Thursday, November 5, 2009

Process and Customer Service Content - Part II

In the previous blog on customer service we discuss the benefit of organizing customer service content around the processes and workflows that agents follow. What follows are some specific steps to get started.

1. Determine the most frequent workflows/customer inquiries that your agents are expected to handle.

2. Take each of these workflows and break them down into a series of sub-steps that explain how the workflow should be handled by the agent. Keep it simple.

3. For each step within each workflow, identify the various types of supporting content, tools, information and guidelines that and agent might need in order to address each specific step. This is your inventory.

4. Now the hard part...which depends a lot on the content management system(s) you use to support your agents. Specific content should be filed in a structure that mimics the workflows and steps that you've outlined. This could be a folder and sub-folder structure, it could be a series of web-pages or it could be metadata that you associate with each piece of content.

In concept this seems pretty easy, and makes plenty of sense. In practice, trying to manipulate your content management system can be a bit more challenging depending on the way(s) in which content is organized in that system.