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Articles |
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Knowledge
Process Management
Knowledge processes cannot be managed following the standard business process
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girl in all of us cheered the soon-to-be nearer reach of all those words. But
visions, especially the grandiose, face the speed bumps, the hurdles, of real
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EDS
Keeps Blogging Guidance Simple
As more companies start blogging, more are also making publicly available their
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Blog Feedback
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I've recently been considering moving my last remaining Movable Type blogs over
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Turning Knowledge Into Power
We are in an era of knowledge abundance. Traditional management theory focuses
on knowledge scarcity. We need new management strategies to deal with so much
communication and so much knowledge.
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08.04.05
Golf And Agent Desktop Search!
 By
Vikas Nehru
The slogan "Golf - Is it in you?" would fit very nicely in the hallowed portals
of the Golf Hall of Fame.
It might even work as a catchy title for a show on the Golf Channel. But the quote
struck me as odd, boldly displayed upon the entrance to the Director of Customer
Care at a major global contact center's office. My base level of golf knowledge
came from Caddy Shack and as I walked into Frank's office with visions of Bill
Murray chasing gophers, I wondered if I should have read up on golf prior to the
interview. What follows is an excerpt of our conversation that will help you chalk
out a new innovative solution within your contact center. It may even help your
golf game.
Question: Interesting reference to Golfing on your door. What is that about?
Frank: Golf is my passion, and the reference is a metaphor for "drive."
The real question is, "Passion - Is it in you?" I constantly challenge myself
and the team to have the passion and drive to seek creative solutions to the challenges
we face. There are also many parallels between golf and the challenges within
contact centers. To use a cliché golf joke, "the problem with golf is that the
slow people are always in front of you and the fast people always end up behind
you." Similarly, in today's contact center, information is fast; it needs to be
processed and delivered in real-time but traditional knowledge bases are slow
to react.
Question: Can you tell me more about this specific challenge - fast information
and slow knowledge bases?
Frank: Contact centers today are a fast-paced environment. Information
is the key; information is dynamic; information comes from disparate sources;
and a significant amount of information is temporal - it is relevant only for
a short period. The challenge is to process and deliver information in a real-time
environment while maintaining the goals of accuracy of content and consistency
of delivery.
Question: What has caused this shift in the need to process and deliver
information in real-time?
Frank: Today, more than ever, we are in an increasingly competitive environment;
cost of customer acquisition is higher, coupled with the fact that the Web has
significantly reduced the end consumer's barrier to switch companies. In order
to respond effectively to this challenge, marketing is leaning more heavily on
the contact center, causing both service and sales positions to be redefined.
This means, more is riding on the abilities of agents and the rapport they establish
with consumers.
Question: How has this marketing involvement affected information processing
and delivery?
Frank: Marketing views every interaction with customers as an opportunity
to sell. They want us to feed real-time relevant offers, coupons, and promotions
to the customer. And the contact center is the perfect touch point to enable this.
However, each customer contact has to be consistent and accurate. This is traditionally
achieved using a centralized knowledge base. Consistency and accuracy means there
have to be processes around information elicitation, approval and publishing.
The challenge becomes striking the right balance between information accuracy
and the need to gather and deliver real-time marketing information.
Question: How did you strike this balance?
Frank: The first step was to look at all the information sources and categorize
them. We found that the 80-20 rule applies to information whereby 80% of the information
is best suited for a knowledge base, such as problem solving and diagnostic cases,
guided resolutions, policies and product information and 20% of the information,
typically generated by marketing, is temporal in nature such as offers, coupons,
promotions, etc. Temporal information is not suited to a traditional knowledge
base due to its constantly changing nature. Because there is a lag between such
information being uncovered or revealed and when it can be made available in the
knowledge base, agents receive "late breaking" information via email, scanned
documents containing offers and so on. All of this information traditionally resides
on the agent desktop.
To meet the challenge of delivering real time information and still provide consistency
of information, I knew the solution had to marry the agent desktop with traditional
knowledge bases. The solution was staring us right in the face.
Question: What was the overall solution?
Frank: We provided a template solution that enabled direct access from
within an Agent facing knowledge base to a leading desktop search application.
The combination of desktop search capabilities and the agent knowledge base ensured
that agents could access critical and timely information stored on the desktop
directly from the knowledge base. This provided fast and easy access to email
and custom documents stored on the agent desktop through a familiar and consistent
knowledge base interface.
By combining desktop search capabilities with our knowledge search engine, we
made it easier for agents to find real-time marketing information. Furthermore,
service agents, regardless of channel, had access to the same real-time information,
the same knowledge content, and the same unified history of communications. This
approach guaranteed that customers got the same answers to the same questions
across channels and agents.
Read
the Rest of the Article
About the Author:
Vikas Nehru is the Director of Product Marketing at KANA. His 12 plus years of
experience as a senior marketing and product management professional in the enterprise
software industry have been instrumental in leading the direction and strategy
for KANA's innovative channel management and self service applications. Prior
to joining KANA, he spent a decade working in many diverse areas of the CRM software
industry. Vikas uses his experience to help deliver world-class customer service
solutions. |
