Reducing Agent Error In Contact Centers With Knowledge Management
Contact centers have been around since the 1960’s and have outgrown their initial purpose of marketing and selling, to become the engines of the Customer Experience Industry.
We’ve come a long, long way from where we were. Technology has helped contact centers become much more effective. We’ve moved from automatic dialers to IVRs and, thanks to the internet, we now have cloud telephony such as CCaaS & UCaaS platforms to enable better communication between companies and customers. The Customer Experience industry has never been more efficient.
But hasn’t AI & self-service made contact centers redundant?
Sure, self-service is amazing for businesses. Not only does it save a lot of money compared to human-based support, it also requires less supervision, even if your agents are trained well. A lot of enterprises are moving their support to self-service and are trying to maximize its usage, but are we really at the stage where all customer issues can be solved by self-service or flashy AI chatbots?
As per this research, 55% of customers prefer talking to agents instead of chatbots or self-service
Chatbots and AI-based self-service solutions can only go so far to help customers fix simple queries that are repetitive (a quarter of all tickets, as mentioned). So, what about the rest?
Customers hate complexity. Repetitive IVRs & ineffective chatbots have been known to be major drivers of CSAT. Wouldn’t you, as a customer rather speak with an agent who knows the way out of a fix, over a chatbot that may get confused by the keywords you use in your input text?
It’s human to want a sense of familiarity, and customers seek exactly that when they reach out for help. Empathy is one quality that AI bots haven’t had programmed in yet. Human empathy is what allows brands to live through what their customer does, and that’s why contact centers will be around for a long time; only to get better through technology with every passing day.
A Gartner study shows that only 9% of customers report that they can solve their issues completely through self-service
Customer problems are diverse, and these figures will vary across industries, customer concerns, product/service, etc. so humans will always play a critical role in customer-facing roles like support.
If humans can be more effective, then why do agents still make errors?
Just as contact center technology has changed dramatically, the role of agents has evolved too. A contact center employee/agent handles an average of over 110 interactions a day. Each interaction has its own intricacies. Customers can potentially ask anything under the sun. Training programs will try to cover next to everything but it’s humanly impossible for agents to remember massive information dumps, even after extensive training.
It’s the responsibility of quality teams to ensure that error rates are kept to a minimum. More so, efforts must be made to understand why agents are making errors in the first place.
Here are common reasons for human errors, and their solutions:
1. Incorrect & incomplete information – This is a big one & probably the most common reason for agent errors in any contact center. Agents deal with very complex scenarios that vary from one customer to the next. At times, agents give out outdated information or even miss out on something relevant, which can be critical to solving the customer’s issues.
Incorrect/incomplete information can be especially disastrous in certain heavily regulated industries like Banking, Insurance, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Pharmaceuticals. However, no company can afford to offer inaccurate or incorrect information to customers. This will erode customer trust over time and ultimately damage a company’s reputation.
An efficient knowledge management platform can be used to ensure compliance, create an exhaustive framework and safeguard against these issues of misinformation. A knowledge management system is critical when you need to enable agents to give the right information to the right person at the right time.
2. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) aren’t followed – All contact centers & customer service teams have well laid out SOPs that they need to adhere to when solving customer problems. These are usually stacked in very lengthy PDFs, Documents or PPTs which are bulky and ineffective, making it very difficult for agents to pinpoint answers while they’re on a live call or chat with the customer.
SOP adherence is a critical responsibility of any Customer Experience or Contact Center Operations Leader. SOPs can change on the basis of processes, customer profiles, and detailed problem statements, therefore driving adherence is key.
When these SOPs are laid out in the format of an interactive decision tree or visual how-to guide, they’re more likely to be remembered and adhered to. These can help standardize processes & guidelines so agents don’t get overworked with excessive documentation that they would otherwise need to go through.
3. Difficulty in Finding the right Information – No one likes to be kept on hold, right? Making customers wait while an agent finds the right information to solve their issue or inquiry is a well-known point of dissatisfaction; especially when it takes longer than usual. Businesses and customer experience leaders must analyze hold times to understand the root cause. That is why it is vital to empower agents with the right tools, to maneuver through large amounts of information. The more time it takes to scroll through extensively long documents, the lower the CSAT & NPS that one can expect.
That’s where AI-Powered Knowledge Management (KM) platforms can deliver the right information in the fastest possible way. Using keyword-based search tools, a smart KM tool minimizes wait time to almost nothing.
4. Evolving business & updates – Businesses today come up with new offers, process changes and regular updates to serve the expectations of consumers on a regular basis. The number of updates coming at regular intervals presents a challenge for agents to stay on top of things at all times.
Customer Experience leaders and supervisors need to keep a track of these developments and ensure that their web based knowledge base is continuously updated and outdated processes and updates are archived.
Agents are as good as the technology that aids them. It’s time for contact center leaders to start investing in better platforms to aid agent efficiency & interaction quality.
A Case Study
Here’s an example of how we were able to drive down agent errors with Knowmax:
We deployed Knowmax for an upcoming consumer internet start-up that had a large support team. Channels of support were mainly chat & voice, and Agent Error was their biggest concern. Processes & information would change very rapidly and without a scalable KM platform in use, their agents weren’t as efficient as they could potentially be.
After our deployment, we saw agent errors reduce by 39%. This considerable decrease in agent error had a direct impact on CSAT too with 60% of the agents showing overall growth in CSAT since better quality resolutions lead to satisfied customers!
A knowledge management system helps your agents find the answers to resolve customer tickets within the CRM without wasting a lot of time to check documents or speak with supervisors. They can directly & indirectly impact every metric that you as a Customer Experience or Contact Center leader track. Using AI & machine learning on cloud, Knowmax has made contact center teams super-efficient without complex deployment procedures.
Transform your contact center into a resolution center by integrating Knowmax within your Freshdesk CRM.
