Last week I attended a forum hosted by our VC partner - Openview on customer service with a couple members of the Balihoo team.  It was presented by Bill Price from Driva Solutions and co-author of the book 'The Best Service is No Service'. 

One of the tenants of the book is: Eliminate Dumb Contacts.  With this came a clever, yet simple framework to think through this concept in your organization.



The concept here is to classify your customer contacts (phone, chat, email etc) against the above matrix based on two axis: customer value and company value, to classify and determine a course of action on undesireable contacts. 

For instance, if you have many contact cases with customers asking for the status of an order, this would be considered an irritant to the customer as well as something the company would rather not have to do, and therefore falls into the bucket of 'Automate'.  Simple enough right?  Not always and I suggest you try it in your organization with real examples.  It will provoke some interesting discussion. 

As i worked through the model myself, here are a few additional insights that came to mind:

1. The size and maturity of your organziation may cause a different contact classification on the company value axis (Simplify vs Eliminate)
   
   • In early stage companies your main goal is to try and find a market, and solve a problem, so many things that would be an irritant and up for elimination in a mature company could be very high value to a startup and something you want to understand better and simplify.
2. Customer types vary by company maturity
   
   • Startups, especially in the technology space typically make their first sales to innovators.  This group of customers has different attributes than the standard majority and because of their excitment over your product is less likely to be irritated by new and somewhat untested products/features.  Minimally this allows things to sit in the simplify bucket longer (see point #1) and even might allow some items to exist in the leverage bucket at least for a period of time.
3. Contact categorization will not be static.  For instance, something may start out in the automate bucket (eg - automating the ability to find out order status) but contacts may continue moving into simplify (we have automated it, but its not easy to find)

There are likely many other insights you can draw from this as it applies to your unique business but as with other frameworks, the primary advantage is that it supports a vibrant and directive discussion around the topic of customer contacts.