Globalization and technology improvements have exposed companies to a situation with tough competition. In this new era companies are focusing on managing customer relationships in order to efficiently maximize revenues. In terms of customer relationship management, call centers are considered one of the primary organizational channels for interacting with customers, but perhaps the greatest challenge of running a call center is to ensure that customers are provided with the right information in a timely fashion.
In this regard, knowledge management has a number of practical tools and strategies for meeting these challenges.
The Real Challenge
While leading the country's largest service marketplace and most successful startup, Sheba.xyz, it was very difficult to control the information channels and update the call center agents on the rapid change and fastest launching of new offers, services, and products. As there were several business wings running their different services parallelly, there was no central hub and checking points on new campaigns. As a result, a customer might get knocked up while getting an update from an app, the web, or Facebook, but customer service agents had yet to receive the information. It was dissatisfying for both customers and agents.
Sometimes it required multiple calls to gather information from different channels and share with customers. Customer holding time and average calls to customers increased, and agents' productivity decreased.
As a fast-moving company, it was required to hire more people into the different business wings. But as a startup, the onboarding process is yet to settle in an organized way. New joiners needed to start working with the business sometime before proper training and without adequate information about the company.
Searching Way-out
1. User acceptance testing (UAT) by Customer Service Department: All teams agreed to control the rapid launching of new things with a proper alignment of the customer service team. But again, in startup culture, we need to make decisions very fast and change modality in a faster approach. So the plan failed again and again.
2. Making a knowledge portal: We've decided to prepare a knowledge hub either from an outsourced company, which is expensive, or to make it by ourselves. We chose the second one, but the technology team was very much engaged with multiple products of the business.
Test Trial by a Free Blogspot Template
Though I’m not a web developer but it’s like a interesting thing to me to learn and make something by own. In my student life I’ve tried to learn frrom online and prepared few blogpost and wordpress website for some projects. From my previous experience I planed to try a free template to check the users feedback.
We started using it in our call center, tele-commerce and digital query management team from January 2020.
Considerations While Making a Knowledge Hub
1. It helps with problem solving: When there are many products and services sold by a company, it is impossible for customer support agents to keep all of the information in their heads. In this case, knowledge hub can prove itself as a valuable asset for customer support agents. With access to the entire database of help documentation, support agents can guide the caller through the entire process of problem-solving in an efficient manner.
2. All in one place: For informations and campaign modality we were used multiple google docs, g-sheets and forms and it was difficult to bookmark the urls or in a page, which required higher loading time as well. Training modules, SOPs were also kept in g-drives. So to cater all in one plate was in priority.
3. Finding Information is Easier: One of the most essential features of call center knowledge hub is the search function. It makes everything searchable. Since time is of the essence in any customer support department, this feature is a must have.
Output
We found very good feedbacks from our agents that how it was helping them in live calls and their productivity increased as they can share information real time also the complain from customers were also dropped significantly.
The Name “sPedia”
Together the team was searching for a good name to launch in the company town hall because we aspired to make the product not only for customer service but also for the whole company. Multiple names came out and, based on popularity, sPedia (Sheba Pedia) was selected.
Launching
After 2 months of test trial in March Townhall 2020 I’ve presented the knowledge hub and its output towards the whole company.
Moving into a company portal with Bigger Aspects
After a successful trial we took on a project to prepare our own knowledge hub for everyone, and the experience of the trial period worked very nicely. This time we've planned bigger.
As we worked as a service market, knowledge sharing and training for our service providers and technicians are a regular process to maintain quality. We used a third-party portal for this. Also, it requires sharing information with customers frequently. And this time we considered those too, and after several iterations in May 2020, we could release our own portal, which is ready to serve customer service, other teams, our service providers and technicians, and the customers as well.
