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10 April 2021/Terje Ennomäe

Cut costs by reducing repetitive calls

Save up to 10% of costs by reducing your repetitive calls

Some customers call back several times about the same issue — sometimes on the same day. A share of those repeat contacts is unavoidable, but a large part is not. The problem is that most contact centres cannot tell the two apart, so the avoidable volume keeps flowing through the queue and quietly inflating cost.

Most teams already track first call resolution, yet still struggle to explain why people call back. Without that understanding, repetitive calls are hard to reduce. This is where analysing every conversation — rather than a sample — changes what you can do.

Repetition is about the topic, not just the number

There can be many reasons for a repeat call, and not every one is a problem. If a customer is talking through a technical fault that needs a device restart, it is perfectly reasonable for them to hang up, try the fix and call back. Other calls should be one and done: the customer asks, the agent answers, confirms the issue is resolved, and that is it.

The trouble is that most companies look for repetition by phone number alone. That tells you how often the same customer calls, but nothing about whether the same topic keeps coming back. To see that, someone would have to read the notes on every contact by hand — which nobody has time to do.

When you investigate repetitive calls, the topic matters more than the number. Repetition can be expected on technical subjects and should be rare on others, such as contract terms. Judging repeat contact on content, not just the caller, is what turns raw volume into something you can act on.

Why fewer repeat calls means fewer calls overall

Repetitive calls are worth attention because they compound. Reduce them and you reduce total volume, which flows straight to cost — fewer contacts need fewer agents to handle them.

You will never remove every repeat call, and you should not try to. But when you understand the reasons behind them, you can act on the causes you control:

  • Process — fix the step that sends customers back.
  • Agents — coach the behaviours that create avoidable call-backs.
  • Self-service — close the gaps that push simple questions to the phone.

Even a modest reduction in repeat contact is meaningful, because it removes work rather than just speeding it up.

The sector shapes the pattern

How much repetition is "normal" depends on the business.

In telecom, technical troubleshooting drives a lot of legitimate back and forth, so a higher share of repeat calls can be expected. If those same calls were about contract conditions instead, that would point to first contacts being handled poorly — cases where the agent should answer the questions, set out the options and confirm the customer is satisfied before ending the call.

In financial services the share tends to be lower. Even then, there is value in learning from the repeat contacts that do happen: analysing them by topic and looking for patterns in the transcripts is the only reliable way to find where to improve.

Automatic analysis helps you react faster

If you do not know how many calls are repetitive, what they are about, or the patterns inside them, improvement is guesswork. Change comes from asking the right questions and using data to answer them.

Feelingstream's platform transcribes calls into text, groups them by topic and surfaces the recurring ones for review. Reading transcripts is far faster than listening to every call, so a quality manager can spot a pattern and act on it during the working day — helped by an overview of live topics and notifications when an issue starts to spike.

In one deployment, this kind of visibility revealed that a few agents were causing repeat calls by telling customers to ring again instead of resolving the issue there and then. Managers saw the pattern, coached those agents, and the system kept tracking repetition automatically so any recurrence could be caught early.

How to measure the impact

To prove the value of reducing repetitive calls, baseline a few metrics before you start:

  • Repeat-contact rate — by customer and by topic.
  • First call resolution — and how it moves as you fix causes.
  • Avoidable-contact share — the volume that should not exist.
  • Cost-to-serve — per contact and per resolved issue.

Then pick one high-volume repetitive topic, understand why it happens, fix the root cause, and measure the change on every conversation rather than a sample.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if a call is genuinely repetitive?

Look at the topic, not just the phone number. Two calls from the same customer about unrelated issues are not repetition; two calls from different customers about the same avoidable problem are. Topic-level analysis makes this visible.

Are all repetitive calls a problem?

No. Some are a natural part of resolving an issue, such as technical troubleshooting that needs steps in between. The goal is to remove the avoidable repeats, not to punish legitimate ones.

How much volume can we realistically remove?

It varies by sector and by how much of your repeat contact is avoidable. The gains come from fixing root causes in process, coaching and self-service — which removes work rather than simply speeding it up.

Do we have to listen to every call to find the patterns?

No. Automatic transcription and topic grouping surface recurring issues so managers can review transcripts and act quickly, without manually sampling calls.

Where to go next

Want to know how much of your call volume is avoidable? Book a demo and we will analyse it on your own conversations.