When Seconds Count and Accuracy Matters
In a high-volume contact center, shaving a few seconds off of average handle time (AHT) can potentially save millions of dollars. Importantly, other metrics such as accuracy, compliance and customer satisfaction should not be sacrificed for time savings.
The good news is that it’s possible to improve all of these metrics while reducing AHT.
“How’s that?” you say. I’ll tell you in a moment. First let me paint the picture of the status quo in many contact centers.
Like good customer engagement practitioners, let’s start with the customer’s perspective—“outside in,” as they say. Research from Forrester shows that 73% of U.S. Online Adults say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. (Source: Trends 2016: The Future Of Customer Service, Forrester Research, Inc., January 5, 2016)
According to Aberdeen Group, contact center employees spend 14% of their time looking for relevant information to do their jobs. Time is money. On average, that costs organizations $1.45 million each year. (Source: Knowledge Management in the Contact Center: Guide your Agents to Smarter Customer Interactions, Aberdeen Group, November 2015)
In essence, customers are saying “Make it easy and get it right.” Employees are saying, “Make it easyto get it right.”
A well-tuned knowledge management system can meet these expectations. We recently kicked off a 4-part webinar series entitled “Knowledge Is Power” where every webinar covers a different “how to” topic related to knowledge management. It’s very pragmatic, prescriptive content to provide you with a step-by-step path from getting your knowledge management project approved to making it really move the needle for your customers and employees.
Here are a few teasers from that series:
- Use customer context (perhaps dozens of data elements) to automatically drive the display of relevant knowledge articles, often without manually searching at all.
- Develop consistent, well-designed templates for knowledge articles to make it easy for users’ eyes to jump to what they need.
- Segment content that changes frequently into separate, embedded knowledge objects that can be changed in one place and automatically syndicated to all related articles.
- Make knowledge use and continual improvement of knowledge a way of life in your organization, using measurement and gamification to reinforce positive behaviors.
SPOILER ALERT: The audience on the first webinar had a surprising and overwhelming response to this poll below. “Accurate and consistent responses” outranked the other three answers—all related to cost and time savings—combined!
The moral to that story is: Get the info right (accurate and consistent), THEN make it fast and easy to deliver it (to the agent and/or customer). There is no point in doing that in the reverse order.
By the way, you can get access to the recording by registering here.
Now let’s connect the dots. All kinds of good things can happen when you implement knowledge management. Aberdeen Group research shows that potential benefits include customer satisfaction going up, service levels getting better, complaints going down, and agents becoming more productive.
Knowledge management has proven its mettle for those who want to be “fast and not furious.” Done well, it delivers better outcomes with less effort for customers and employees.
Here’s how you can learn more about making it work for you:
Register for the Knowledge Is Power 4-part webinar series.
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