Information Optimization for Customer Service
Successful Information-Centric
Approach to Improving the Bottom Line

Few activities affect the bottom line as much as customer service. Regardless of industry or type of business, customer satisfaction and retention, new customer acquisition and average revenue per customer are critical factors. At a time when many products and services are being commoditized and subjected to fierce competition from around the world, customer service remains one of the surest ways that companies can differentiate from competitors. And on the risk side of the equation, we have all seen how quickly customer service missteps can become widespread public relations disasters in the age of social media.

The most common and pervasive challenges to delivering outstanding customer service are remarkably consistent across industries and types of business:

• Excessive average handle times for customer service engagements;
• Training and “on-boarding” of new customer service agents;
• Lack of consistency in responses to customer service incidents;
• Lack of a complete view of customer information;
• Retention of top-notch customer service agents; and
• Low customer service satisfaction ratings.

In one way or another, all of these challenges have at their root a single problem: failure to get the right information to the people on the front lines of customer service. Directly or indirectly, all of these issues can be addressed by providing customer service agents and other customer-facing employees with the right information at the time and place they need it most.

It is important to emphasize that the solution is not more information, but rather the right information, in a form that is easily digested by agents on the front lines. We call this customer service optimization.

Customer Service Optimization
Customer service optimization (CSO) is a technology-enabled discipline that puts customer service professionals in position to deliver outstanding service. The goal is to correctly resolve each incident without subjecting customers to time-consuming and annoying delays such as waiting “on hold,” having to explain their problem more than once or feeling that they are participating in on-the-job training of customer service agents.

The ideal customer service agent has two characteristics: The first is the interpersonal side, projecting a very positive and personable manner that communicates both the motivation and ability to solve the customer’s issue. The second is the actual knowledge to quickly understand and resolve the issue. While these two characteristics are clearly distinct, they are actually quite closely related; agents who are comfortable and confident in their ability to resolve customer issues find it much easier to project the positive and personable attitude that puts customers at ease than if they are under stress due to inadequate knowledge or access to information.

Properly training customer service agents in the right customer interaction skills and techniques is a well-known and highly developed practice. However, provisioning those individuals with the knowledge and tools they need to confidently handle the wide range of questions and issues that they will have to handle on the front lines of customer service is another matter and offers the most opportunity for organizations to distinguish themselves from their competitors. This is where CSO comes to the forefront, providing agents and other customer-facing staff with immediate access to the knowledge they need to deal with a variety of challenging issues. CSO is not a substitute for thorough training; however, it does enable agents and other customer-facing individuals to greatly increase their effectiveness, both initially and over time.

Delivering the Right Information
At the heart of CSO is the ability to access the best, most relevant and up-to-date information available in the organization. Therefore a robust and powerful search capability is an essential component. Being able to quickly find relevant data on a topic, regardless of where it resides and what form it is in, is often the key to achieving the goal of resolving incidents in a single call or interaction.

“Vanilla” search alone, however, is insufficient to provide a strong foundation for CSO. Simple keyword search without specialized features can sometimes overwhelm agents with irrelevant or poorly organized results, forcing them to sort through possible responses while the customer waits for an answer. Some of the key information access capabilities for information optimization are:

Advanced relevance:  Relevance is the art and science of delivering the right information to a search user. When the user is a customer service agent on the telephone with a customer, relevance is of paramount importance. Relevance in the domain of CSO is not simply a statistical calculation comparing the user’s query to the contents of documents. Often it is prudent for knowledge managers and experts to highlight articles, snippets of information and other items as particularly relevant to certain topics.

Freshness: For customer service agents, having the most up-to-date information on any topic is critical. There may be a new fix for a known problem, information on a newly released product or other insight that is critical to resolving a customer’s issue. So whatever mechanism is used to provide users with relevant data must be able to quickly index and return results from brand-new items that have just been created or updated.

Access to multiple sources: It is a fact of life in most organizations that important information is maintained in multiple repositories, each with its own search and access method. For the customer service agent who may need information from CRM systems, technical support incidents, wikis, product specifications and a myriad other sources during the course of a customer interaction, logging in separately and conducting separate searches with each is not an option. The ability to present agents with a single query across all of the possible sources is therefore critical.