To retain customers and be competitive, contact centres need to overcome obstacles to providing excellent standards of customer service. This has to be high on the agenda for any business, particularly now, as unhappy customers have so many channels on which to air their complaints about a company – and competitors to turn to.

The challenge in the current harsh economic environment is to improve customer service while at the same time delivering efficiency savings and reducing costs. Empowering call handling agents with the relevant information needed to respond quickly and accurately to customer problems is essential. This then avoids the all-too-often painful scenario where the agent does not have the information required to help - resulting in wasted time, call escalations, call backs and ultimately frustrated and unhappy customers.

Rostrvm Solutions, which designs, develops and supports the rostrvm suite of applications that make contact centres and back office operations work effectively, has teamed up with Knowledge Powered Solutions Ltd (KPS) to provide an answer to this problem.

Rostrvm’s CallGuide, which integrates with multiple desktop applications so agents are served with all the information they need via a single screen, generates context-sensitive scripts.  Through the partnership, CallGuide can now deliver KPS’s ‘Knowledge Management’ system to the desktop.

KPS provides a world-class knowledge management system called ‘Universal’. This helps agents to find the answer to customers’ questions quickly and easily through a natural language search (they ask a question in their own words). Not only that but it allows the capture of tacit knowledge that resides inside employees’ heads, allowing users to share and collaborate more effectively.

Sue Waller, Business Development Manager at KPS, said, “Through Universal, KPS has achieved 70% reduction in call escalations to second line agents and 20% increases in first call resolution rates in in-bound customer service environments. Universal leverages the existing information available in a business, so you don’t have to migrate any data into a new system; you keep it in its original place - databases, file shares, html etc.”

Andy Willson of Rostrvm Solutions said, “CallGuide with Universal enable the agent to be more efficient and productive and provide substantial savings in the time taken for employees, customers and partners to find relevant information. Ultimately, this can result in significant cost savings – not to mention happier customers!”