The performance of many support organizations has hit a wall. In spite of a host of investments, whether in telephony, CRM systems, call routing, or workforce management, performance gains have been incremental, if realized at all.
How can support teams realize significant breakthroughs in productivity? Following are five keys steps.
1. Level the Information Playing Field
All too often, the information one support rep has access to is very different than another’s, which conspires against a rep’s ability to get questions answered. A seasoned rep may have a laptop jam packed with resources—or a bunch of Post-It notes on their computer monitor. A new hire may have to wade through a huge SharePoint repository for the one answer he or she needs. The result is inefficiency, inconsistency, and inaccuracy—even the seasoned rep may have out of date information.
According to a study conducted by the SSPA (now Technology Services Industry Association), 85 percent of service costs are associated with the problem resolution process. Simply put, service professionals spend a vast majority of their time looking for answers. When contact center knowledge is not universally available, the productivity of agents suffers. Organizations need to ensure all information—whether diagnostic procedures, the latest tech pubs, FAQs, or corporate policies—is universally shared and available. By doing so, support teams can deliver better service, and shrink the time and cost associated with finding fast accurate answers.
2. Right Channel Customer Demand
As the number of customers needing support increases, budgets and a trained workforce are not able to keep up the pace of service demands. In light of this, customer care organizations have continually focused on agent training and workforce optimization. While these efforts may deliver some gains, they have been marginalized by the growing demand for 24/7 customer service. It’s a supply and demand issue that has been impossible to keep up with.
Today, most customers prefer to start online when they have questions or issues. Providing and promoting effective online self service can absorb a tremendous amount of customer care inquiries. Even the best Web self-service initiative could never completely replace agent-assisted support; however, an effective Web self-service strategy is the best way to curb the growing demand. It is one time where curbing demand is a far more effective strategy than trying to manage the supply of your workforce. By enabling a business to support more customers, while simultaneously reducing contact center volume, right channeling reverses the economic pressures of the past.
3. Leverage Community Networks
Both in the press and in the boardroom, social networking, social media, and social CRM are hot topics. In response, many vendors are taking a service-channel approach, attempting to mine the social cloud for issues and escalate these conversations back into the contact center. This approach runs directly counter to the prior objective, namely that of mitigating the demand for contact center agents’ time. We believe the best approach for contact center professionals is to proactively establish and monitor “gated communities.”
Gated communities are publicly hosted forums that allow customers to pose their questions to the user community, and to see how others with similar issues received resolution. This is a place where customers help each other and your responsibility as a contact center professional is to monitor these conversations and add value when necessary. These gated communities are not only another way to curb service demand, but have proven to be great incubators for social knowledge. Companies can leverage the answers developed in gated communities to boost efficiency, save time in content development, and speed up resolution time across all service channels. Additionally, by monitoring and promptly responding to service swells in these gated communities, organizations can avoid potential service spikes that frequently plague the staffing efforts of contact center management.
4. Infuse Knowledge into your Agent Desktops
When it comes to boosting agent efficiency, one area that can present significant dividends is in the integration of knowledge management capabilities, that is, how agents search for and work with knowledge, into their existing CRM interfaces. This can present a host of benefits:
Having one integrated system reduces training time and effort.
Guidance can be better tailored to the context of solving cases, and the specific point of the resolution process, so information is more targeted and useful.
Easier access to knowledge assets helps fuel increased knowledge usage, and encourages more consistent participation in the efforts of generating, updating, and sharing information.
Finally, when agents are on calls, having everything they need in one place can be a big time saver. We have calculated that for every second a contact center professional saves in resolving cases, a company can save two cents. For enterprise customers with daily service volumes in the tens of thousands, this two-cent savings can amount to almost a quarter of a million dollars annually. Clearly, every second counts when it comes to providing fast, accurate answers on the desktop.
5. Measure, Apply, and Adjust
Where do agents have knowledge gaps, and which ones are costing the biggest delays in case resolution? What are the hot inquiries that comprise the bulk of calls during a given day, and how can online self service help address those inquiries? What searches did customers do before they gave up and made a call into the contact center?
Having answers to these kinds of questions is vital in providing the actionable guidance and resources needed to deliver the greatest performance impact. When it comes to improving efficiency, team leaders need to have the insight and metrics in place that help guide ongoing improvements. Quite simply, gaining the ability to discover what you don’t yet know is the most important initiative for improving future efficiency.
