BY KATHY PORTEUS
In 1990, before the term "knowledge management" entered the consciousness of the support marketplace, managers of what was then AT&T Consumer Product Division's national call centers found themselves shaking their heads and saying, "there must be a better way." At that time, in order to provide responses to 5,000,000 consumer calls a year, customer support associates manually consulted a 1,000 page procedural handbook and eight product binders containing more than 5,000 pages. Not surprisingly, it took eight to ten weeks to train call-center staff. Additional staff was required to collect product data and compile and distribute updated pages to each person's 'library' of product information. By the time product engineers got their hands-on technical knowledge collected from customer and support feedback, the data were nearly 30 days old. Customer satisfaction was being met, but at a high and increasingly unacceptable level of energy and expenditure.
Fast forward this scene to the present. AT&T Consumer Products Division is now the Consumer Products Division of Lucent Technologies*, which also encompasses the former Bell Laboratories. More than half of all U.S. households use Lucent products. 400 products, including cellular, cordless, and corded phones, answering systems and telephone accessories, are supported through call centers in Creve Cour, MO and Maitland, FL. The 5,000,000 customer calls have grown to over 6,000,000 calls annually. Customer satisfaction continues to be strong. But instead of product binders everywhere, there are small groups of visitors that tour the call centers to view a highly successful implementation of a knowledge management solution.
Today, there are no paper-based product binders at Lucent's call centers. Call Center associates now require just two weeks of training. Rather then an average call taking six minutes, today's average support call lasts just three minutes. A staff of seven technical supervisors has been reduced to two people who support 250 call center associates. Technical information and product feedback gathered from customer calls are immediately accessible. Warranty repair costs are reduced by 30%. Costs of answering customer support calls have been slashed by half. The overall operating customer support budget has been reduced by 30+ percent. With the ability to address new product symptoms within 24 hours, Lucent can confidently roll out 40 new products this year. No wonder outside visitors want a peek at Lucent's support centers.
Armed with a complete assessment of their call center operations and their vision for a world-class call center, Operations Manager LeeAnn McClain and her co-workers sought out commercially available solutions. This search was open-ended in that Lucent did not specify specific cost reduction goals. Rather, McClain reports, "we presented our vision and a thick book of high-level requirements to several companies, and asked them what they could do."
Advantagekbs (AKBS) of Edison, NJ, responded quickly to Lucent's inquiry. AKBS provides problem resolution software and professional services for automating help desk, customer support, and call center operations. AKBS's IQSupport Application Suite uses an expert system troubleshooting paradigm, known as the Augmented Fault Model, which is based on a structured and detailed technique for representing failures, their symptoms, corrective measures and the procedure to confirm or rule out those failures.
According to McClain, AKBS demonstrated what its IQSupport solution would look like to Lucent's call center associates. AKBS also demonstrated how the knowledge being captured by IQSupport could be applied to back-end systems. "What AKBS was able to show us was amazing. The company's IQSupport solution matched our needs and expectations. It is amazing that something that we installed in 1994 in a computer-based environment remains cutting-edge today," McClain continues.
When a customer calls one of Lucent's product support 800 numbers, the call center associate walks the customer through to a solution by simply reading questions prompted by the software. Whatever answer the customer gives leads the call center associate to a different path of troubleshooting. This makes the customer support process very consistent, yet is based specifically on the problem about which the customer is calling.
Any new symptoms that the customers report are forwarded to Lucent technicians. These technicians research and resolve the issue, contact the customer with the solution and update the system overnight. Sometimes, it is not a new solution that is required, but a revision of the paths that lead to the solution. If other customers call with the same problem in the future, their inquiries can be resolved by the front-line call center.
* At this moment, Lucent Consumer Products has merged with Philips (Electronics) Consumer Products to form a global support-chain. Both the U.S. and European proprietary systems are being abandoned in favor of a commercially available standard. The main requirement of this standard is compatibility with the IQSupport Suite, the only existing component being carried over to the global initiative.
Excerpt from Service News Productivity Series-Knowledge, July 1997
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