Modern Customer Service: Precise And Efficient

Customer service has become an integral part of the added value chain. It contributes to turnover, profit and ROI, and improves customer satisfaction and loyalty. Good service sets companies apart from the competition and stimulates growth in fiercely competitive markets. But the demand for fast reaction times with the correct answers in an atmosphere of extremely short innovation cycles causes service staff to be challenged even more.

Furthermore, professional customer service relies on powerful IT systems. Traditional IT systems that primarily focus on management of service processes need to be complemented by innovative, intelligent knowledge management methods and tools in order to improve the actual problem-solving process. This is the only solution to reducing overall costs for resolving customers' problems.

Service resolution management must automate the complete range of phases in service: from efficient creation and publication of service literature; to intelligent problem-solving in the contact center, call center, help desk, phone service and self-service; all the way to systematic diagnosis and problem resolution by the service team on site.

Ultimately, statistics show that nearly 80% of the costs incurred by a support query are generated in determining the exact context of a problem and finding a suitable solution. The remaining 20% are spent on query routing and case tracking, but do not actually contribute to solving the customer's problem. In fact, quickly finding the correct solution is the most effective way to increase customer satisfaction.

With the goal of turning this statistic around to benefit the customer, a service resolution management solution is needed to quickly and efficiently provide the correct information, precisely at the moment it is needed and in the form in which it is needed. Identifying the correct answers to the most complex issues assists support staff in communicating effectively and consistently with customers. Service agents today are often "non-specialists" that need to assist customers with the right answers and solutions to their problems, as if they were experts in the field. Only by being guided through a number of questions and suggestions, can a "non-specialist" deliver the correct information efficiently.

Correct information can only be delivered when all data sources relevant to the diagnostic process—internal databases, ERP systems and file servers or data publicly available on the Web—are provided to the user, taking individual context into account. With the help of semantic and linguistic processes, the correct information should always be listed first ("one right answer"), even when tapping into extremely large data sources (big data).

Service staff is further supported by being relieved of tedious manual tasks with automated collection and return of relevant customer information. When third-party systems can be incorporated into the automated process, it only boosts information delivery even more. Service center staff utilizing data from an expert knowledgebase (trusted expert knowledge) can be confident in their communication with customers because they operate in their "comfort zone" and avoid the "stress zone." Employees receive the information they need, quickly and reliably.

Hallmarks of Service Resolution

A service resolution management system must include a guided problem-resolution technique that incorporates necessary processes and transactions, as well as intelligence navigation and search technologies. Case-based reasoning, artificial intelligence and semantic technology concepts are ideal for these purposes. When an employee has all of the information needed to resolve an issue aggregated in a single window, switching between different applications no longer slows up the process. When the employee has the ability to easily switch from a guided problem-resolution process to a search approach and back again, the resolution process has the potential to become even faster.

A service resolution management system of this nature must provide easy handling graphical elements, tailored to users' needs, and minimize expenses and the amount of training for employees. Any additional information that can be provided to simplify processing of the respective issue, and can be dynamically incorporated and displayed to the user in its corresponding context, only improves service quality. A system must deliver content in a consistent, target group-specific manner and operate with a wide range of interaction channels such as phone, email, and self-service (web, app, etc.). Escalation pressure is taken off cost-intensive channels and shifted to more inexpensive communication channels.

The following key performance indicators are benchmarks that are improved by a service resolution management solution: average handling times per call; first-fix rates and escalations from 1st to 2nd level support; end-to-end process time which is the overall cycle time for issue resolution; and call avoidance with implementation of self-service (web, apps, etc.).

The decision in favor of implementing a service-resolution management system must consistently improve service quality, be adaptable to individual requirements, increase customer satisfaction and keep costs manageable.

Ideally, a service resolution management system can not only be operated on-premise, but is also available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model in the cloud. Using the SaaS model, companies are relieved of the initial investment involved with license fees and efforts required for creating their own IT infrastructure. Necessary application components such as the actual database, connection to third-party systems, sophisticated search processes, or specialized application logic must also be available in the cloud.

Typical results after implementing a service-resolution management solution (such as the one from Empolis) are: decrease of the average handling time by 20%-30%; increase of the first call fix rate by more than 40% (in some cases, all calls are solved by the 1st level agent, meaning 0% escalations); dramatic increase of the number of trouble tickets solved within 24 hours; decrease of the overall cycle time from days to hours; and 15%-25% call avoidance by self-service.

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Empolis is a provider of "smart information management" software for the holistic creation, management, analysis, intelligent processing and provision of all of the information relevant to a business process. Empolis is the first European software company to be named on both prestigious lists, EContent's "100 Top Companies in the Digital Content Industry" and "KMWorld's 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management" at the same time. This clearly reinforces Empolis' approach of uniquely combining knowledge and content management according to the Empolis motto "the right information, at the right time, to the right person, on the desired device."