Avoidable contact (NI14)
Most of us will have made contact with a business that turned out to be unnecessary.
Avoidable calls waste cost, time, and effort both for customers and the businesses and organisations who serve them. And if you work for a local authority, you’ll know that there are 198 separate National Indicators for reporting different aspects of performance. One of them, NI14, gives a measure of how many instances of avoidable contact you had, defined as “The proportion of contacts within key service areas that are a poor use of customer and officer time.”
Why measure it?
The measurement of avoidable contact provides information which you can use to reduce the number of unnecessary calls and improve operational efficiency and customer service. It can include:
Businesses and local authorities who reduce their instances of avoidable contact, will benefit from:
- time and efficiency savings.
- operational cost savings.
- fewer customer complaints.
- being able to provide better customer service.
- an improved understanding of how queries are being handled with by their contact centre teams.
- more accurate reporting.
Avoidable contact (NI14) and call recording
There are some standalone software systems which handle just the NI14 statistics. However, Veritape’s Call Tagging and reporting functionalities allow you to measure instances of avoidable contact (NI14) and record your calls.
A combined measurement and call recording system allows you to:
- Easily identify and categorize avoidable contact.
- Identify which categories caused the greatest numbers of avoidable contacts.
- Choose the largest category, and list the actual calls associated with them.
- Listen to some or all of these calls.
- Make changes to your processes, training and people, to permanently resolve the underlying issue.
- Measure and report on whether the changes were successful.
This iterative process will ensure that you drastically reduce your avoidable contact (”NI14 count”). In addition, and fitting with the philosophy of eliminating ‘avoidable’ work, much of the process can be automated.
Ask us for more information on how we can help you to reduce avoidable contact within your business and improve your customer service.
