Forrester Research recently asked 5000 of them, “What created the biggest pain when you contacted a business for customer service?” The answer was loud and clear—the lack and consistency of agent knowledge, followed by the difficulty of finding relevant answers on company websites. The feedback sounded like a broken record for customer service pain across a whole bunch of industries. So what is driving this dissatisfaction? We think the following issues have something to do with it.

Self-service and peer-to-peer service adoption continues to rise, with millennials leading that trend. Naturally, questions that come to agents are more complex, posing a big challenge to a labor pool, where the high average churn rate of 40% makes the problem worse.

Contact center training budgets are ironically being cut by as much as 60 percent. This is against the backdrop of agent roles becoming more complex. Still considered cost centers by many businesses, contact centers can ill-afford to keep agents in perpetual training mode. With inadequate training, agents try to improvise with their answers, leading to repeat calls, compliance issues, and customer complaints.

Legacy knowledge management (KM) systems are not smart enough for the modern contact center. Moreover, many organizations confuse data, and document/content management systems with KM. With such systems, agents are unable to find the “answer needle” in the ever-expanding information haystack in a timely manner, when the customer is on the line.

Channel-specific knowledge silos compound this problem, creating multiple “right” answers that frustrate agents and consumers alike.

Why knowledge first? Read the full article