Call Center Outsourcing Featured Article

Knowledge Crucial to Effective Contact Services

By TMCnet Special Guest
Jeff Velodota

Is your technical support team, and systems support, as effective as you desire?

 

At American Customer Care, one of the more specialized projects we have worked on for a client was the development of a technical support services program for a large provider of neutral interconnection and collocation facilities in the U.S. Within each of its facilities in 21 U.S. markets, the client’s customers are able to collocate mission critical telephone and network equipment, and have a choice of interconnecting to over 250 unique networks. 

 

American Customer Care was chosen to handle all of the company’s customer contacts relating to each of the facilities in the U.S. markets as well as alert notifications internally for the company. The knowledge management tool developed was dictated by the multitude of reasons why the company’s customers would call, including but not limited to: phone and/or network service affecting issues, service call requests, and alarm notification calls. All of these calls required our assistance as a Tier 1 level, and most required our CSRs to open up a service ticket with each of the individual client site managers and follow up through resolution. This also involved follow-up calls to each of the company’s facilities where the customer’s specific collocated equipment resided in order to close the ticket.

 

In order to develop this program, we worked closely with our client to create a knowledge management tool with logical call flows that would effectively handle the customer/client phone and email inquiries. Our analysis also needed to include providing notification to the various departments internally in order to generate trouble tickets and monitor them until completion. During the process, our account executive assigned to the program worked in conjunction with the client and our IT Team to continually modify the call flow analysis. The end result became easy-to-follow navigation screens to assist our agents throughout the call for a very large number of mission-critical situations, all with an effective ticket system for follow-up by the agent until completion.

 

As new locations came to market, new solutions were developed within the agent screens through the creation of new branches. These new branches created additional knowledge bases from which the agents could draw during the customer contacts, and were typically done within a 1-2 week timeframe, end-to-end testing included. The frequency in which the knowledge management tool was changed/modified was typically every month and a half, based on program feedback from the agents and supervisors, or through new products/services offered by our client.

 

 

Jeff Velodota is Vice President of Sales for American Customer Care Inc., a Savannah, GA-based supplier of customer contact services. The company's web site is http://www.americancustomercare.com.

 

 

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