Ranging from longer resolution times to active waiting calls to inadequate service quality, at the heart of every call center challenge lies the inability to utilize the information at the right time for customer queries.
To this end, contact center knowledge management cuts through the most common and overarching call center challenge businesses face and transforms the way agents engage with the customer and organizational knowledge.
Table of contents
What affects call center productivity?
1. Stressful work environment
- The turnover rate for an average contact center ranges between 30-45%. Given the stressful work environment, demanding targets, and handling frustrated customers, agents leave their jobs midway, disrupting the call center workforce balance.
- High attrition rates introduce new agent hiring and training challenges, resulting in increased operational costs and difficulty ensuring quality customer service.
2. No on-point scripts
- Around 30% of the customer calls to call centers to revolve around previous unresolved issues.
- Several customers calls result from the failure to source solutions through self-service channels. The inability to provide on-point resolutions at this stage breaks customer trust and propels them to shift brands.
3. Information silos
- The agents’ ability to provide the right answers without deviating from the average handle time(AHT) metric is hindered, especially when information is scattered across CRM platforms, google drives, and standard operating procedure(SOP) documents.
- Disseminating incorrect and inconsistent information results in poor customer experiences, significantly impacting brand reputation
4. Managing multi-channel communication
- Customers are no longer restricted to any particular communication channel and expect consistent customer service while switching platforms.
- Disintegrated channels present a crucial call center challenge, with agents struggling to consolidate contextual customer information, impacting the overall customer service experience.
5. Lack of training resources
- Given high agent turnover, onboarding the new agents and getting them up to speed is a serious call center challenge impacting key performance metrics.
- Agent training is never a one-time process. It is a continuous process that makes up for a substantial chunk of call center operational costs. The time needed for training and retraining is an additional cost that companies find challenging to bear.
How to tackle call center challenges with Knowledge Management?
Call center knowledge management is a one-stop call center tool that makes knowledge readily available at the right time, facilitating smooth communications between customer service teams and customers.
Harnessing the power of AI and machine learning, Knowledge management platforms like Knowmax manages organizations’ entire KM cycle, from content creation and curation to dissemination and management, all in real-time.
Below is a detailed description of KM capabilities that helps management tackle key call center challenges.
1. Feedback mechanism to improve agent engagement
- The role of a customer service team does not end after resolving the customer issue, and it should not.
- Every KM module, like articles, FAQs, and workflows employed by the agents, can be rated for its resourcefulness, enabling management to make better decisions.
- Knowmax Knowledge management platform lets agents share feedback and suggestions, which get reflected on the admin interface under the feedback report, creating a collaborative work environment where agents become part of the decision-making process.
2. Interactive call center talk scripts
- Instead of boring and time-consuming long text documents, interactive call center talk scripts interlink different KM modules to augment agent efficiency in resolving customer issues on the first go.
- Relevant pictures and videos can be interlinked anywhere in the workflows, enabling faster, more accurate, and mistake-proof customer service.
- Integrating these talk scripts with the CRM platform reduces agent effort to feed primary customer information resulting in improved FCR manually and reduced average handle time.
3. Knowledge base optimization
- An optimized knowledge base with intuitive search features and natural language understanding is a key KM solution that seamlessly helps agents search for information.
- It reduces the time to resolution as agents can search keywords to retrieve content from within the long text documents, enabling faster support dissemination.
- AI-backed KM platforms like Knowmax optimize search engines for faster retrieval of knowledge base content for self-service, reducing the number of active waiting calls at call centers.
4. Omnichannel customer service approach
- An omnichannel KM platform eliminates the confusion resulting from multiple channels for communication with customers.
- It allows admins to push the same content to all the customer touchpoints, making information consistent throughout the platforms.
- Customers accessing website support, live chat, or phone support receive the same and consistent support, while support teams get a unified view of customers’ journeys with channel integrations.
5. Learning Management System
- Moving away from the traditional training methods, LMS, supported by knowledge management, works as a single platform for agent onboarding, training, and retraining needs.
- It acts as an online library where learning courses can be organized and managed with the added advantage of tracking agent performance.
- LMS helps overcome various call center challenges
- Reducing new agent onboarding and training time
- Promoting an efficient and continuous training culture with lesser costs
- Enabling agent retraining by helping them take courses to learn new skills and develop critical problem-solving abilities
Conclusion
89% of the companies believe phone support will continue to play a crucial role in the contact center future. Customer service automation will facilitate and not overtake support agents in resolving customer service issues.
The multiple frictions on the road to call center success can be overcome by evaluating, assessing, and managing call center challenges with efficient and robust Knowledge management solutions.
