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Call centers play an important role in many industries – from telecommunications, manufacturing, and financial services to energy, utilities, public sector, and travel and tourism. In all of these industries, the end goal is the same – provide a high quality customer experience in the most cost effective manner possible. Yet, in trying to achieve this simple goal, nearly all call centers face enormous challenges. To address these, we must first understand the perspective of the central player - the customer service representative (CSR). From their viewpoint, here are just a few challenges:
- Where do I look? - Data residing in multiple silos causes the "where do I look"? issue
- Hotkey from screen to screen - Combination of structured and unstructured data causes CSRs to hotkey from screen to screen
- FAQs are limited - While a list of frequently asked questions is a popular means for a CSR to get at the right info, most often customers ask questions that vary from the FAQ list
- Scrolling only goes so far - Many times, CSRs scroll through lengthy pages with vast amounts of information; this wastes precious time and doesn't always result in them finding the right information
- Long ramp-up time - Learning the intricacies of where all the information is and how to access it can take weeks, if not months
- Constant addition or multiplication of data - The amount of data increases rapidly; for example, when an acquisition occurs, an entire new company's data must now be available to sift through
While there is no panacea to address all of the challenges, a few, simple things can be done to substantially improve performance. One of these is to implement a search solution that empowers the customer service representative to be able to find the exact information that the customer is looking for.
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