How Self-Service Serves Assisted Service
Have you ever had the experience of calling into a contact center after gathering information online and feeling like you have more information than the agent does? It may be that the company’s Web group has launched a robust knowledge based while its contact center is using the same old disjointed information silos that require an excess of clicks into multiple systems. Besides the obvious need for those two groups to work in tandem, this is a case where customers should actually come second.
I had a conversation earlier this week with Chris Hall, Kana’s vice president of product strategy, on this topic. We both heartily agreed that organizations need to first arm their agents with that robust knowledge base, and then turn it loose for customers to access via self-service. “When companies deploy and test internally first, content online is richer and customer satisfaction is higher,” Hall said.
Sounds great. But as with any initiative, there’s more work than initially meets the eye. Hall offered a few tips beyond the all important “outline clear objectives” and “get executive sponsorship and support.”
Measurement: Outlining your objectives allows you to define exactly why you want a “shared” knowledge base, which leads to the ability to measure results. Is your goal reduced talk time? Call deflection? Once you decide you can more easily set metrics.
Preparation: Don’t underestimate the effort for content aggregation and clean up, Hall warned. And remember that in many cases the language used in the knowledge base will be different for customers than it is for agents.
Accountability: Assign a “knowledge engineer” to take ownership of the knowledge base. That person would oversee the preparation stage and set up a network for content creation. Also important is tying employee compensation or the performance plan to keeping the knowledge based updated with fresh information.
Deployment: Using a phased approach can help with planning and cost. Do one product at a time to learn from experience. Additionally, initial results may lead to costs saving that can help fund the next phase of the deployment, Hall said.
What happens when you integrate online self-service and the contact center? According to Hall, here are some results he’s seen in the market, on average:
First call resolution improves 20-35%
Average handle time drops about 20-25%
Tier 2 escalations are reduced by about 20%
Call backs down 10%
Agent errors reduced 20-30 %
Training time down 35%
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