To help you prepare for the year ahead, CCC’s research and advisory team is putting its heads together to give you some additional perspective on areas of opportunity we see across a variety of companies—fresh ideas on how to enhance the customer experience and improve operational performance.

The intent here is not to increase your workload, of course, but to give you additional perspective on continuing to improve your service and support operations in the year ahead.

So let me start here with the recommendation of a relatively simple tweak: Ensure that all staff know how to navigate your company’s website.

It is a basic idea, but conversations with numerous service and support organizations reveal that most companies—both B2C and B2B—have not properly taught staff to use their own websites.

And this is becoming an acute problem as forecasts indicate that self-service increasingly is a preferred channel of resolution (CCC research historically has found that the preference for self-service is equal to live service, if not higher).  And we’re continuing to work on new research on customer expectations for self-service, in which I would be highly surprised to find the trends reversing.

This change among customers—but lack of change among service and support organizations—inevitably leads to a well-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful customer interaction along the following:

Frontline Staff: “After next week you’ll be able to check your account online to make sure that the changes have been updated.”

Customer: “OK.  Thanks for the tip.  And where do I go online to find that?”

Frontline Staff: “You’ll need to log in and you’ll find it on your account page.”

Customer: “I’m looking at your web page now and don’t see that option.”

Frontline Staff: “Unfortunately I’m unable to pull the web page up, so I can’t give you any more information right now.”

Customer: “OK….  I guess I’ll just call back if I can’t find the information next week….”

So what can be done to avoid this all-too-common situation?  A few ideas, arranged from least investment required to most:

1. Ask supervisors to do a coaching session on website navigation—Put out a memo to supervisors and coaches and ask them to spend some time orienting frontline staff to your company’s website, particularly the service and support functionalities.  A general introduction can be helpful, but also navigate the site based on a few issues customers commonly call about.  At a minimum, supervisors should do this once a quarter either in team or 1:1 meetings.

2. Tweak new hire training to focus on navigation—An entirely new curriculum isn’t necessary, but even creating a short module orienting new hires (and tenured staff, too) to the website, basic navigation, and important functionality to know about is a good start.  Supervisors and coaches can supplement this on an ongoing basis.

3. Integrate self-service steps into the knowledge base—It is helpful to have training and coaching on discrete website functionalities, but to truly ensure frontline staff can effectively advise customers on what to do on the web, knowledge bases should incorporate this information.  CCC members, learn more about effective knowledge management design principles here.

4. If staff do not have access to the external Internet, at a minimum grant access to your organization’s website—All sorts of historical reasons exist why some frontline staff have no access to the Internet (if you missed it, CCC’s latest research explains why this isn’t such a wise idea from an employee performance and engagement perspective).  Given the trend toward more customers going online and the large number of customers calling because they can’t find information on the web, this would be a good issue to put on the agenda for your next leadership meeting.

In the coming weeks, stay tuned for additional 2012 Resolutions to consider from colleague Rick DeLisi on why using the term “THE CUSTOMER” is not a good idea, and from Brad Fager and Judy Wang as well.

Happy New Year.

Last year, my colleague Lara Ponomareff talked about how knowledge management processes and people—not just the technology—lead to sustainable knowledge management. She followed up the post with a write up on failure points in knowledge management efforts. A quick recap is that there are four key failure points—

1. poor knowledge generation channels,
2. poor knowledge usability,
3. lack of knowledge-related feedback, and
4. unclear knowledge management priorities.

In today’s post, we’ll examine how Oracle addressed those failure points in their successful strategy to sustain and scale knowledge management efforts.

Historically, more than 80% of Oracle’s knowledge base was accessed on a monthly basis, creating high demands for quality knowledge. However, traditional centralized knowledge management processes didn’t scale well due to Oracle’s large number of products and increasing product complexity. This required the company to decentralize knowledge efforts and make knowledge management everyone’s responsibility. In doing so, Oracle:

• Encouraged frontline staff participation in the “knowledge community” by embedding knowledge management into staff career paths
• Monitored individual involvement in creating knowledge and providing actionable feedback by implementing individual contribution metrics
• Prioritized knowledge management efforts by tracking metrics on knowledge use and value through a centralized project plan

As a result of this exercise, Oracle increased overall “knowledge health” by 20% and individual staff participation in knowledge efforts by 15%. These improvements helped Oracle off-load a significant portion of service volume to self-service knowledge bases, ultimately contributing to an estimated US$195 million in cost savings from avoided calls.

CCC Members: We have pulled out the key insights from Oracle’s practice in a more detailed summary here. You can also listen to CCC’s presentation of the Oracle case by accessing the full Webinar replay here.

Related CCC Resources:

• Creating Sustainable Knowledge Management
• Knowledge Management Maturity Assessment
• Knowledge-Base Desktop Redesign

We’ve all been the beneficiary of a helpful tip or trick from a coworker, and while we may not think of an Excel shortcut, for example, as rising to the level of a “best practice”, in the service organization these are exactly the kind of useful pieces of advice that can add up to real savings. The biggest challenge is that it can be tough to identify—let alone replicate—these time-saving habits of high performers to improve performance among the entire front line.

To address this challenge, one financial services company we work with took a structured approach to learning from and sharing the collective wisdom of their frontline reps. While the full case is available on the CCC Web site, the key insights to help you uncover and teach time- and cost-saving tips and shortcuts are below:

1) Survey and observe reps to gather existing best practices.
MassMutual begins the process by surveying their entire frontline staff to determine which productivity practices are currently being used. An efficiency team then observes how reps use available tools and systems to supplement any information not collected in the survey.

2) Prioritize your productivity results.
Instead of sharing a laundry list of the productivity techniques uncovered, MassMutual focuses on disseminating the tips and tricks that have the biggest impact on performance and time savings. To do this, they compare the productivity habits of low, medium, and high performers, focusing on the practices that distinguish high performers from the rest of the pack. For example, MassMutual finds that high performers tend to have much more organized computer desktops than their coworkers and that lower performers spend significant time navigating between multiple programs and windows. Based on these findings, MassMutual develops desktop standardization guidelines to help agents manage applications and cut handle time.

3) Make learning personal for your reps.
Based on rep responses to the initial survey, MassMutual assesses improvement opportunities and coaches to these ‘productivity gaps’ through customized, one-on-one sessions. This tailored approach ensures that coaching time is not wasted teaching generic tips that the rep may already practice. Short refresher sessions ensure that best practices are retained over the long run.

By following the above steps, MassMutual is able to capture and share practices that would otherwise remain undetected and inaccessible to the majority of reps. In doing so, they’re able solve their productivity problem by cutting AHT by over 90 seconds–all without sacrificing the quality of service they deliver to their customers.

Customer Service Buzz readers: What are your thoughts? Do you have any best practices when it comes to productivity in the workplace?

CCC Related Resources:

Disseminating Productivity Best Practices to Frontline Staff

Productivity Impact Calculator

CCC Cost, Productivity, and Quality Benchmarking Data

If you haven’t read my last post, I’d suggest you give it a quick glance before proceeding on – but the quick recap is there are four key components (raw knowledge generation, knowledge refinements, knowledge feedback, and articulation of knowledge need) and three stakeholders (knowledge originators, adapters, and users) who all work together to continuously refine and pump out new, relevant, and high-quality knowledge.

One could imagine failure points at each of the four process steps, so:

1- Poor knowledge-generation channels: The flow of knowledge across the organization is through ad hoc channels only used reactively, resulting in poor knowledge flow as important information just isn’t communicated or is communicated after the fact.

2- Poor knowledge usability: When knowledge doesn’t map to usage patterns of the frontline, usage declines and results in poor knowledge adherence as staff look for other ways to find an answer.

3- Lack of knowledge-related feedback: When the frontline fail to understand the value of knowledge or don’t feel involved in the process, they don’t give much feedback on improving knowledge – meaning the organization doesn’t know where knowledge gaps and improvement opportunities are.

4- Unclear knowledge improvement priorities: When organizations approach knowledge improvement in an ad hoc way (see 1) they based knowledge improvement on their best guess of what is right answer, instead of using knowledge-related metrics and end-user feedback.

Seems like a lot can go wrong, right?  But, before this gets too overwhelming, it’s worth it to think about one of the most frequent (and among the more important) focus areas.  One commenter from my last post, @Kristina, hit it on the head: “However, getting the frontline agents involved and held accountable to participating in THEIR knowledgebase has really taken knowledge management to be one of the top focuses in our company.”  In my mind, each of these four failure points matter a lot, but if you don’t get the frontline bought in and make them active participants, a lot of these failure points will crop up.

So, what can we do to get frontline staff involved?  I’ve heard great ideas including:

• Better knowledge writing rules that improve the knowledge consumability for the frontline
• Enforcing a “paper-free” environment by holding friendly team-based knowledge base competency competitions
• Employing knowledge managers who specialize as change-agents to work with reps
• Redesigning the frontline rep desktop to integrate the knowledge base with staff workflow and usage patterns

So, what do you do to involve your frontline in the knowledge base?  Do you require them to give feedback?  Do they even write some of the knowledge themselves?  Let’s keep the knowledge management conversation going!

My answer? More or less, no.  The answer wasn’t a better transition plan, it’s a better knowledge management approach.  My biggest clue here was that she manually updated everything before she left – trying to cram all her tribal knowledge into the handbook after the fact, rather than updating the handbooks and guidelines in real time as things changed.  Of course she forgot to include things, especially if they weren’t everyday occurrences. 

The same can be said for the contact center.  There’s so much knowledge floating around about the latest product or the best way to handle a customer issue, but it’s not always in our frontline rep-facing knowledge base.  Or perhaps the information is in there, but is not up-to-date or is poorly written.

The answer for many service organization is to invest in the latest knowledge management technology.  And while technology plays an important role, I’ve come to believe the emphasis should be placed on the people and processes of knowledge management.  I’ve seen highly sophisticated knowledge management technologies fall short of their goals because the company had poor processes to support the technology.

So, what do sound knowledge management people and processes look like?  It’s not a linear process of imputing in new knowledge and then using it, as that often leads to information that isn’t ever updated.  Instead, effective knowledge management processes revolve around continuous knowledge improvement.  Knowledge flows through the organization, and everyone is responsible for helping to evolve and refresh that knowledge.  

This chart shows the system in place.  It has four process steps, including: 

Source: Customer Contact Council

• Raw Knowledge Generation: The starting point of new or updated knowledge
• Knowledge Refinement: This is where raw knowledge is edited and formatted for frontline staff (and even customer) consumption
• Knowledge Feedback: As knowledge gets used, feedback on knowledge points to improvement areas or knowledge gaps
• Articulation of Knowledge Need: Knowledge feedback is then mined to help prioritize where limited knowledge management resources should be spent

These process steps are carried out by three primary stakeholders (and it’s important to note that these roles aren’t mutually exclusive, so one individual could play multiple roles):

• Knowledge Originators: Responsible for raw knowledge generation and updating knowledge
• Knowledge Adaptors: Responsible for knowledge refinement to ensure knowledge usability, plus responsible for ensuring knowledge feedback is passed on and followed up on
• Knowledge Users: Responsible for using the knowledge and providing knowledge feedback that articulates improvement areas

Given these four critical process steps carried out by three stakeholders, two things become clear: all key knowledge stakeholders must participate in the system and any gap in participation/failure in a process step has downstream consequences that quickly break down the entire system.

Next time, I’ll talk about what the four top failure points look like and how to avoid them.  But I’d love to hear from you – what’s your take on this system?  Do you do something similar or would it work for you?

CCC Members – take a look at our work on knowledge management that outlines this system as well as leading member examples to create usable knowledge and encourage continuous knowledge improvements.

The most concerning relationship I found was a strong correlation between larger staff size and a higher average number of contacts to resolve issues.

While this was a quick-hit analysis, and not an intensive deep-dive, I believe it highlights one of the most difficult challenges larger centers face: decreased individual ownership of issues, leading to unnecessary repeat contacts.

While we don’t have a comprehensive model to understand why this relationship exists, my hypothesis is that larger operations, foster a “just a number” mentality among staff.  The outcome: reps believe if they don’t give 100% one day (but still passably handle calls, meet QA requirements, etc.) they’re doing their job, especially as it pertains to the thousands of customers who have issues.

I know you’re asking, “Brad, are you suggesting we get smaller?”  Let’s be realistic here – that’s not going to happen. But, I do think you should be asking, “How do I make my center feel smaller?”Here are a couple ideas our best practitioners have shared on this front:

1)  Co-locate more senior reps with your frontline. Physically bringing your tier 2/escalation staff into your frontline team – either on a permanent or rotating basis, increases knowledge sharing as more senior staff can coach frontline reps in real-time.  It will save you an escalation now, and allow the senior staff to teach the frontline new skills so they can fully resolve issues on their own in the future.

2)  Design co-located team spaces for maximum collaboration. The actual design of team spaces is a great way to increase knowledge-sharing. Data shows the probability of communication between two people exponentially decreases as the distance between them increases from 0 to just 100 meters – so we’ve seen companies create spaces for teams where each team member sits together with a center ‘huddle’ table for impromptu problem-solving sessions.

3)  Create a team incentive program. Even with the right structure in place, you can’t always expect the knowledge to just flow on its own.  Establishing a program around rewarding teams for resolving issues and sharing knowledge creates a more collaborative team culture – and helps team members hold each other accountable for owning issues.

The key learning here is to not lose sight of your reps as individuals, regardless of your center’s size.  There may be a correlation between center size and number of contacts to resolve, but with these strategies, there doesn’t have to be.  What have you done to establish/maintain that “small center feel” in your organization?

CCC Members interested in reading further on this topic, I recommend viewing the case profile, Multi-tiered Support Clusters which demonstrates how NetApp, a B2B storage and data management provider, used principled incentives and co-location to increase team knowledge sharing and improve issue resolution.

Whether we’re acting out Project Runway or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, it’s always a hilarious experience.  In the heat of the moment, folks try wacky things to get their team to guess the correct phrase – it’s stuff that makes sense to the actor at the time (like jumping up and down to simulate flying), but looks like gobbledygook to their team.  It’s all about perspective, right?

And that got me thinking, what does the service organization do that makes total sense internally, but confuses the heck out of customers?  From recent conversations with some of our members, it sounds like our FAQs on our websites offers up some quick win opportunities.

FAQs are often the customer’s go-to information source, but they tend to be added on an ad hoc basis – cutting and pasting from press releases or internal documents.  The end result is a large volume of FAQs that are repetitive and hard to understand.  CCC data shows that between 2-5% of call volume comes from customers who were just on the company website but were either confused or unconfident in the information they found.

Just how hard are your FAQs to understand?  Well, there’s a simple, free tool you can use to find out.  It’s a readability index that goes under the name the FOG Index (related to other indexes like SMOG and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level), and it’s based off a mathematical algorithm developed in the 1950s that evaluates the clarity and simplicity of language.  These tools calculate a score representing the number of years of schooling needed to understand the writing.

[In fact, a member recently showed us a really great readability test tool that combines many of these indexes and will score whole web pages.]

So, for example the following famous passage from the Gettysburg Address would rate a 19 (meaning you’d need 19 years of education to understand it):

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a    new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

But instead you could have said:

“When the US became a country, the people in power thought everyone should have the same rights.”    

 That would have scored a 9 on the Fog Index.

See the difference?  It’s a cool tool to use – and as an informal experiment we ran 150 random FAQs from 50 company websites (covering multiple industries) through the FOG Index.  We found the average score was 12.2 (ranging from 7.8 to 20.0).  A good rule of thumb for universal understanding is to aim for an 8^th grade reading level.  So, there’s likely some room for improvement here. 

Some changes we’ve seem companies make to improve are pretty simply, and include: 

• Simplifying language to remove multisyllabic words
• Using tables to arrange complex or situational information
• Using customer-friendly language, not internal jargon

So, do yourself the quick favor of putting a couple of your FAQs through the FOG Index.  And let us know your thoughts – what are some of your tips to make FAQs more consumable for your customers?

CCC members, check out Travelocity’s experience with the FOG Index and their 10 Rules for World-Class FAQs.  Plus, join the discussion on FAQs to see what your peers are up to.

Of course plagiarism is terrible and it’s critical to teach students skill development through hard work, but another friend questioned his logic: “Is knowledge of an English passage that important?  Aren’t search skills critical as well?”

You can imagine the direction of conversation from here—the table was evenly split among liberal arts and math/science majors—but applying this thought to a service and support environment, it’s an interesting question: Do we need to train staff in critical thinking or do we simply need to provide better access to the answers?
My answer: Both.  But it’s important to consider this in terms of a short-term and long-term strategy.

In the short term, it is worth reconsidering building rep certification programs that require detailed tests and qualifications (of course only if it not a legal requirement).  Instead:

• Reinvest these resources in knowledge bases and reinforce use—Particularly in an industry with very high attrition, knowledge retention through faster and easier-to-use knowledge bases can eliminate the need for substantial training hours and enable more consistent customer experiences.  And as more companies turn their knowledge bases outside in, more customers can self-serve.

In the long term, as customer issues continue to become more complex, critical thinking becomes even more important.  A simple process flow doesn’t work for a multi-faceted, nuanced problem—there is good reason that technical support organizations hire engineers with advanced training.  But the implication here is not to fire all staff who lack PhDs; there are ways to upskill talent:

• Teach staff how to root cause—Considering the underlying reasons to an issue helps ensure that the issue is appropriately diagnosed and resolved.  While true root cause analysis is a very rigorous economic exercise, a modified version, like that CCC teaches in our Teaching Supervisors Best-In-Class Coaching Practices Workshop, is helpful for the entire organization.
• Incent collaboration and brainstorming—Sometimes issues must be resolved creatively, and obtaining peer perspective and comparing multiple ideas can be very effective.  A technical support organization we work with uses team-based resolution incentives and metrics in addition to clustering teams for better knowledge sharing, leading to a 90% increase in same-day case closure.

The good news is that the short-term strategy of searching directly supports the long-term strategy of thinking: If the knowledge base is easily accessible and understood both internally and externally, companies can increasingly focus efforts on upskilling talent with critical thinking.

What’s your current book-smart/search-smart strategy?

CCC Members, for best practices in knowledge base design and tactics for boosting utilization, refer to our research on Creating Sustainable Knowledge Management.  And learn how to incent collaboration and brainstorming through team-based resolution incentives and metrics.

By Dan Clay

“The best farmers prepare for a famine during a surplus.” 

My grandpa, Forrest Stokes, himself a farmer in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, spread this wisdom any chance he got: while budgeting finances, rationing fertilizer, or stealing Sweet & Low from Perkins.  It’s proof that repetition is the key to education, because I have never forgotten this important lesson—a lesson that at once teaches foresight, restraint, conservation, and preparation.

I’m reminded of it because, amidst record-high unemployment and recent mass layoffs (in other words, a labor surplus), it’s counterintuitive to be concerned about employee retention.  But many HR professionals are pointing out a perfect storm about to hit staffing departments: the loss of irreplaceable knowledge and experience as millions of baby boomers retire.  The Baby Boomer Brain Drain. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people entering the retirement sweet spot (ages 65 to 75) will grow by more than 80% by 2016 while the number of people in the prime of their careers (25- to 54-year olds) will grow a mere 2%.  Customer service will be hit hard by this trend, with a combination of industry growth and employee departures leading to 1.2 million job openings.   

A forewarned company recently called me for advice on how to handle the brain drain. 

What I’ve found is that most companies are examining retention strategies.  While there are great opportunities to keep older workers by offering more flexible career options, these solutions are band-aids at best—a semicolon in the sentence of a career with an inevitable period. 

The real fix comes from retaining knowledge, not people.

Many baby boomer employees have amassed great skills and wisdom, but this info has not been captured by organization.

I see two ways to transfer knowledge: to systems and to people. 

Systems are great at capturing “explicit” knowledge—the observable, indisputable knowledge that can be recorded in training books and product manuals. 

But “tacit” knowledge—the inexpressible “tricks of the trade” that come with experience but aren’t easily written down—is spread best through knowledge sharing and coaching.

• The smartest companies I’ve encountered have made knowledge sharing a promotion requirement.  As you gain more knowledge, you’re expected to share more knowledge. This is very different than the approach of rewarding “experts.” Experts are nothing more than glorified knowledge-hoarders.
• Inherently, the motivation of employees approaching retirement age shifts.  The desire to demonstrate mastery tends to diminish, whereas the desire to leave a positive legacy becomes stronger.  Smart organizations are catering to this desire by creating coaching programs and opportunities for folks to share their information.  

It’s crucial to get ahead of this “brain drain,” because if we wait for the problem to fully present itself, the solution will have walked out the door.  Have you thought about the impact that baby boomer retirements will have on your organization?  What are you doing to transfer knowledge?

CCC members, check out LexisNexis’s coaching-specific career paths.