Call Center Management Featured Article
Are Your Contact Center Agents Fortified With The Most Up-to-Date Knowledge?
When it comes to training contact center employees, many call center managers focus on friendliness, tone, sales techniques and other soft skills. While these are all important, many companies are skipping the first requirement of great customer service: knowledge. It doesn’t matter how friendly a customer service agent is if he or she doesn’t have an answer or a resolution for the customer.
According to the 2014 American Express (News - Alert) Customer Service Barometer, 99 percent of consumers surveyed said that getting a satisfactory answer or being connected to someone knowledgeable (98 percent) are the important prerequisites to great customer experiences. After that, quality customer experiences are determined by factors such as personalization and appreciation. Essentially, unless your contact center agents are armed with customer knowledge in an easy-to-retrieve and understand format, all other efforts will be largely useless.
Informed contact center agents are effective contact center agents. These workers, who don’t often feel like they’ve been cast adrift in a sea of customers without a lifeboat, are more likely to be engaged with their jobs, according to Tricia Morris writing for Parature’s Customer Service Success Blog. This, in turn, has numerous benefits for the company they are supporting.
“The benefits of customer service agents (and all employees for that matter) being informed are many but include reduced training time, reduced churn, reduced time to contribution, reduced average handling times, and increased engagement – and on the external customer side, increased first contact resolution and satisfaction,” she wrote. “But are most brands and organizations empowering information-aware employees? If you look at stats from several noted analysts versed in knowledge management for customer service, the answer is no.”
It has been estimated that the average contact center agent spends about 20 percent of his or her day searching for answers to questions. Imagine what these employees could be doing with that time instead: cross-selling and upselling, taking more calls and other contacts or attending training sessions to expand skill sets.
Few companies update their knowledge bases for customer support personnel regularly, and few organizations worry about the format the knowledge is in. Is it easy for agents to find answers? Can they actively update the content if they’ve solved a tricky problem so that the next agent can benefit from that knowledge? Can agents collaborate and share information easily?
Rather than giving customer support personnel yet another stern lecture about missing expectations on performance, companies need to ensure that they are providing these workers with everything they need to service and delight customers. Contact center knowledge bases should be living, breathing entities that are updated regularly in order to ensure that agents have the tools they need to do their jobs properly.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi