From contact centre intranet to customer experience...

The contact centre environment presents a specific set of challenges for the intranet manager. I think of it as a real no-nonsense test of the usefulness and usability of the site. Where employees in office-based roles may be able tolerate poor performance of the intranet to some degree, those in customer facing roles are under continual pressure to deliver answers and beyond this, an increasingly high quality customer experience. In this situation, issues such as out-of-date content and poor navigation are magnified and can quickly earn the intranet a bad reputation, while CSRs (customer service representatives) seek out workarounds such as asking colleagues, notes on desks and files on shared drives. Many contact centres “get by” in this way, potentially with a real lack of understanding at a senior level of how the intranet can support the strategy and help them to “get ahead”.

More and more, contact centre leadership has shifted from a numbers game of turning around as many calls as possible to balancing this with a qualitative focus of providing a customer experience that will meet the expectations of an increasingly demanding and savvy clientele. The intranet should be a key support in delivering this experience. However, what you still see in many organisations is the CSR having to translate from a variety of tools and resources to create this customer experience “on the fly”. Observing a CSR in this situation can see them moving between CRM systems, emails of hints and tips, notes on the desk, and questions asked to colleagues (and more!) while the customer is often put on hold. Just one simple example demonstrates this “translation” overhead very well: if a CSR follows a procedure or policy that is written in very formal language and littered with company terminology, they have to translate this in the moment into a more conversational style with terminology that will make sense to the customer. Factors such as this add up and can lead to low first contact resolution and poor experiences for customers, not to mention low engagement for agents.

With the contact centre generally regarded as a cost centre, getting investment into the intranet in this area can be a real challenge. For intranet managers wanting to make a convincing case for this investment, linking the intranet into the key drivers for the leadership team is paramount. For example, agent competence and confidence, first contact resolution, customer and agent satisfaction are all areas where the intranet is a key enabling factor. And beyond these direct links, there are important questions around how the knowledge in the contact centre is integrated and re-used via the intranet to create a consistently high quality experience across customer touch points (such as retail stores and online web support) and help drive product development and marketing in a more customer-centric manner. For contact centre leadership wanting to craft a customer experience that will set them apart (in a positive way) from the competition, the development of the intranet as an information and knowledge resource should be ignored at their peril!