Great Customer Service on a Tight Budget Part 8: Empowering Agents with the Right Information
Empower agents with the right information at the right time
Service representatives can spend excessive amounts of time searching for information and answers, leading to higher costs and poor experiences. The problem with most contact center knowledge bases is that they deliver too much irrelevant information. Agents must sort through long lists of links to locate the right information they need to address customer questions. The more products the company has, the more time consuming and frustrating this gets. And if the agent finds the information they need, they must take time to formulate a response for the customer.
As a result, quality of service suffers because:
- agents deliver incomplete, inconsistent or inaccurate information
- issue resolution is slow
- the number of call escalations is high
- and hold times are long
On the other hand, our customers have vastly improved efficiency, issue resolution and customer satisfaction by delivering clear and specific answers to customers’ question directly to the agent’s desktop.
For example, one of our customers is a global consumer goods leader whose agents must support over 90 brands of home, personal care and food products. Using our RealDialog solution as their contact center knowledgebase, their service representatives simply enter a consumer's question, verbatim--or select a question submitted via email--and they instantly receive a clear and specific answer. The answer can be a direct response they can read or send to their customers, a paragraph within a document or Web page, or specific data retrieved from external systems. As a result, the company:
- Speeds call processing and issue resolution
- Reduces interaction costs
- Enhances the consumer experience through higher quality, more efficient interactions
Similarly, a major retailer deployed RealDialog in the contact center and reduced:
- Hold time
- Average handling time
- Seasonal associate training time
- Escalations
- And errors in classifying issues
Read about these successes and more in our resources area.