case KM II (Marconi)
On the Front Line
Tactics Online complements the new system. “The data stored in KnowledgeBase are specific troubleshooting tips and hints on our various product lines,” says Zehra Demiral, manager of knowledge management systems. “Tactics Online, on the other hand, is more of a doorway for customers to come into our customer support organization. From there, customers can access KnowledgeBase or their service requests or our online training manuals.”
Technical support agents now rely on KnowledgeBase for the latest solutions to customers’ product and systems problems. Level 1 agents answer all incoming calls, solve customers’ problems when possible, record the calls in the company’s CRM system and transfer the more difficult calls up the line to Level 2 agents. Level 2 agents, meanwhile, are the heart of the organization, composing about 70 percent of the technical support organization. They handle the more difficult calls and troubleshoot and diagnose equipment and network problems. “They’re the majority of our knowledge users and contributors,” says Breit. “They write up a synopsis of the call and feed it into KnowledgeBase [on an ongoing basis] so that other agents can refer to the solution later.”
After Level 2 agents submit their knowledge “raw” to a holding queue, Level 3 agents confirm the accuracy of the information, make any necessary changes and then submit the document to Demiral. (Level 3 agents also act as consultants, helping Level 2 agents solve problems and serving as intermediaries between the agents and the company’s engineering departments.) The entire process of updating the KnowledgeBase system with a new solution typically takes between three days and two weeks.
Changing Roles
As Breit anticipated, implementing KnowledgeBase has changed the agents’ roles. Level 1 agents, for example, now do more in-depth troubleshooting because they have more information available at their fingertips. In fact, they solve twice as many calls themselves (50 percent instead of 25 percent) in a shorter time (10 minutes versus 30 minutes). Since Level 1 agents can handle more calls, this group has doubled in size during the past two years.
The transition wasn’t quite as painless, however, for the Level 2 and Level 3 agents. Indeed, their roles changed significantly. “Rather than simply submitting HTML pages to Tactics Online, they were now asked to analyze the problems in a very procedural way and create diagnostic ’trees,’” says Breit. “That’s a more analytical way to think through a problem. Most of these guys had thought in terms of ’what is the fastest way to solve a problem’ rather than ’what is the most efficient way to solve a problem.’”
With hundreds of people submitting solutions, Marconi tended to get a lot of wheel reinvention. “There can be five or six ways to solve the [same] problem, but there’s one way that’s most efficient,” Breit says. To unearth and disseminate the most efficient solutions, agents were required to flowchart each of their solutions for the first three months following KnowledgeBase’s launch. “It’s amazing how many [agents] were unconscious of their own methodologies,” says Breit. “It was somewhat painful, but they eventually felt they benefited because they understood how they solve problems.”
As a result, agents now create technical solutions for customers in the most efficient?and logical?way possible instead of simply offering a “quick and dirty” solution. Think of the difference between simply being told what keys to strike on your PC and being taught how your software works and the logic behind executing a certain sequence of keystrokes. Once you actually understand how the product works, you can use the software more effectively and resolve more problems yourself.
Agents also had to change the way they present the solutions to customers. “We wanted to provide a collaboration tool for employees and a library source for our customers,” says Demiral. “Engineers wanted to provide a lot of detailed information yet we needed a degree of simplicity for customers. Most of the time, the immediate focus is on what a great collaboration tool this is and how it overcomes geographical distance among agents. Then I have to remind [agents] that this is a tool that we want customers to use and that they’ll have to organize, write and present the content with customers in mind.”
