In an effort to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service, many leading enterprises have turned to knowledge management. But where exactly does knowledge management make an impact, and how? In this series of blog posts, we’ll take a look at five key areas—and provide some anecdotes that illustrate the kinds of metrics being seen. In this, the fourth of five blog posts, we’ll look at knowledge management’s impact on support team capacity.

As industry consolidation and acquisitions expand the customer base for many survivors of the recent economic downturn, the need for more efficient customer support becomes increasingly critical. One InQuira customer experienced this effect first hand. Following a key acquisition of one of their competitors, this company saw their call volumes triple. Agents were quickly forced into cross-functional crisis teams and struggled to access information across isolated support resources. Their previously profitable service offering quickly became a cost center and the support experience for their customers deteriorated to the point where their e-mail servers were filled with “hate mail”.

Knowledge management can help scale existing agent resources to handle increasing volume by helping them work more efficiently. Through the knowledge management platform, inexperienced agents learn from institutional knowledge. It can help reduce the time it takes top agents to do research while improving their accuracy and their access to distributed knowledge sources.

One year after implementing InQuira, this organization’s customer support Web site was named one of the “Top-Ten Web Support Sites” by the Association of Service Professionals. In addition, by allowing customers to effectively search for consistent and accurate answers via the Web channel, they saved $5.8 million in the first year.

In a second example, one of the UK’s leading wireless telecommunications providers has shown that call deflection can not only save significant money in the contact center, but it can also reduce customer churn. When they started on this journey, it required an average of eight calls to resolve customer issues with some of the newest smart phones. With the help of InQuira, they have adopted online customer discussion forums that handle more than one million hits and resolve as many as 7,000 cases per month. As the head of e-services notes, “If we had to staff for this volume in the contact center, we would need to hire 19 additional agents.” Not only has their effort paid off in cost savings, but their discussion forums have created a self-help community of users that have a greater sense of loyalty to the provider and their fellow customers.

To learn more, I encourage you to download our e-book, called “Five Key Benefits of Knowledge Management in Customer Service.”

In an effort to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service, many leading enterprises have turned to knowledge management. But where exactly does knowledge management make an impact, and how? In this series of blog posts, we’ll take a look at five key areas—and provide some anecdotes that illustrate the kinds of metrics being seen. In this, the second of five blog posts, we’ll look at knowledge management’s impact on resolution accuracy.

Most questions can be asked in a multitude of ways. Customers looking for upgrade information online may search for “upgrade service,” “how do I upgrade,” “what are my upgrade options,” etc. But traditional search and content management engines interpret each word in these questions separately, bringing back hundreds if not thousands of irrelevant results. A knowledge management solution that understands customer intent—including special terms such as product names and industry jargon—and maps the inquiry to pre-defined results, or that uses intent to intelligently navigate enterprise content, is the only way to guarantee a high degree of accuracy.

When the success of your insurance business demands that accurate answers be delivered to more than 70,000 independent agents as they write new policies, there is truly only one solution: knowledge management.

A well-respected specialty insurer discovered that their contact center representatives were struggling, achieving only a 28% accuracy rate in their response to independent field agent inquiries as they scoured PDF documents and regulations that were stored in multiple databases. As the agents depending on this critical information could write policies for a number of competitive carriers, this support experience was certainly not encouraging new business.

After implementing InQuira, the resolution accuracy of the first search by contact center representatives increased to over 85%. As an added benefit, call times were reduced by an average of 22%. These improvements in support consistency and research accuracy led to a 35% increase in the number of new policies written over a one-year period.

To learn more, I encourage you to download our e-book, called “Five Key Benefits of Knowledge Management in Customer Service.”

Working for a vendor that offers solutions for agent-assisted support and Web self-service channels, I was floored by hearing the challenges many support executives are still confronting today. When attending the Consortium for Service Innovation’s executive summit last month, I heard how executives at some of the top technology brands are wrestling with a fundamental disconnect:  Companies continue to spend approximately 80% of their support budgets and focus all of their support metrics on agent-assisted support. However, the growing reality is 90% of their inquiries are being initiated online today without any agent intervention—and that figure is only increasing as Gen Y makes up a bigger percentage of the buying population.

As jarring as this disconnect is, it began to make sense when we discussed how service organizations are still being evaluated, incented, and compensated based on the service levels achieved across traditional agent-assisted channels. No surprise why the concentration of service investments remains the same.

The reality is that there isn’t consensus how to measure the effectiveness of online channels. Clearly, support needs to undergo a transformation, and this is where it has to start. Valid, credible benchmarks need to be established for online channels. These metrics need to then be tied to how support teams are evaluated and how organizations are compensated. Then and only then will initiatives and investments follow to improve these new measures.

This transformation is long overdue, and the emergence of social CRM will only exacerbate the pain of those organizations that continue to put this change off.

Increasingly, organizations are looking to packaged self-service and contact center productivity solutions based on a knowledge management platform as a way to deliver a better customer service experience. These organizations all face a critical decision: whether to buy a commercial off-the-shelf solution or build the capabilities by combining such products as search and content management. In this, the fourth in our four-part series, we’ll outline a recent case study.

The biggest drawback of home-grown knowledge management systems is that they end up being difficult and costly to enhance, while user needs quickly outstrip the capabilities. This was the experience for Advent Software, Inc., a San Francisco provider of software for the investment community. Advent used an in-house knowledge management system that enabled employees and clients to create and locate information. Unfortunately, call times were rising, call volume was dropping, and resolution rates were not acceptable.

The company realized that knowledge management vendors were providing capabilities they could not mimic. “We wanted better search—the ‘rank by relevance’ function returned too many results to be useful, for example—and a streamlined authoring system to make it easier for content authors to create and update the knowledgebase,” said Collin Martin, Advent’s quality and service resolution manager.

Advent turned to InQuira to gain these capabilities. Advent has taken advantage of InQuira’s ability to provide knowledgebase access in a timely and contextual manner integrated into day-to-day activities. In addition, the extensive analytics allow the company to fine-tune its processes and content as users can now find and fix content without resorting to emails and trouble tickets.

As Advent discovered, purchasing a solution proved to be the right choice. The four-month implementation was on time and on budget. Once the installation was complete, Advent experienced a jump in first-call and same-day resolution as well as agent ready time and Web usage. Talk time and total calls decreased as well. The company has increased content output by 20 percent and fully leverages the content throughout its customer-facing Web site.

To learn more, please download an e-book entitled “A Superior Web Self-Service and Contact Center Solution—Buy It or Build It?”

In addition, you can view the related article in CRM magazine:

“Investing in Knowledge Management: Financial software developer Advent uses InQuira to show it’s what you know and who you know”

Increasingly, organizations are looking to packaged self-service and contact center productivity solutions based on a knowledge management platform as a way to deliver a better customer service experience. These organizations all face a critical decision: whether to buy a commercial off-the-shelf solution or build the capabilities by combining such products as search and content management. In this, the third in a series of blog posts, we’ll touch on some key financial considerations.

In prior blog posts we’ve discussed the shortcomings of technologies like search and content management in improving the customer experience. Even if it were possible to cobble together these technologies into a solution capable of meeting the business objectives of customer experience and call-center efficiency, is it truly less expensive to build rather than buy? The reality is—probably not. Following are a few of the most critical points to consider:

• Cost—It is no trivial task to recreate the technology sophistication of purpose-built technologies. Building a solution from scratch requires significant effort on the part of IT for custom development, testing, ongoing maintenance, and enhancements. A market-leading knowledge platform and knowledge-infused application such as that available from InQuira has hundreds of engineering staff years invested in its solution and a large installed base of customers with proven success.
• Time to Market—The time required to build a solution and the cost of delay must be factored in. Business stakeholders tend to be impatient, and long solution development times and delays can result in a loss of business attention or sponsorship which can jeopardize the success of any project. While buying a packaged product can lead to fast deployment times, many companies, including InQuira, also offer on demand or Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) models, which facilitate rapid implementation with the flexibility to grow the deployment as your business evolves and pay as you go.
• Inflexibility—Maintaining a solution with multiple different moving parts, each with its own timelines, maintenance needs, and upgrade costs is a challenging task. The knowledge of how products are integrated is often trapped in the heads of the people who built it, whose sole task now becomes its upkeep. When those employees leave, organizations stop touching it for fear of causing a business disruption. It becomes a technology frozen in time—an all too common experience in many IT organizations.
• Risk—Building a KM solution that incorporates proven technology, capabilities, and best practices requires deep expertise and experience that is not likely to be found in the IT organization. Implementing an unproven solution to support the mission-critical job of interacting with customers introduces an extraordinarily high degree of risk. Market-leading solutions such as InQuira’s have the credibility and the proven stamp of a happy and successful installed base of industry leaders in financial services, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, high technology, healthcare, and the public sector.
• Opportunity Costs—The fact of the matter is that everything can be built. For example, a CRM application is simply the combination of a database, business process templates, workflow, reporting, a portal, and security mechanisms. But nobody would ask for budget to build a CRM or SFA application rather than buying Oracle, SAP, or SalesForce.com. When a mature and proven solution exists in the marketplace, the build argument becomes less relevant, especially when packaged solutions can be configured in a cost-effective manner to fit your specific business goals. This allows IT resources to be deployed for more high-value purposes than trying to recreate a proven solution.

To learn more, please download an e-book entitled “A Superior Web Self-Service and Contact Center Solution—Buy It or Build It?”

When it comes to improving contact center performance, speed and efficiency are obviously important, a must have for organizations tasked with controlling expenses (i.e. every business in every industry). However, those productivity gains can’t come at the expense of the customer experience.

How do support executives ensure they are focusing on the right metrics, so that measured improvements will ultimately yield the biggest business benefit? What approaches have proven to yield the biggest payoff? On May 20, InQuira and the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) are hosting a webinar focused on these issues. Entitled “Improving Productivity in Today’s Contact Center – Do You Know What ‘One Second’ Is Worth?”, this session will cover these topics:

• Evaluating industry benchmarks in terms of customer service expenditures and returns.
• Defining productivity metrics that make sense in today’s markets.
• Best practices, case studies, and ROI metrics of high-volume contact centers in several industries.

Presenters of this session include John Ragsdale of TSIA, Francoise Tourniaire, founder of FT Works, a consultancy focused on improving support operations, and Chris Hall, InQuira’s VP of Product Marketing.

To register or learn more about this webinar, click here.