For busy people seeking product
information by telephone, nothing is as annoying as being put on hold,
waiting for what seems like an eternity, and then being told incorrect
information. Despite assurances that “your call is important to us,”
canny consumers are increasingly skeptical that companies are doing
their “very best” to serve them.
GOOD
CUSTOMER SERVICE IS CRITICAL
But smart companies in a
competitive environment understand the critical nature of good customer
service. Rogers Communications, for one, has more than 4,000 customer
service staff to serve its more than seven million telephone, cable and
wireless subscribers. Keeping these people up to date with the latest
company merchandise and offerings as well as providing technical
support is always a daunting task.
But recently, as a result of
Rogers integrating recent corporate takeovers and introducing new
products, the company faced further challenges. Its customer service
representatives now had to manage four different knowledge systems
stored in an outdated “legacy” information technology badly in need of
replacement. Frustrated, Rogers turned to Bay Consulting Group for help.
ASSESS BUSINESS
REQUIREMENTS THEN IT
For John Huehn, Rogers
vice-president of client management, the test was to find someone who
could “articulate our business requirements and then translate those
requirements into the appropriate IT system.” Bay Consulting’s Dave
Johnston was that person, and “he did a great job.”
Marrying IT and business needs is
one of Dave’s specialties. When he arrived on the Rogers scene, Dave
found the customer service reps struggling with documents of up to 40
pages, some in binders, others computerized in difficult-to-manage
software. Call-in customers would often be put on hold while the rep
searched for an answer, frequently relying on the “tribal knowledge” of
more experienced colleagues. “The biggest problem was that the reps did
not have the proper data to do their jobs,” recalls Dave. “They had
inadequate information delivered inadequately.”
For Dave, the Rogers assignment, which took him 15 months, full-time
and then some, was one of the biggest change management jobs in his 35
-year consulting career.
USER TEAMS KNOW THEIR
BUSINESS
To begin, Dave set up a team of 10
reps at the Rogers call centre in Kitchener, Ont. He worked with them
for several months, understanding their jobs and defining their
business/systems requirements for better information and data. He
created, revised and refined his own Top Ten list of why customers call
in. The reasons ranged from service complaints to purchase requests and
billing inquiries. Each call required different material (i.e.,
information and relevant content).
“In a situation like this,” says
Dave, “you need to ‘architect’ your information. It’s just like
building a home. Every room has a purpose, and everyone knows what to
expect when one enters that room. For example, bathrooms and kitchens
have sinks, bedrooms have closets, living rooms have chairs, etc.
“For Rogers, we needed to organize
and classify their vast amounts of background material so that the reps
would know where to go for answers. And they had to have confidence
that they could find the appropriate answers—and find them quickly. The
information had to be short, clear, accurate and relevant to the
customer—and easily accessible for the rep.”
SIMPLIFY, CONSOLIDATE AND
ORGANIZE
Guided by this principle, Dave
reduced thousands of documents of mostly “disorganized facts” into
simple solutions found on one to three pages. The material was arranged
so that the reps could access it from different starting points,
whether it be by a simple search engine or by calling up the particular
business process prompting the customer call such as the Purchase of
New Equipment or Technical High-Speed Internet Support.
There were many adjustments along
the way as Dave met daily and then weekly with the front line customer
reps and their team leaders. “I was really pleased with how quickly
these people understood the real needs of their customers and made
suggestions for improvement,” he recalls. “We learned early on that the
reps often lacked sufficient information to satisfy their customers.
Too often, the customer rep would have to end the call, research the
request and phone the client back.”
STAGE DESIGN AND
IMPLEMENTATION
To simplify implementation, Dave
and Rogers first focused on the company’s new home phone service. Being
a new product, it presented the opportunity for a fresh start without
any baggage from the past.
After designing an information
response system for the home phone, Dave shifted to cable TV and
Internet where he found some 10,000 product and service documents with
vast duplication. This time, Dave needed to establish three teams of
customer reps to develop the new information system and technology. In
the end, he reduced the number of documents by about 60 per cent,
reduced their size on average by 75 per cent, increased the information
relevancy by large orders of magnitude of 2 – 10 times and increased
the information accuracy on average by 250 per cent. On the IT solution
side, he created a single IT/Library system to replace the five legacy
systems.
GOOD SYSTEMS = GOOD MORALE
= GOOD SERVICE
Rogers expects Dave’s
recommendations will improve customer service as well as employee
morale. “The new system is more straightforward and easier to use,”
says Huehn. “We expect service to be faster, more accurate and have
more first-call resolution of customer inquiries.”
Specifically, calls should be
dealt with more quickly, reducing overtime. And they should be handled
more efficiently, increasing customer satisfaction. “The reps will have
more confidence in the information they deliver to customers, and the
customers will have more confidence in the information they receive,”
says Huehn. “It will be a faster and crisper service experience for
everyone.”
