, divided by orders. By his own account, it fell 70% during his almost three years at the company Reported. Amazon kept watching it after he left. Jeff Bezos’s letter to shareholders for 2002 called it “our most sensitive measure of customer satisfaction” and reported a 13% improvement that year Reported.

It’s sensitive because almost nobody contacts a store for fun. A contact means something didn’t work. Count contacts per order, split them by reason, and you have a map of every broken promise in the business, drawn by the customers who hit them.

Every contact is a customer telling you, at your expense, where the business broke a promise.

The seven principles

Price and Jaffe’s seven principles, in their order: eliminate dumb contacts; create engaging self-service; be proactive; make it easy to contact the company; own the actions across the company; listen and act; deliver great service experiences Reported. The order matters. Most brands start at the second, with a chatbot, which moves contacts to software without asking why they exist. Start at the first. Chapter 5 applies the third to delivery, and chapter 8 the fifth.

Reason codes that work

Most help desks have forty tags, applied inconsistently, several per ticket. What works:

• One primary reason per contact, chosen at close from twelve to fifteen, named by cause: “late against date shown,” not “email inquiry.”
• Every contact tied to its order, so contacts join to the failure index and carrier data.
• Audited monthly. Re-code twenty random contacts blind. If you disagree with agents on more than one in five, the list is unclear.

A starting list is in Appendix B.

Say a brand ships 10,000 orders a month and receives 1,800 contacts, four in ten about where an order is. With those defaults, contacts per order falls from 0.180 to 0.128 and about 70 agent hours a month are freed, worth about $25,000 a year in agent time alone Derived. That’s modest next to the cost of the failures behind the contacts, which is the point: the support saving is the smaller half. Replace the made-up shares with your own reason counts before quoting it.

Deflection is not elimination

A help-center article that answers “where is my order?” deflects the contact. The customer still had the worry and still found your promise broken. Report contacts per order and self-service sessions per order side by side. If the second rises while the first falls, you’ve moved the problem, not solved it.

Do this

• Replace your tag list with twelve to fifteen primary reasons named by cause, starting from the list in Appendix B.
• Report contacts per order by reason, weekly, starting with the last twelve weeks.