Information Optimization for Customer Service
Successful Information-Centric
Approach to Improving the Bottom Line
Shared folders, tagging, commenting and bookmarking: As agents work with information in the course of resolving customer service incidents, it is important to be able to provide them with a means to streamline future access to information, and to share this developing knowledge with others. Each successful search for information creates a path that, with the right tools, can be followed again to resolve a similar or identical issue. With shared folders, tagging, commenting and bookmarking capabilities, each agent becomes a knowledge manager who is able to improve future access for themselves and their colleagues.
Expert identification: While customer service agents may themselves be experts in one or more of the products or services they support, sooner or later there is inevitably the need to escalate a question, either directly or indirectly, to an authority for a policy decision or for deeper information on a topic. Therefore, a truly comprehensive CSO solution will offer managers the option to provide agents with the information needed to contact the designated expert in a particular subject area. Providing this information seamlessly as part of search results can be a very effective productivity tool when used properly.
CSO in Action
With a clear understanding of what CSO brings to the table, let’s look at the challenges that we identified earlier and examine how these can be addressed through a successful CSO solution.
Reducing average handle times— Average handle time (AHT) is a critical metric that most customer service organizations measure. Many things can contribute to excessive AHT, however having agents spend inordinate amounts of time looking for information is near the top of the list. The ability to quickly pull up the right information and communicate it to the customer is potentially the single most important factor in reducing AHT. Even small improvements in AHT can pay big dividends in large customer service organizations.
Faster training and “on-boarding”— Bringing new customer service agents on-board quickly and having them productive is critical to an expanding business. In some product categories, as much as 80% of the support activity occurs in the first 30 days after purchase because of the initial installation. If customer service can’t keep up with a successful sales campaign that is rapidly bringing on new customers, the long-term value of those customers will be diminished because they will potentially return products or take their business elsewhere if they can’t be serviced successfully or in a timely fashion. While initial training is very important, once new agents are on the front lines, quick access to the right information is a vital part of making them successful.
Consistency— Consistency in responding to customer inquiries is an important quality metric for customer service organizations. If agents are unable to find the right information, they may begin “authoring” answers themselves, which leads to inconsistency, incorrect answers and lowered customer satisfaction. The first step in ensuring consistency is addressed in the initial training of agents. However, over time, the ability to locate the most relevant and current information and responses is critical to ensuring consistency. With the most advanced relevance techniques, business managers can tag information that they want agents to see when they search for certain subjects, including standard and approved answers to certain questions.
Complete view of customer information— Having access to information about a customer’s past issues, products they have purchased, email communications and other information is an important component to delivering good customer service. The biggest challenge in making this information available to agents is the fact that these different types of information are typically stored and managed in separate systems. It is not enough to simply provide agents with login credentials to all of these different systems. To efficiently deliver service, agents need to be able to perform a single search across all of the different types of customer information, and view that in a single window on their desktop. Therefore an effective CSO solution will index and aggregate information about the customer, in addition to the information the agent needs to handle the customer’s inquiry.
Retention of agents—Working every day on the front lines of customer service is not easy. Turnover rates in customer service positions can be among the highest in any job category. How do you retain top performers in this important function? CSO can improve retention of customer service agents by increasing job satisfaction. Having the right tools on hand and the ability to add their own knowledge and experience to the system are important factors in keeping customer service agents motivated and on the job.
Improved customer satisfaction—Customer satisfaction is affected by many factors, from the quality, price and performance of the products and services they have purchased to their continuing interactions with manufacturers and merchants involved in producing, selling and supporting those products. By helping to ensure that all of the company representatives who interact with customers are well-provisioned with the information they need to handle inquiries efficiently and effectively, CSO will positively affect on your organization’s customer satisfaction.
We have seen that most of the challenges in delivering effective customer service are rooted in the need for customer-facing employees to be able to access the right information quickly. This is true of all of the channels through which companies engage customers, whether directly through agents or self-service via the Web. CSO, a technology-enabled solution to empowering organizations and customer service agents to deliver outstanding customer service in a cost-effective way, offers a clear path for organizations to differentiate themselves from competitors and to improve the bottom line.
Inbound Call Center Success Story
A leading insurance company integrated Vivisimo’s Velocity Platform into their call center to seamlessly connect all of the applications used by agents to locate customer and policy information. With one click, agents can view all relevant information about an inquiry in a single window. Agents are able to save important information in shared bookmarks—improving performance for all agents when a similar question arises. By consolidating and simplifying information and eliminating the need to navigate to multiple applications to access information, this company added efficiency and agility to their call center’s 14,000 users and saved millions of dollars annually by reducing the average time required to handle inquiries.
Vivisimo helps organizations unlock and optimize the true business value of information—regardless of application or source—to drive innovation, real-time decisions and actionable insight. Visit www.vivisimo.com