Process and Customer Service Content - Part I

(Part 1 of 2)

Providing customer service, whether via self-service, performed through the web, delivered through a call center; outsourced or insourced is a business process...on that everyone can agree. And the specific types of customer inquiries can be grouped into a series of sub-processes related to providing customer service e.g. purchase a product, inquire about a charge, return or repair a product. And most customer service environments have figured out how to create prescriptive work flows (scripts and call aids) that are organized around these sub-processes.


However, most of the supporting content and information designed to support accurate and complete response to customer service questions isn't organized by process. It's categorized in information categories that don't align with the way an agent or a customer would expect to find them. So the most common approach to solving customer service content issues is to use enterprise search or to create a large knowledge base of Q&A that can be...searched. One problem with this approach is that as the body of knowledge and content grows, so do the search results...and instead of helping with productivity, this approach drains it by requiring agents and customers to wade through the mounds of content and Q&A returned in a search result before they can provide a hopefully, correct answer.

An alternative method for categorizing content is to do so around the processes, workflows and types of questions that are typically posed. This approach can reduce agent and customer "search" time by up to 50% on a per incident basis. The impact on quality is intuitively positive. The flow-through impact of answering customers more quickly and accurately is also obvious.

But where to start?