It wasn’t easy, but you’ve done it. You have fixed the foundation of your customer service design. Operations are running more smoothly. You know what you need to do to get customer interactions to the best available agent. Your self-service options are performing well, and you have speech recognition implemented effectively. Your omnichannel building blocks are in place along with your digitization strategy.
Just when things seem to be stable…
The Problem is Already Here
For many organizations, the problem is already here.
Given that Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and self-service enable customers to handle the easy transactions themselves, chats and voice calls directed to agents are getting harder. The volume that is left for human interaction is the really hard stuff. By the very nature of technology, that is a problem that keeps growing bigger.
As the different permutations of content continue to explode and omnichannel support structures continue to evolve, teams must absorb more information and master more processes than ever before.
Yet few leaders address learning and knowledge management within the organization. Without this piece, you cannot keep up, let alone break through for amazing employee and customer experiences.
In the age of high attrition and “quiet quitting” (which I consider to be performing in an average way and not such news), employees are frequently citing reasons that go far beyond pay for their departure.
A major satisfier for employees is feeling accomplished. They have the systems and tools to be successful. They are comfortable in their environment, and in turn, they delight customers. If your people are constantly turning over – 2-3% per month is on the low side lately in contact centers – you are stuck in a constant loop of onboarding, training, and building competence.
You need to get your teams trained to deliver high quality work in days or weeks, not months. Every agent needs to create amazing experiences and loyal customers by answering a broader array of questions than ever. New hire training can instill an understanding of the basics. Practice builds speed and effectiveness. But how do you go from basic training to fully productive?
How Do We Define Full Productivity?
Full productivity is the optimal combination of proficiency in the work and speed to serve. One of the ways I break down proficiency is into three pieces: knowledge, process, and quality of work. Knowledge is the most foundational.
Then why is so much knowledge undocumented, unshared, and inaccessible?
Knowledge Is Foundational
As with many aspects of contact center management, knowledge has multiple components that are rooted in people, process, and technology. If it is neither documented nor searchable, it is hard to share except through side-by-side work with other people. Effective onboarding and training is a start, and on-the-job training helps.
However, without a clear knowledge management framework supported by technology, these traditional approaches only go so far. You are on the right track if you are thinking about how to integrate training, knowledge management, and quality approaches.
There Is No ROI to Knowledge Management…or Is There?
A quick story illustrates the Return on Investment (ROI) to knowledge management. Susan runs North American customer service for a large insurance company. She has been working for years on a roadmap we created together for process improvement and investment in technology, with the goal of improving the customer experience in a sleepy area of the company.
One of the only areas untouched to date is knowledge management. The refrain has been that “it will get addressed with the next CRM upgrade” or “we will work on it when we re-do the training process.”
This year, the conversation shifted to tackling the reality: "we need to know what it will take to demonstrate the power of a great knowledge management strategy." The issue can no longer be ignored as something without a ROI.
The traditional approach to computing the ROI would look like this:
- Monthly or annual cost of Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) and Learning Management Systems (LMS)
- Implementation cost
- Cost of resources to collect, organize, prepare and maintain content
Benefits
- Reduction in labor or handling time for agents serving customers
- Reduction in training time
As leading executives know, this approach misses a few key pieces. While you can shave seconds off of Average Handle Time (AHT) or eliminate a few hours of training, you have to change fundamentally the way people codify and access information for the strongest results. In today’s world, we can add a few more benefits to investing in a knowledge management framework and platform.
Knowledge management – and feeling smart, effective, and productive – is associated with stronger feelings of job satisfaction and employee retention, as well as strong customer experience measurements. The ROI components can be reimagined to help with some additional and significant issues than just the cost per transaction from reductions in time.
Now the cost-benefit table looks like this:
- Monthly or annual cost of KMS and LMS
- Implementation cost
- Cost of resources to collect, organize, prepare and maintain content
Benefits
- Reduction in labor or handling time for agents serving customers
- Reduction in training time
- Decrease in time to reach full productivity
- Increase in positive employee experiences and increase in retention
- Increase in customer experience scores like Net Promoter Score, Customer Contact Satisfaction and Customer Effort
Looking Ahead to Success: Solving More Than Today’s Crisis.
Susan’s situation is common. We came up with an approach to stand this project up alone, without the common strategy of tying bits and pieces to other initiatives in the capital plan, and will be pushing forward in the coming months.
It is probably one of the hardest areas to tackle, often with few internal experts to rely on. Yet it will be worth the investment when it solves not just one crisis, but many.
As you consider your own experiences with your organization, what knowledge management challenges are you struggling with?
Whether your team’s situation is basic, hard, or ridiculously complex, solutions are out there.
If any of this resonates with you or your organization, take a moment to share this newsletter with your colleagues who may be struggling with similar challenges.
Blue Orbit Consulting guides you through methods that will transform your contact center’s operations into a world-class customer experience.
______________
I founded Blue Orbit Consulting in 2014 after running staff organizations in contact centers and building consulting practices in customer service, process improvement, complex program management, and channel operations. My approach – and my firm’s approach – is fundamentally pragmatic, and our clients often achieve benefits in excess of 10x their investment. We develop and deliver world-class customer interactions for our clients, whether it is troubleshooting and optimizing what they already have in place or creating strategic transformations to deliver outstanding customer interactions every time.