In 2012, the travel website, Expedia, learned that, for every 100 customers who booked travel on Expedia, 58 of them placed a call afterward for help. [1]
One of the benefits of self-service, from a company standpoint, is maximizing efficiency and minimizing expenses. Longer call times between customer service agents and customers incur higher costs.
And Expedia was incurring a lot.
In 2012, Expedia logged 20 million customer calls, which, at the cost of $5 a call, equated to $100 million.
When Ryan O’Neill, Expedia’s Head of Customer Experience, and Tucker Moodey, the Executive Vice President of Global Customer Operations, dug into why so many customers were calling, the results were alarming:
The number one reason customers called was to request a copy of their itinerary.
Like most self-service websites, Expedia sent its customers their itineraries via an automated email. Still, few customers ever received them due to mistyping their email address or accidentally deleting the email by accident, mistaking it for a solicitation.
To solve the growing problem, O’Neil and Moodey assembled a “war room” of top people in the company to deploy several fixes ranging from how Expedia sent emails to offering an online tool to allow customers to handle the task themselves.
Today, those 20 million calls have vanished, with calls dropping from 58 percent in 2012 to around 15 percent as of writing.
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We tend to react to everyday problems as they occur. A repeated bout of illness causes an employee to call in sick. A cash shortfall causes a single mother to apply for a payday loan. These are examples of downstream actions, and rarely are they isolated incidents.
What’s better, as was the case with Expedia, is preventing problems from happening altogether.
Instead of overmedicating, the employee curbs their bad eating habit and eats more healthily. Instead of applying for another payday loan, thus, indebting herself further, the single mother cuts back on unnecessary expenses and gets a handle on her finances.
These are examples of upstream interventions. Instead of reacting to a problem once it’s occurred, you recognized it, ahead of time, and take the necessary means to prevent it from happening.
Upstream interventions aren’t always possible, of course. Problems can, and will, occur outside our trichotomy of control. But those that are, offer a chance to improve the systems (or habits, if you prefer) that are contributing to, if not causing, the problem to occur.
We don’t always have to fight fires. By deliberating our decisive moments and trying to be less wrong, we can prevent fires before they happen and reduce the harm caused by them.
Footnotes
[1] Thank you to Dan Heath to introducing me to Expedia’s story and the idea of upstream thinking in his new book, Upstream: How to Solve Problems Before They Happen.
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