How to Maximize Knowledge Management for Agent Effort and Productivity with Samantha Middlebrook

Transcript

Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Connected Knowledge from Upland Software on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright. The last time our guest was on the show, she led us through the lessons she’s learned from a career working with contact center leaders. This week, she’s back to turn the tables. What’s it like working as an agent today? What are the resources they count on to be responsive and effective? How are call center leaders best able to maximize knowledge management investments in support of their frontline representative? Samantha Middlebrook is Senior Director of Product Marketing and Management for Contact Center Productivity at Upland and she’s back to talk to you about your agents.
Samantha Middlebrook, welcome back. It’s good to see you.

Samantha Middlebrook:
Thanks so much, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Wright:
Can we start with, just in the form of a table-setting, can we start with a day in the life? What’s it like working as an agent in a mid-size to big call center today?

Samantha Middlebrook:
Well, I need to cast my mind back a number of years, more so than I would like to admit, I would say. If I think about my time being an agent, it can be pretty stressful. And not to date myself, if I think about the way that customers were interacting with me personally when I was an agent, there was really just two channels. It was voice—so phone—and then email. And I think, at the time, I wasn’t even handling email inquiries. That was for the more experienced agents, if you will, or a special agent that the contact center had to carve off and manage to try and handle those inquiries. So, pretty stressful. Things are changing all the time. You’re dealing with people and their emotions, and no one really wants to call a contact center. They’re calling because something’s gone wrong, and so for the agent, they already know that before they pick up the phone.

Pete Wright:
Right. Energies are already potentially peaked by the time the first, “Hello, how can I help you?” is spoken.

Samantha Middlebrook:
That’s right.

Pete Wright:
You mentioned the pace of change. Things seem to be moving more quickly today than ever in terms of, if I think of myself as a consumer, how I can reach out to the companies that support my life. How has that impacted call center operators?

Samantha Middlebrook:
Yeah, it’s a really great question. It is a consumer’s market. We are used to information being provided to us 24/7 at a really rapid rate. If we think about where we get our news from and our updates, that has completely changed. People and families aren’t sitting around and watching the 6:00 PM news. That’s what we say in Australia, 6:00 PM. I don’t know if that is specific to us. Do you watch the news at 6:00 PM, Pete?

Pete Wright:
We do have an evening news, but depending on time zone, it could be at 5:00 or 6:00. Yeah.

Samantha Middlebrook:
But if you think about where you would learn about things, in generations past, there would be certain areas—the news, newspapers. Now, everyone has access on their device, and they’re looking for options and searching for options on a number of different apps. That’s very much the case when we think about the buying journey for a customer who’s looking to find the best health insurer or the best car insurer or the best bank for a home loan. They’re already bombarded with so much information. They have access to so much information at their fingertips and through any channels that they want. When they come through to an agent, what they’re really looking for is an expert, that person that gives them reassurance, that person that definitely knows the answer, because maybe they’re making a really big life decision and they’re not comfortable with self-service. If the agent picking up the phone doesn’t sound confident or isn’t up-to-date, it starts to create a real distrust for those customers and has a huge flow-on effect for an organization as well.

Pete Wright:
You just made a point that I don’t think I’d ever thought of quite so clearly. There is nothing that creates more friction for me personally than when I contact somebody at a company and I feel like they don’t know more than I do.

Samantha Middlebrook:
Exactly right.

Pete Wright:
I think what you’re getting at is we’re in a knowledge economy where it could be very likely that the customer will know as much as you do, call center agent.

Samantha Middlebrook:
Especially if you have an organization where knowledge is siloed. What happens if the website is updated by a different team and that knowledge comes from one knowledge base? And the chatbot is updated by someone completely different? And then the agent, or the people on the frontline, as we often call them, because it can feel like a bit of a war zone, is the last to know? And that’s a complaint that we hear all the time, especially from customers that I’ve worked with where, “How do we support our agents in their time of need to support our customers in their time of need?” How do we not bombard agents, so they feel supported, but also confident?

If I think about the real impact of knowledge management, it’s changing an agent’s language from rather, “I think I know the answer is,” versus, “I know the answer is,” without the pauses, without the hold, without that fear that we start to evoke in the end customer because it just sounds like you don’t know what you’re talking about. And if you think about anyone in a role when they first start, it’s a very high-pressure situation. And quite often, even if they’re speaking with any customers, we’ve all been in a situation where we’re going into our first meeting or putting together our first piece of work and we don’t want to feel silly or look like we don’t know the answer. That is times a million when you’re actually speaking to an end customer and trying to solve their problems.

Pete Wright:
Just staying, for a moment, on our day-in-the-life scenario before we move on, what has this connected economy done to onboarding agents? When you start in a new role sitting at a desk and you’re ready to start taking calls, how has that effort changed by the knowledge management and availability of information that has just seemed to explode over the last decade?

Samantha Middlebrook:
It’s a really great question. If we think about, and I know we hate to keep raising it, but pre- and post-pandemic is really where contact centers started to shift in terms of how they were structuring training and how they were managing teams. Because pre-pandemic, there were very few contact centers globally that were willing to have a hybrid or work-from-home model with their contact center, which meant that training was very traditional. You had classroom training that was a mix of corporate induction training as well as learning everything that you needed to know to really handle those calls. And so, that looks like all of the product information, all of the policy information, all of the processes, depending on how complex an organization is.

Now, businesses can generally take two tracks. They either say that an agent on day one has to be this unicorn that can answer any calls. But quite often, what will happen is there is some form of call routing in place via an IVR that says, “Let’s only take these certain calls and give them to certain agents.” And so, then you start to segment out your workforce to say that these are the different inquiry types, and this is the complexity, and this is where we teach someone in their learning journey. What that means for an organization is that time to competency is expanded. And so, if you think about when you’re starting to get return on investment from your team, it’s stretched out further and further. If you think about the pressure that puts on other functions in a contact center, your workforce team as an example, they have to think about all the calls coming in, the different categories those fit into, how they can slice and dice that to the different agents you have available to then essentially pick up the calls or the chats or whatever you’re doing there.

That was the traditional way. The pandemic forced us to think differently, and what we’re seeing a lot more of is that micro learning strategy that says, “Only show me as much as I need to know, but provide knowledge, when I need it, in a format that makes sense to me.” The up-and-coming generations, especially because we know that contact centers often have quite young individuals, is generation now. They don’t want to read a lot. They want to see those short snippets. It’s TikTok generation, where, “Only show me what I need to know, what’s trending, what makes sense for my customer, so I can take that and add my own flair and then move on to the next thing.”

Pete Wright:
Well, I think that makes for a fantastic transition to one of the more important topics that you’ve been thinking about and talking about, which is on agent productivity. As we talk about greater connectivity to the brands that I as a consumer have across all sorts of different modalities, voice, chat, and email. With all of these tools, how are agents being trained and leveled up to manage that connectivity. And are they being more effective and more productive as a result?

Samantha Middlebrook:
Yeah, it’s a really great question. I think, more and more, what we are really seeing is our human touchpoint. So, our agents inside a contact center are really there to help level up the experience play for customers because we know that customer experience is such a differentiator for many organizations, especially ones that are super competitive. There are some inquiries that are very easily handled by a self-service. But as humans, we want human interaction. When we come through to that agent, we want to experience things like empathy. We want to have someone on the other end of the line who has a genuine concern or interest in our well-being, if we’re talking for a health system or banking, finance, all of those kinds of things.

What we’re seeing more and more of is the ability for knowledge management not to be black and white and so process-driven, but more supporting an agent to be actively listening to the customer and embedding some of those customer experience frameworks into what they’re doing. Recommended wording, empathy prompts, tips and tricks—all of those things that you think about come really naturally to someone who is very tenured, but not so much that someone’s in those first three or six months of the role. Because they’re so focused on the systems and what to press and what to do that, they can’t actually listen to what the customer is saying and really help them problem-solve together, which is really why a customer is coming through to those human channels, for that connection and that reassurance that someone is going to help them and solve their issue.

Pete Wright:
I love that. And I’ve got just a brief side story. I’ve got a dear friend who’s a former attorney, and he started a company, completely separate company from the law, and it’s in stainless steel pipe fittings in Canada. Fantastic, right? All great. They have a customer support line, a small team now, of eight or ten people who manage their internal customer support. And he said, “When I was an attorney, I was an attorney and counselor at law, and I was a counselor far more than I was attorney. So I’m going to call this rank in our company customer support counselors.” And his response is, “That dramatically changed the way these people deal with our customers,” because they are, leading up to what you are talking about—they have a greater empathetic vibe and a greater incentive, by title alone, to help with context. “This thing that you’re dealing with, I can help you, and here’s why I can help you, and here’s why you might use it in this way.” I think that’s really, really beautiful.
It sounds like these kinds of tools are what might be being put in the hands of call center agents by way of well-trained, savvy managers. Am I off the mark?

Samantha Middlebrook:
No, that’s exactly right. And moving away from that follow-the-bouncing-ball approach to dealing with customer journeys is really important because, the simple stuff, we can deflect, and that’s okay. It’s the complex stuff that we need to handle really well. And so, if we think about the way that knowledge can be delivered to support those interactions, it’s less about it being static. No one wants to read a really long document as they’re trying to listen to a customer explaining their problem. That’s why we’re seeing the rise of things like virtual assistants from the agent side, the ability to interact with a chatbot as they’re speaking to a customer, and just get those tiny little snippets of what they need to move on to the next stage of what the customer’s asking. It also means that they can follow the flow of a customer conversation a lot more organically rather than just being really stuck in a rigid form that they may have been used to seeing before, like a training manual as an example. Because we’re not talking about technical troubleshooting all the time, and that’s a really important thing to remember.

Pete Wright:
Then let’s talk about some of these at-your- fingertips technologies that are shaping the future contact center. What are you seeing that is being implemented thoroughly now? What are you seeing on the horizon?

Samantha Middlebrook:
Yeah. The point that you mentioned is really key. It’s the at your fingertips, no one wants to leave what they’re doing, and what I mean, what they’re doing, the screen that they’re in, to go out and search somewhere else to find the answer that they need. I was talking to a colleague just prior around the concept of single pane of glass, and it’s something we’ve been hearing in the industry for a very long time. It almost feels a little bit redundant as we move further and further along technically because we know that organizations and agents access many, many different applications every time they’re interacting. And as these really big software companies build out these all- in-one solutions, there has to be a balance for the agent. So, making sure that we are working in harmony with the other applications that an agent is using. And so, what we mean by that is using the data and the intelligence that is already available to take that mental load off an agent.

Imagine a world, Pete, where if you’re already interacting with a customer and the customer has already given some details—maybe what they’re thinking about, what they’re thinking of asking, or what they’re really looking for through an IVR selection—wouldn’t it be better that that content or that knowledge that the agent needs is automatically popped straight to them as the call drops in? That’s the kind of things that we’re looking at. So, using APIs to really connect the agent experience so they don’t have to think about searching or pressing or, “What do I do here?” It’s just being delivered to them without them even having to consider that they may need to look for knowledge. And that’s a really important piece because, for really successful organizations, not having knowledge as a separate project or product that sits in the corner is really important. Because, when you bring it into everything else that an agent is interacting with, it just makes more sense, and they’re more likely to use it and feel guided and supported by what they’re doing.

Pete Wright:
We talk a lot about implementing a lot of these technologies that give the just-in-time, at-your-fingertips information to agents. Are you talking about potential risks of implementing these technologies, maybe age specifically to agent behavior, specifically to agent productivity, and awareness? Are there risks that we’re not talking maybe as fluently about as we should?

Samantha Middlebrook:
There’s always risks involved when you’re thinking about automating something. But there’s risks in both sides. There is a bigger risk of you creating a knowledge resource that nobody wants to use and then, in fact, that they don’t use it, and then they have some form of alternative. We talk a lot in the industry about the concept of tribal knowledge. Individuals within an organization hold the power of knowledge, and other people rely on them to answer the questions. It creates huge single points of failure within organizations. What happens if that person leaves? What happens if you don’t have a succession plan in place? What happens if five of your agents all have their customers on hold trying to get to that one person, Pete, if you’re the expert? And also, Pete, maybe you’re the expert, but you really feel like you know what you’re doing, and you probably did at a point in time, but the industry you work in changes rapidly and maybe you haven’t kept up to date and then it creates a huge-

Pete Wright:
Ouch, Samantha, really? Ouch.

Samantha Middlebrook:
And so, it just creates this cycle that happens within an organization where the people who were the champions before are almost anti-change and causing disruption. You have to weigh it up. When we talk about popping information or guiding someone through knowledge, it’s also understanding what the fit is for an organization, and not all agents are created equal. You have people with different learning styles, you have people with different competency levels, and how you choose to support them should be very different. And that’s the other key to success here when we’re talking about a knowledge strategy is it’s not a one-size- fits-all. And if you assume that all of your agents need the same level of support delivered in the same way, then you’re not going to win that battle.

Pete Wright:
All right. As we get toward wrapping up here, we have the patented Samantha Middlebrook magic wand that you get to wave over a contact center to make it the ideal contact center. Specifically in terms of knowledge management and productivity, what are you going to do 8:00 AM day one to level up?

Samantha Middlebrook:
Okay, so my magic wand. The first thing is all of the training that someone should receive should be through the knowledge management system. Having a separate learning management program that isn’t connected into how someone is supposed to be supported day one, that’s something that you really need to work with. Also, understand where your agent lives, so what screens are they in, what are the applications that they can’t live without, and make sure that your knowledge is right there alongside it.

If they’re in Salesforce, have your knowledge be feeding into Salesforce. If they’re in ServiceNow, then that’s where it should be. If they are interacting with bots on the outside world, then you should be delivering the agent via virtual assistant. I think anything that we can do that makes knowledge delivery shorter and sharper is going to help you on your bottom line when it comes to productivity in a contact center environment. And also make sure you engage the users. They have to have a role to play in this. They need to feel empowered to provide feedback. And you need to actually do something with the feedback as well, so they feel like they have ownership in the solution that they’re using every day.

Pete Wright:
I am, for the case of this conversation, I’m in HR, Samantha, and I’ve just invested a ton in this L&D system to train our call center folks. And yeah, we can’t make that switch to deliver training in the system that they’re supposed to be working in, in the knowledge management system. How do you convince me otherwise?

Samantha Middlebrook:
Yeah, it’s a really great question. And we’re never recommending a rip and replace of all the other products that happen in an organization because we would never win that battle. But day one should be talking about the knowledge management system and there should be references to it and links from your courseware. And a learning management system will always have a place in an organization. It has robust learning frameworks that you can port on audit trail, and you need that, especially in large, complex corporates. But this is about showing the toolkit that an agent will have right up front and letting them feel really comfortable with that, so teaching them to fish.

If they go out there day one, not knowing everything, but knowing that they have the knowledge that they need and it’s a few clicks away, or knowing how their search works or knowing how they get extra support, then that’s really what you want to achieve from that training because every single day for an agent will be different. Every single customer interaction should be different because, if we’re thinking about it black and white, then we’re not focusing on the experience, which is really why that customer’s coming in to speak to the agent.

Pete Wright:
It’s jazz. Customer support is jazz. Got to be able to improvise, right?

Samantha Middlebrook:
That’s right. That’s right.

Pete Wright:
It all comes back to jazz. Samantha Middlebrook, thank you so much for hanging out and talking about a day in the life of the agent.

Samantha Middlebrook:
No problem.

Pete Wright:
As always, I learned so much from you. Thank you so much for doing this, and thank you, everybody, for downloading and listening to this show. Make sure to swipe up. Check your links. We’ve got some links to resources where you can learn more about successful knowledge management implementations and how you can support your agents.

Thanks for your time and attention. We’d love to hear what you think. Just swipe up in your show notes. Look for that feedback link too. You can send us questions to any of our past guests and we’ll do our best to get those questions answered. On behalf of Samantha Middlebrook, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you right back here next time on Connected Knowledge.