Contact centers are facilities in enterprises that handle inbound and outbound calls from end-users of various services such as information technology, insurance, banking, etc. Today’s contact centers are human-intensive and knowledge-intensive, involving millions of contact center agents answering end-users’ questions and solving their problems. As contact centers seek to increase efficiency and reduce cost, two big challenges are: a) to enable end-users to help themselves, reducing the number of calls; and b) increase the efficiency of agents in knowledge creation and updates. This paper introduces an end-user self-enablement portal that dynamically updates descriptions of commonly occurring problems and their associated solutions. We also present agent-facing tools for more efficiently targeting and handling solution documentation efforts. In effect, we transform today’s contact center processes. We validate our approach through a pilot conducted in an enterprise help desk operation for IT support.
By: Sinem Güven, Mark Podlaseck, Gopal Pingali
Published in: RC24421 in 2007
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