Overview:

Most customer support is handled via call centers staffed by a large number of front-line customer service representatives. These front-line representatives are tasked with either resolving the customer’s technical issues or referring the customer’s request to other more experienced Tier1/Tier2 personnel who have more specific domain expertise to resolve the inquiry. Most call centers are large operations that have the majority of front-line representatives. This analysis will focus on IT technical support call centers supporting the internal employees of Fortune 500 companies with an average employee count over 100,000.

What resources are being used?

The key resources supported by the IT call center are 1) Personnel tasked with responding to customer issues 2) Knowledge Base Articles which contain written instructions about how to resolve technical problems and 3) Service Tickets which document a specific instance of a customer calling in with a technical issue. The combination of these resource determines the key task of the call center which is to satisfactorily address a pre-defined number of technical support calls within a period amount of time. The capacity of a call center is firstly determined by the aggregate number of personnel that are able to respond to phone calls. Secondly, the ability of any given call center person’s ability to resolve a customer inquiry is determined by the quality and accuracy of the Knowledge Base Articles that are created to help resolve the issue. A Knowledge Base Article documents the recommended steps to resolve a specific type of technical issue. Lastly, the service tickets are the key resource that enables the call center to determine the volume of technical service calls and calculate the amount that are resolved versus the amount that are open.

Why are the resources organized?

Service Tickets are organized because they categorize and classify what are the nature of the technical support issues faced by customers calling the call the center. This allows the call center to spot trends and staff appropriately. For example, if a Fortune 500 company is rolling out a new operating system upgrade, the amount of service tickets opened pertaining to the operating system can alert call center management to increase the amount of front-line staff to answer the call volume. Also, one of the key categorizations of the service tickets is between the states of “opened” versus the state of “closed”. This is especially crucial because call centers often have pre-defined service level agreements pertaining the maximum amount of time that “open” tickets can remain open without appropriate resolution.

Knowledge base resources are organized because the speed and accuracy of front-line technician’s ability to find the pertinent resolution to a customer technical issue determines the capacity of a call center to meet pre-defined service level agreements. Therefore the call center needs to provide comprehensive descriptions of each knowledge base article such that the front line technician can easily locate that specific knowledge base article when needed in a short amount of time.

People are organized into specific technical domains to answer customer issues because the call center can increase the accuracy of problem resolution by maximizing the individual technician’s expertise by training staff thoroughly in pre-defined technical domains. People also need to have clear delineations of what types of technical issues are scoped appropriate for the specific role and what technical issues should be delegated to other staffers with increased technical knowledge. Again, this strict triaging of capability is to maximize the ability of the call center to “close” service tickets.

How much are the resources organized?

All three key resources of the call center are highly organized to increase maximum efficiency supporting the key goal of resolving customer service tickets as fast as possible.

Service Tickets are highly structured records that require the front-line personnel to accurately and consistently provide descriptions of technical service issues. Each service ticket is assigned a unique identifier with descriptive information such as demographics concerning the employee calling, descriptions of the IT resources generating the technical issue and lastly information concerning the technical problem encountered. All of these sets of descriptions often conform to a specific vocabulary or taxonomy defined by the call center. This is to ensure consistency for the call center management to eventually spot trends in the customer support issues. Also, consistency is required to accurately determine what are the most common new “open” issues that are not resolvable with guidance from the current Knowledge Base articles. This information can help direct personnel resource to which technical support topics merit the generation of instructions to resolve the issue. The service tickets are also highly descriptive because service tickets are often delegated to different personnel who much be able to get the full context of the customer support issue without having the ability ask the customer to provide more information. A key example is escalating a technical support issue from front-line technicians to more trained Tier1/Tier2 experts.

Knowledge Base articles are also highly organized because the call center intends to provide search and discovery mechanisms with both high recall and high precision for frontline technicians. To ensure high recall, Knowledge Base articles often have a hierarchal categorization according to the common customer service complaints. To improve precision, each knowledge base article must provide sufficient description of the symptoms of the technical service in which the knowledge base article is intended to address allowing front-line technicians to expend time reading further into the actual resolution steps.

When are the resources organized?

Service Tickets are organized at the time a customer calls the call center providing descriptions of their technical issue. Sometimes part of the organization can be pre-determined through unaided categorization through telephone prompts. Customer often must navigate through a variety of telephone prompts such as “Press 1 for X issue” or “Press 2 for Y issue”. The rest of the organization is determined based on the front-line technician’s description of technical service issues. Knowledge Base Articles are organized by Tier 1/Tier 2 domain experts. These people are able to take multiple instances of technical problems and create an abstraction containing a generic solution that can apply to a general situation that satisfy common criteria. Knowledge Base Articles are often created when there are multiple open service tickets that have been escalated to tier1/tier2. Therefore, to speed time to resolution by frontline technicians, Tier1/Tier2 creates the Knowledge Base article that can be searched and retrieved by frontline technician bypassing the need to escalate. Management organizes people into the different service tiers based on their initial expertise capabilities or trained capabilities when they are hired to work in the call center.

Who does the organizing?

Front-line technicians must be trained to accurately organize service tickets because they provided the initial description information that governs all future action such as issue escalation or generation of aggregation of call volume statistics. Every person in the call center must provide sufficient descriptions of resources for inputting information into Service Tickets. This is because to resolve an “open” service ticket multiple call center people might have to interact with an instance of a service ticket to input information. For example, if a front-line technician is unable to resolve a customer issue, that front-line technician needs to escalate the service ticket to other staffers. When another person is assigned the task to resolve a service ticket issue, that person often times must enter information into the service ticket describing what actions have been taken.

Other considerations

Call centers often have high turnover of personnel especially on the front-line tier. Knowledge transfer is especially important because the call center is often training a large number of rookie employees who often have no significant prior experience in the technical field.  The ability for the call center to record knowledge into searchable information systems allows the call center to more easily use that knowledge to onboard new employees. Imagine if all of the knowledge management was governed purely through word of mouth references. The call centers would have inconsistent problem resolution statistics because many people will be “re-building the wheel” to create resolutions to problems that have already been faced before by other employees.