Rich Feinberg, Product Marketing Manager, eGain Communications

Question:
How can we improve the speed in which new agents can find answers to common inquiries?

Answer:
Your agents are faced with a variety of types of inquiries. As a rule of thumb, you can estimate that 80% of your inquiries will be common questions. These are the questions that your agents should be equipped to answer quickly and effectively.

A knowledge management environment that incorporates structured knowledge can be leveraged to help new agents find answers for common inquiries quicker. With structured knowledge, the expertise from Subject Matter Experts (SME) is replicated in an automated fashion that enables new agents to be led to the documents that provide the best solution for customer inquiries.

Companies will typically establish SMEs covering complimentary domains so that together they can answer all inquiries. By replicating the expertise of SMEs with structured knowledge, new hires can become productive very quickly across a broad domain of expertise. This is because they can leverage an automated environment to lead customers to answers just as the SMEs would. Since the agents can effectively handle a broad domain of inquiries, there are fewer escalations that need to be made to the more expensive SMEs.

Implementing structured knowledge also lowers the impact of SME turnover since the agent expertise that was built into the automated environment remains for new agents to leverage after a SME has left.

Question:
How can we handle the range of customer inquiries in a Web self-service environment?

Answer:
More and more customers want to help themselves through your Web site. They are comfortable finding answers on their own, and are able to answer increasingly complex questions without the assistance of an agent.

The more comprehensive the self-service environment is, the more effective it will be at handling customer inquiries. First, the environment should be able to handle both simple and complex inquiries that are common. This means that customers with simple questions should receive immediate answers and customers with complex questions should be led through diagnostic questions to find the answers to their questions. Second, those customers that have uncommon inquiries and that would rather not speak to an agent should be given the choice to search all accessible documents for answers using intelligent searches provided by the self-service environment. And if a customer accesses the self-service environment, but needs additional help, the agent they are routed to for help should have a copy of the customer's self-service transcript so they can help them more quickly without having to ask questions the customer has already answered.

About The Author
Rich Feinberg is Senior Product Marketing Manager at eGain and is responsible for eGain eService Enterprise (E3), an Enterprise Interaction Management solution. Rich has been managing software products for over eight years with the last four years focused on Internet products. Prior to eGain, Rich was a Product Manager at Symantec Corporation in their Internet Tools business unit.