The Covid 19 global pandemic has shaken the very core of the customer service industry, with social distancing measures placing unprecedented demands on contact centre operations.

Remarkably, the BPO industry has been quick to react to the challenge, busily dusting off their working from home strategies that often never made it beyond the conceptual drawing board.

Necessity is of course the mother of invention, and through the adversity of a global pandemic thousands of contact centre agents are now being equipped to work from the comparative safety of their homes.

However, while it is technically feasible to operate and manage a remote contact centre workforce, what does this mean to the culture within the new virtual centre?

It is a world where agents can’t just pop to their supervisor, team leader or colleague for help with an unfamiliar customer requirement.

Sure they can drop onto their team chat room, or IM platform to ask a question, but is that really delivering the optimal customer and agent experience?

It is only when your agents begin working in isolation that you realise just how dependant they may have been upon the support, wisdom and tacit knowledge of the in house SMEs.

This tribal knowledge dependance is unfortunately the rule and not the exception, with few contact centres today providing a comprehensive base of knowledge assets that addresses all topical customer queries.

It is fair to say, from our extensive global travels and analysis, that most contact centre Knowledge bases are inadequately furnished with content, often only addressing the ‘short tail’ of high volume issues. For the remaining issues, dependency on undocumented tacit knowledge is typically the norm.

This ‘long tail’ of issues, that are likely to account for 20% or more of volume, will typically include a mixed bag of uncommon or singular customer issues. It is these contact drivers that cause the greatest disruption among agents, especially new-hires, and place the greatest dependency upon colleague support.

Most contact centre managers will be aware if there is an over reliance on colleague support, but very few ever analyse or quantify the operational impact of deficient knowledge management practice. Some may even consider that if KPIs are being met, then why bother?

However, WFH has changed this cultural landscape, we can suddenly see and quantify how much a reliance on in-house SMEs has been plastering over the cracks in deficient knowledge management practice.

It is an opportunity to take stock of the situation, and understand just where the shortfalls in your knowledge management process and associated platforms have been.

WFH / Digital cloud platforms present an excellent opportunity to gather the necessary structured and unstructured data to analyse your current operating model, and really begin to quantify the scale of the challenge.

It is also an ideal time to rebuild a broken knowledge management culture and redirect focus and attention to the digital resources that are at your agents fingertips.

As supervisors now use IM to help agents, try to focus on providing them with the ‘fishing rod’ and not the ‘fish’ when helping their colleagues; don’t send agent solutions within the chat, instead direct them to the original KB source.

This is far easier to enforce via IM than it has ever been verbally on the contact centre floor, where it is much easier to simply provide the answer than to walk back to the agent’s workstation to guide them to the KB.

This new digital referral mechanism delivers three key benefits:

  • It drives stickiness with the official KB platform, and may raise agent awareness of content that may have otherwise been ignored.
  • It will drive down dependence on supervisor / TL support.
  • If the supervisor / TL identifies that there is no content when searching for a link, then this should raise a flag and initiate a new knowledge creation process. This should then trigger a qualification process, and ultimately the rapid turnaround of new knowledge creation that can serve the wider agent population.

Enforcing this behaviour, with associated tracking of communications, will instantly highlight and quantify the gaps that exist in both your Knowledge management process and content.

Naturally, if you don’t have an ‘upstream’ process for capturing new knowledge from the agent ‘coal face’ then now is an excellent time to implement one.

You may be surprised just how many gaps there are, and the consequent impact on profitability and customer experience.

For a free initial consultation on how The Insight Guild can help you define or optimise your knowledge management practices, please contact Doug.overton@theinsightguild.com today.