One of the important problems you need to deal with when building a Customer Facing System is collaboration support. Not necessary you say? Don’t believe it.

During the analysis of a company’s support services, we uncovered an interesting problem. it seems that customers had learned that they could call into the service line and ask for something. If they didn’t get the answer they wanted, they could call again. If they did it several times, they were likely to get a favorable answer. Sounds like it couldn’t happen right? But it did because the systems didn’t build a collaboration environment in real time:

FIRST - telephone calls weren’t logged in real time. Agents took notes by hand and transcribed them when they could.

SECOND - even when transcribed, the entries were only posted once a day. There was no way to find out if someone had called until the next day

THIRD - many calls never got logged at all because the people who handled the calls did it as a secondary duty and not as their primary responsibility

FOURTH - even conscientious agents often had to transfer a call to someone else and in that case, the calls very often weren’t logged because no one took responsibility for the call

Providing good service through a Customer Facing System requires collaboration, not just to deal with situations like that described above, but for many other reasons as well. The most important reason is that no one person answering the phone can know all the answers.

When you’re dealing with a customer, whether it’s a service or a sales situation, you will need advice and assistance whenever questions come up that aren’t within your area of expertise. These might be major or minor issues, but they’re still issues. Some of this can be dealt with using a knowledgebase of some kind, but some times, you just need to talk to someone to get help. There are a number of ways to do real time collaboration:

Phone Systems - most ACDs will allow you to bring a third party into a conversation. Whether you’re going to transfer the customer or not, this can be a good way to get answers when an expert can be brought into the conversation.

IM Systems - Having everyone checked into an IM system like Jabber or AIM can make them available for quick questions when needed. Sometimes it’s enough. Unfortunately, sometimes people get so wrapped up in IM conversations, they kill the effectiveness of this kind of system.

There are also lots of ways to do non-real time collaboration.

The options are just to wide to give any specifics without knowing in detail the needs of a particular organization. We’ll spend some time talking about different tools later.

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, Customer Service, Systems Analysis & Design