Talking About Expert Agents

Of the many Forums (roundtable discussions) on UCStrategies.com, my current favorite is about Expert Agents and unified communications. By now many of you know that I love talking and writing about Expert Agents because it combines two of my coverage areas – unified communications and contact centers. The forum, which you can find at https://ucstrategies.com/forum.aspx?id=4543&g=posts&t=4590, has been focusing on some of the challenges that companies implementing Expert Agents need to consider in order to best utilize the experts and to ensure that agents, experts, and customers are happy.

Let’s back up a bit and make sure we all understand what I mean by Expert Agents. There are often times when contact center agents don’t have the information they need to respond to or resolve a customer’s inquiry, and need to turn to an appropriate subject matter expert. Expert agents are those knowledge workers or subject matter experts within (or even outside of) an organization that can help formal contact center agents provide faster and better responses to customer inquiries, resulting in the elusive “first contact resolution,” or FCR.

Unified communications – particularly presence and IM capabilities – has made it easier than ever to leverage expert agents and make them part of the customer service cycle. Using presence awareness technology, contact center agents can see the availability of the subject matter experts elsewhere within the organization, and can contact the expert in real time to either get the information they need via IM or the phone. In some cases they can conference in the expert to speak with the customer.

The technology for using expert agents is here today, and a limited number of customer service-focused companies have been using these tools. The tricky part is what I call the “personnel” issues, which are much more complex than the technology issues when discussing expert agents. Frequently, subject matter experts, whether engineers, insurance underwriters, financial professionals, etc., will not want to deal with customers, and want to be left alone to do their jobs. In many cases, these workers are too busy doing their regular jobs and don’t have the time (or interest) to deal with customers.

In our Forum discussion about expert agents, I noted that many companies are concerned about bombarding their experts with questions at all hours of the day, and asked what are some best practices around scheduling/leveraging those experts. A very thoughtful response from Michael Kropidlowski of Aspect provided some useful information. Michael noted, “What makes the contact center so uniquely positioned to leverage expert agents is the concentration of performance optimization technologies already in use. They can complement a unified communication strategy and help the contact center effectively schedule knowledge workers across the enterprise, determine availability to support customer interactions, or monitor these interactions to drive improvements in customer care.”

Michael went on to say that, “Workforce management for example, provides direct, real-time awareness of whether agents and expert agents are where managers have planned them to be. It allows for recalibrating the tasks allotted to agents based on how their presence and availability relates to the presence-state of the customers. Additionally, it provides a framework to direct specific types of customers towards specific agent.And workforce management software creates a template for extending that practice to the rest of the enterprise and to other kinds of expert agents who perform similar kinds of allocated tasks that depend on real-time awareness of external contexts. And, workforce management plays a key role in scheduling these experts in short timeslots, based on expected call volumes, which helps reduce the overuse of knowledge workers who are still trying to do their “day job” - a big concern of any UC strategy leveraging expert agent.”

What Michael didn’t say is that Aspect offers a suite of performance optimization and workforce management tools that can help companies leveraging expert agents. In addition, Aspect offers what it calls "Ask an Expert," which lets an agent within the contact center leverage Microsoft OCS’s IM and presence tools to be able to reach out to any expert, any individual, any knowledge source. An agent can be in the middle of a call with a customer, and if the customer asks a question that the agent can’t answer, the agent can search for any available expert. The agent doesn’t need to know who the expert is, and they can search for an expert by product area, by product category, or by area of expertise that's best needed.

This is one of the keys to making the use of expert agents work. In the discussion forum I asked about how to handle the situation when an agent utilizes certain experts because they're knowledgeable or helpful, but then it overburdens the expert when the agent keeps relying on them. Candace Berman of Aspect responded, “Companies can handle this issue in a variety of ways based on what makes the most sense for their business. Of course, without rules or processes in place, agents will escalate to experts they are familiar with or most comfortable with. This is what creates the situation of overburdening the experts. However, with the right workforce optimization tools and processes, organizations can determine which experts can address which specific types of situations and how often/for how many hours per day or week they should be made available to do so. Then, agents can see, using presence, who is available to handle certain escalations at a given time. This technology, and the associated processes, eliminates the risk of overburdening only those experts that agents prefer to reach out to over and over again and will give agents access to others who can help them in the same ways while keeping everyone's schedules and involvement in check.” This seems like a very reasonable way of handling the situation, leveraging the workforce management tools that the contact center already has.

Michael rejoined the discussion, explaining that when experts are configured, they are assigned a skill or set of skills that define their profile as an expert, and then agents can search for experts with specific skills that match the requirements for the customer interaction they are handling. Using presence capabilities, the agents receive a list of “available” experts with the skill set criteria they selected.

One question brought up in the forum by UCStrategies Expert Laura DiSciullo was, “How can organizations determine the value created by using experts with customers versus the value created by these individuals in their normal routines?” There needs to be a method in place to ensure quality and consistency, and to measure metrics across organizations. In other words, companies need to be able to define and measure value creation. And as Laura later pointed out, companies need to determine what to measure, and how to create relevant information from these measurements.

Aleassa Schambers of Aspect agreed, stating, “Performance management applications address this issue by allowing managers to continuously monitor, measure, and improve contact center business processes, as well as those that may extend into the enterprise. By providing scorecards and analysis that keep employees focused on the organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) – in this case it may be first call resolution - performance management drives improvements across sales, collections, and customer service processes to help companies realize cross-functional alignment with strategic goals. Performance management applications also enable a structured process through which a company can take steps to improve overall performance against key metrics. These applications can initiate and track actions automatically in response to an indication of a performance problem, thereby reducing reliance on supervisor and manager diligence. At the same time, executives can immediately see performance issues in their organization and track their resolution.”

It appears from this forum discussion that the tools we need already exist and have been used in contact centers for years. The key is to expand the use of these tools beyond the walls of the contact center, to experts and knowledge workers who can help the contact center provide better customer service. The combination of UC capabilities such as presence and IM, combined with contact center tools such as workforce management, reporting, skills-based routing, etc., can help organizations provide optimal service to customers, while increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

This paper is sponsored by Aspect.