Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Overloading Contact Center Agents with Unstructured Knowledge Can Lead to Customer Support Chaos
Customers are demanding today. They like fast service. They like accurate service. They have a wide variety of needs and questions, and they expect contact centers to provide them. Many companies respond by providing contact center workers with access to more and more knowledge bases and applications. Unfortunately, this sometimes has the opposite effect than companies intended. More data doesn’t always mean more intelligence.
“If your technology is not serving your agents, or if your agents are not as up to speed as the software systems they use, the results will be detrimental to customer service,” blogged Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo recently.
For knowledge to be usable to agents, it must be easily searchable and organized in a logical way. Just as important is ensuring that agents are trained to find this material quickly and they know how to interpret it. For a dynamic company in growth mode, information is added on a regular basis, and even the sharpest agents can’t mentally keep track of the chances. They may find themselves toggling between applications, fighting slow or ineffective search functions and becoming frustrated themselves, which does nothing to boost the quality of service they are offering customers. It also weighs down critical contact center quality metrics such as average handle time (AHT).
“Every time a procedural change is made, or a product is added, or a new promotion is taking place, it adds a document to the system that agents must be able to retrieve quickly,” wrote Ciarlo. “Eventually the locations of this data will be committed to memory, but in the meantime customers are either forced to wait or (even worse) are put on hold.”
Every company that services customers today would benefit from the review of their knowledge bases and the processes workers use to retrieve the information. While many companies spend time reviewing the customer journey, they are less careful about reviewing the path agents must take to find the solutions customers require, says Ciarlo.
“A review of the various touch points of information flow may reveal opportunities to expedite retrieval and eliminate frustrating logjams,” he wrote. “There may be a more logical way to organize information so it can be found more rapidly.”
While a few seconds may not seem like a significant amount of time to each customer interaction, when this time is multiplied times hundreds or thousands of customer calls each day, small improvements can actually lead to large overall gains in cost savings and efficiency in the average contact center.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi