Speeding up front-line customer service
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Improving the content and experience for agents reduces call time and cuts cost CSI's Blaine Kyllo and BC Hydro's Ken Bell share the successful process of merging several of BC Hydro’s internal information repositories for frontline agents into one central Knowledge Centre. This case study was presented at E Source Forum 2018 as part of a panel on customer experience called Back to CX Basics: Getting Great at What Matters Most.
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Speeding up front-line customer service
- 1. Speeding up front-line customer service IMPROVING THE CONTENT AND EXPERIENCE FOR AGENTS REDUCES CALL TIME AND CUTS COST
- 2. © 2018 Ken Bell Manager Business Innovation and Operations Customer Service Blaine Kyllo Senior content strategist
- 3. © 2018
- 4. © 2018 CX/UX is important for internal audiences, too
- 5. © 2018 Knowledge Centre user requirements • Speed • Accuracy • Ease of use
- 6. © 2018 The Customer Experience
- 7. © 2018 Back to basics • User research • IA and navigation • Taxonomy and metadata • Templates and style guides • Writing fundamentals
- 8. © 2018 When the experience is interacting with content, improving content improves the experience.
- 10. © 2018 After
- 11. © 2018 Before
- 12. © 2018 After
- 13. © 2018 That all you got?
- 14. © 2018 ROI: $240,000 annually • Elimination of errors and duplicates • 25% efficiency gains with re-written pages
- 16. © 2018 Lessons learned Content and structure matters in a knowledge management system. Process experts and SMEs are not the best people to develop and maintain your knowledge centre.
- 17. © 2018 Lessons learned Involve the process experts and SMEs in the development of the new knowledge system and structures to get buy in. Simplifying content search and look-up results in more efficient CSRs, happier customers, and cost savings for your organization.
- 18. © 2018 Knowledge Centre “hacks” Improve page titles “Reverse a move out” not “Reversing a move out done in error” Create content models and templates Create a glossary; include acronyms
- 19. © 2018 Ken Bell 604-699-7020 ken.bell@bchydro.com Blaine Kyllo 778-999-7656 blaine@contentstrategyinc.com
Editor's Notes
- PROJECT OVERVIEW KEN: From 2003, up until May of this year, BCH outsourced various frontline customer services, including the contact centre. Recently, a key business decision was made, and for about the past year, we’ve been in the process of repatriating and in-sourcing these front-line services back into the BCH. That included taking control of information repositories created to support those employees. BLAINE: We were asked to review these repositories. Our recommendation was to take the opportunity to merge a number of them into a single Knowledge Centre built on a modern content management system. In so doing, our assessment determined that we could reduce the size of the repositories from about 8,000 web pages to fewer than 3,000. KEN: Before, agents might have to open and navigate between up to four different systems. In this new world there are only two: SAP and the central hub that houses the details on BC Hydro business rules and procedures.
- BLAINE: There’s lots of attention these days being paid to customer and user experience, and with good reason. Improving the experience for people, whether they are general users or a more specific group of users you call customers, is a good way to improve the performance of your business. In this context, the users are the front line agents who are taking calls and solving problems. They are the audience the Knowledge Centre content is created for. And they have unique requirements.
- KEN: They need to be able to handle calls efficiently. They need to be accurate. To do those things they need to be able to navigate to and search for procedural information quickly. When you layer of top of that the high employee turnover rate in some of these customer-facing areas, you can begin to understand how important it is to have information systems that are simple, streamlined and uncomplicated to use. This makes training and day to day use much more efficient and uncomplicated
- KEN: Customer Service Agents are a key connection point with our customers. It’s not good for anyone if the knowledge management system causes delays and results in awkward customer hold time. This is why giving the customer service agents a simple, uncomplicated, “back to basics” system is central to a good customer experience.
- BLAINE: Which means getting back to basics with the content. During this project, we conducted content assessments to determine the effectiveness and organization of the content. We interviewed users to learn their key pain points and validated those findings with surveys. We found that content was inconsistent in its quality and structure. The same information could be found in multiple places, and at times information was contradictory. Broken links were common. Staff couldn’t find the information they needed. Even searching for the right details failed more often than not. This all had an impact on staff performance.
- BLAINE: Work to improve all of this included: a new information architecture and navigation to make it easier to find information an underlying taxonomy and metadata schema to support content findability designing new content templates to establish consistency establishing content standards and training authors to enable higher quality content
- KEN: This is what content used to look like in one of the old frontline agent knowledge mgmt systems. Complex, verbose and visually unappealing.
- BLAINE: After our team of technical writers reworked the content to new standards, this is how it is looks now. You’re seeing the result of not just a change in how the content is presented, but also in how the content is written and designed on the page. We knew we had succeeded with this work when we realized, months after the new content and system had been turned on, we hadn’t received a single complaint.
- KEN: In one of our old systems, new information was incorporated into old content designs and systems. This made it difficult for agents to find the information they needed to provide a good customer experience. Imagine trying to quickly find what you were looking for in such a sprawling document. When we were asking agents what they needed in a new system, they all begged us to make sure they would still be able to search a page using “control-F”. That’s how they had learned to find what they needed on these dense pages.
- BLAINE: Even displayed small, here, you can see how the writing is easier to follow. Even the headline on this article makes it easier. It used to be “Credit bureau check” and now it’s in language that speaks to what the agent is doing: “Perform a credit check”. There is great complexity in this content. But the content can be designed in such a way as to make it seem simple. You can still use “control-F” here, but you don’t need to.
- KEN: Better customer experience. All service organizations care about that. Is there more to this?
- KEN: We’ve conducted an analysis of the cost savings that results from agents being able to process calls more quickly and accurately. We can eliminate the time they spend reaching system error messages due to broken links We assumed that we can streamline the agent look-up effort for pages that were re-written by about 25% Based on standard labour rates and average handling time associated with the relevant calls, BC Hydro looks to save about $240,000 a year.
- KEN: Work continues to redesign the content experience, which includes rewriting hundreds of pages of content to new standards. BLAINE: And we’ve been working with BC Hydro’s IT team, which is in the process of bringing in a new enterprise content management system to help with the publishing and maintenance, to ensure that the needs of content authors be considered when technologies are selected.
- KEN: Systems that lack consistent structures and layouts are fraught with inefficiencies, resulting in slow and frustrating task completion. Repeatable effort is a hallmark of a well structured system, resulting in quick and simple workflow BLAINE: In the same way that you don’t ask your accountants to come up with engineering designs for bridges, process and subject matter experts are not the people who should be creating and maintaining your knowledge centre. You need people who have been trained in the mechanics of content. Look to hire or contract editors and technical writers, and provide your staff with opportunities to expand their skills.
- BLAINE: The star performers and “go-to” members of your work teams will be most familiar with the old systems, warts and all. Involving them in the development of the new system alongside they any hired guns brought into transition from old to new, will create buy in and build credibility for the shift to the new knowledge management system. You need this to break from the old and bring in the new. KEN: Workers are happiest when they can find what they are looking for the first time. Organizations like the inherent efficiencies that result in cost savings. Customers like it for the most basic of all reasons: when they call they don’t have to wait, they get to speak with a quick, efficient and happy agent who solves their problem.
- You don’t have to overhaul your entire business process repository to get some of the benefits that BC Hydro has. Here are some things you can implement next week when you’re back at your desk. Improve the way your teams write headlines for articles: Instead of “Reversing a move out done in error” it’s simpler to write “Reverse a move out”. Create content models and templates to enable consistency even when you’ve got distributed authoring teams. Create a glossary so you can start wrangling how your organization understands terms. What, exactly, does “bill” refer to? Is it a verb, as in “Bill the customer”? Or a noun, as in “Send the customer the bill”? Make sure you include all of the different acronyms being used. I’ll bet that there are some that have different meanings depending on what department you’re in.