5 Benefits of Online Communities for the Contact Center – Part I
For most organizations the customer contact center is the nexus for all contacts between the organization and its customers. Typically the contact center is relied upon when the customer faces a problem he or she cannot solve on his or her own.
As we know, customer service agents within the contact center are responsible for diagnosing the issue, proposing resolution options and ultimately providing customers with the right solution to their problem.
However, contact centers face their own set of challenges too—just to name a few:
- Agent recruitment and retention
- Transition to Customer Experience Management
- Challenges with self-service
- Changing customer expectations
- Workforce optimization
Online communities, specifically a set of technologies that facilitates customer self-help, provides a set of benefits that contact centers can realize almost immediately.
- Online Communities Increase Knowledge Retention
While the loss of a customer service agent within an organization can be challenging—the loss of knowledge can be devastating. Even for organizations with simple products, it may take months or even years to learn the nuances required to successfully resolve customer issues.
While structured knowledge management systems help alleviate some of this, unstructured knowledge systems such as a private ‘agent only’ discussion area provide a means to more easily search and share. Online communities enable agents to shift their tacit knowledge into a community where interactions with peers, discussions about problems, and resolutions to those problems all contribute to a pool of unstructured knowledge that helps new agents more quickly learn best practices.
- Community Is in the Consumer’s Path to the Solution
A customer-facing online community fits directly into the resolution path that most people turn to first: Web search. The first response when an issue is encountered with a product or service is usually not to contact support; rather a web search is conducted to determine if other consumers have experienced a similar problem and what their resolution was.
The benefit of an online community here is clear: If the solution does not exist, the community provides a place for the problem to be discussed. If the solution does exist, the solution can be easily found and used.
For example, a leading managed cloud computing company uses community as part of its customer experience solution set. When customers—or even potential customers—have a problem, they can quickly find a solution in a web search that references this company.
- Community Helps Optimize the Workforce
Because community offloads repetitive and basic questions that don’t require an agent, it frees up agents to develop deeper expertise. A successful community will also help decrease the number of contacts into the contact center which will further allow the organization to optimize its contact center spending. Both employees and customers stand to benefit from an online community.
In Part II of this blog, we’ll conclude with two additional benefits of online communities for the contact center, along with a bonus research document for further analysis.
The post 5 Benefits of Online Communities for the Contact Center – Part I appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
