What If Any Agent Could Take Any Call?

Think about the agents in your contact center and the agents who handle Web chat. What if any agent could take any call? What if your agents could follow the right process, just as you had envisioned it? What if your agents didn't have to alt_tab through 15 applications on their desktop? What if your agents didn't need to use post-it notes and index cards? What if you didn't have to spend months and months on training agents? Read more

The Contact Center in a Profit-Centric Service Organization

In a study of more than 150 service organizations, the best-in-class had a first-call resolution rate of 87%—stunning results compared to an average of 57% for the remaining firms. The same high-performing bunch currently exhibit a 92% customer-retention rate while having reduced their service costs by 8% over the past 12 months. Read more

How to Profit from the Shift to Multi-Channel Customer Service

For multi-channel service to truly meet the needs of the modern customer, it must do more than simply provide many channels. Too often, each new channel is implemented as a silo, resulting in multi-channel service that is disconnected and inconsistent. Read more

Guidelines for a Successful Multi-Channel Service Strategy

Switching from self-service to getting help from an agent shouldn't mean starting over. Too often it does. Read more

Companies Find Faster Call Resolution Key to Cost Center Profitability

By Marchai Bruchey. As companies face a backlash against offshore call centers, or are simply finding it was not the right solution for their particular business, they are bringing service back to the U.S. This doesn't need to be cost-prohibitive however. Read more

KANA KCS Verified Solutions - How KANA Supports and Extends Knowledge-Centered Support

KCS provides levels of business agility, cost savings and knowledge quality that are essential to dealing with the exploding inquiry volumes, skyrocketing customer expectations and complex technologies that challenge support organizations every day. KANA is a KCS-certified vendor with knowledge management solutions that meet the extensive functionality required to support a KCS-focused support organization. Read more

Six Best Practices in Agent Knowledge Management

How do you make sure your customers are having good service experiences with your brand? You measure the experience and adapt accordingly. Read more

The Search is On

This highly informative white paper delves into the subject of optimizing search engines and knowledge bases specifically for use by customer service agents and customers themselves, via web self-service portals. It explores specific strategies to help your agents and customers find the answers they want faster and easier than ever before. Read more

Best Practices to Accelerate the Quality, Consistency and Speed of Email Service

Customer service delivered via email can lower your cost per contact with customers by 75-80% compared with phone support. That's the reason you can't afford not to use it. Read more

Increase Customer Self-Service Success with KANA Web Collaboration

Customers appreciate the speed and convenience of self-service on the websites of their favorite brands. If they run into difficulty, however, they're inclined to just give up on your online services—or on you. Read more

KANA Secure Messaging Drives Compliance with Privacy Regulations

Email is notoriously vulnerable to attack. And securing email content is especially important in today's world — where customers may send confidential information such as credit card and social security numbers in free form text. Read more

PCI Data Security Compliance in KANA Applications

How KANA Applications Help Companies Comply with PCI Data Security Standards. The PCI DSS standard offers companies an effective path to securely process, store, and transmit sensitive data. Read more

Watson Raised the Bar, So Can You: Set the Standard for Smart Self-Service with Context-Driven Search

Using the web as a channel for customer self-service is a winning scenario for companies looking to reduce service costs while at the same time create a satisfying customer service experience. Unfortunately, too often customers find it difficult and cumbersome to find the answers they seek. The secret is context-driven search. Read more

Knowledge-Infused Processes: The Solution to Self-Service Woes

Customers trying to resolve their issues using online self-services are looking to achieve one thing: resolve their issues! Promptly. The experience, however, is often a one-dimensional search that keeps on going. Read more

Overcoming the Barriers to Channel Shift

Government organizations worldwide are transitioning to online self-service as a way to deliver public services cost-efficiently through the channels citizens use in their everyday lives—smartphones, PCs, tablets, etc. Find out what's needed for a successful transition to new media. Read more

Knowledge-Enabled Software

As human service providers face the prospect of replacing their aging and increasingly fragile information systems, numerous technology approaches compete for the mindshare of commissioners and CIOs. This paper explores lessons learned in human services technology solutions over the past thirty years and proposes criteria for future success. Read more

311

Some cities have hundreds of phone numbers for accessing city services—some have thousands. For citizens in need of service it's a maze and the easy way out is to dial 911. Read more

The Case for the Virtual Front Office

Faced with the challenge of replacing multiple aging information systems, each of which holds just a partial view of a family's situation, human service agencies are seeking ways to deliver better constituent service while renewing information systems in a low-risk, evenly paced manner. This paper explores the concept of the virtual front office, a powerful strategy for modernizing the delivery of human services while streamlining the way agencies engage with their clients. Read more

Legacy Systems Replacement

As CIOs puzzle over how to replace their legacy systems in an orderly manner, the problem of migrating their interfaces looms large. Faced with hundreds of interfaces that share no common data interchange standards, project planners are grappling with a tangle of dependencies. Read more

Enterprise Case Management

This paper examines the role of enterprise case management in helping government deliver on its mission of effective service delivery. It discusses the challenges government faces in coordinating case management across multiple departments and disciplines to deliver truly first-class constituent service, and outlines the key requirements of an enterprise case management solution. Read more

The Case for a Multichannel Analytics System

If you're simply monitoring keywords in social media to put out fires, you're missing out on what all the chatter really has to offer—a wealth of information about the customer experience, your products and your brand. Keywords don't reveal customer sentiment, but social media analytics can. Read more

Volume vs. Meaning: Effective Customer Listening Requires More Than Keywords

Is it your job to listen to and analyze social media messages and direct customer feedback about your product, brand, or service? Are you leading corporate initiatives that leverage consumer-generated content to uncover meaningful insights about your business? Read more

Customer Listening and Machine Learning

Most companies make great efforts to listen to their customers. They may sponsor a survey, assemble a focus group, or even hire a market research firm. Such efforts emphasize getting specific answers to specific questions, i.e., structured data. Read more

Why Not Do It By Hand? Manual Processing Vs Automated Listening

Increasing the effectiveness of captive and independent agents is crucial to promoting and sustaining growth in the insurance industry. To increase agent loyalty, enhance their readiness to sell and improve the quality of the customer experience, insurance companies need to offer highly efficient ways to access and leverage knowledge; automate transactional processes; and deliver powerful multi-channel communications that provide customers with interaction availability and choice. Read more

Automated Listening vs. Keyword-based Monitoring

The monitoring of user-generated content has become increasingly important as companies seek to mine large volumes of text-based brand conversations across today's complex web of customer interaction channels. These include both direct feedback (web sites, surveys, emails, discussion boards) and indirect sources in social media (forums, review sites, blogs, Twitter, social networks, etc.). Read more

Best Practices for Integrated Listening

Listening to customers does not mean the same thing today as it did five years ago. Today consumers have found strength in numbers. In essence, the community is becoming the consumer. Socialization has dramatically reduced the barriers to group communication and organization. This is a huge risk for companies who can now watch missteps spread through an entire universe of critics, fans and self-appointed journalists, many of whom are not even customers. Read more