Empowering customer service agents with relevant, complete and accurate answers to customer questions remains one of the major challenges in contact centers today. The last 10 years have seen efficiency and productivity gains squeezed out of the mechanics of routing and queueing a call to the right agent pool, screen-popping the customer information to the agent’s desktop, case management and workforce optimization. Less attention has been placed on allowing agents to access information and informally collaborate with one another. Its no wonder that over 70% of an average call time is spent on locating the right information for the customer.
In many contact centers, content is created by groups of authors who are disconnected from day-to-day conversations that agents are having with customers, and who are unfamiliar with the language and terms that customers use. All content follows the same basic create-edit-publish cycle irrespective of its usefulness in answering customer questions.
What has proven more effective is to allow customer service agents to work in a more collaborative environment where they are also allowed to take collective responsibility for the content that they use. Programs like KCS have evolved to give organizations the process flows and organizational structure to allow customer service agents on the front lines the ability to create and modify content in real time, and link content to actual cases so that the body of content is evolves in-line with customer demand. Organizations like Symantec are using variations of these programs with great success. Have a look at two stellar examples from McKesson and Ogilvy that report improved speed of answers, reduced handle times and increased satisfaction scored because of the social collaboration and content creation processes that are being used within their organization.
Great post Kate. We, at Moxie Software, have spent a lot of time thinking about this and actually building a solution that enables just this type of collaboration within the Contact Center. Knowledge is really at the core of this, as you say, and the ability to tap into this rich reservoir of tribal knowledge and provide a forum to share this information is pretty compelling. This gets even more powerful when you think about pulling in folks from the rest of the enterprise to collaborate around customer issues in real time. You can learn more at http://www.moxiesoft.com