In many companies, the role of a call center agent hasn’t changed much during the past ten years. Most agents, like most white-collar professionals who aren’t managers, still do their jobs within cubicles equipped with phones and computers. Aside from the occasional family photo or decoration, most of the cubicles look the same.
At times, sameness, or at least, consistency, is desirable. The benefit of an on-line knowledge base, for example, is that answers to questions are consistent, rather than subject to interpretation. When customers call with questions about your company, they shouldn’t have to hear different answers depending on which agents they reach.
But there is a stronger argument for knowledge management, and that argument has to do with the needs of those who consult knowledge bases. Precisely because agents, customers and other people within your company seek different kinds of information, a knowledge base can have a unifying effect that extends beyond your call center and even beyond your company.
Unlike a call routing table or a schedule, a knowledge base is something to which people within your company, as well as the customers your company serves, can all contribute. The wider the constituency that not only consults a company’s knowledge base, but also can contribute to it, the more influence the constituents have within the company.
In this respect, knowledge management is analogous to quality assurance. According to the top-down management model that many call centers follow, mere compliance, such as following a script, is a sufficient indicator of performance. In some cases, such as when a customer switches service from one phone company to another, there are legal reasons why agents have to say certain words. But most of the time, scripting undermines an agent’s ability to communicate with a customer.
Given the number of customers a call center agent typically speaks with each day, it is the agent who often knows best what questions customers need help with, and how to answer them. Rather than listening to conversations with the sole goal of telling agents what they should have said, it’s a good idea to try to glean from these conversations instances when agents convey information effectively.
There are certain types of conversations, or portions of conversations, that call centers can translate from conversations to Web pages. These can include questions that customers ask agents most often, as well as questions that agents receive that are not already in your knowledge base.
We can go even further. Your customers comprise people who are among the most knowledgeable about your company’s products and services. They, too, should have a role, especially with assisting other customers with questions. Instead of dictating in advance what questions your company should answer, your company can discover, from the people who communicate most regularly with customers, and from customers themselves, what information your customers need.
It’s unfortunate that one of the most common arguments for implementing knowledge bases is that they save companies time and money, ostensibly by eliminating the need for customers to wait on hold for agents. Implicit in this argument is that a knowledge base is a substitute for calling an agent. But because agents, like customers, are among the people who are most likely to consult and contribute to knowledge bases, they’re precisely the people companies can rely on to ensure that knowledge bases present answers that are easy to locate and easy to understand.
It’s essential that you assign responsibility within your company to verify that contributions to a knowledge base are clear and accurate. Such a role can emerge within your call center, especially for agents who aspire to grow in their careers but don’t currently aspire to become supervisors. This role can also emerge outside your center, so that colleagues in your company who are experts on certain categories of products take responsibility for this information in your company’s knowledge base.
