are you looking for ways to solve your knowledge management challenges
berg hughes of ge healthcare provides you the answers in this call talk caramel video
he shares his criteria for selecting a kms system and the creative way he moved from simple document
management to true workflow knowledge management cutting agent's time to proficiency by 50 percent
and reducing the error rate to practically nil all while getting agents to take ownership of the
knowledge management system enjoy this fast-moving content-filled call talk caramel hello i'm bruce
belfury ceo of benchmark portal and this is call talk caramel video based on our regular call talk
audio episode for january 6 2021 which you can find on our website under resources today's topic
is knowledge management in the contact center as the complexity of customer interactions increases
the ability of contact centers to manage knowledge becomes more important agents
not only need accurate information they need it quickly and in a format that's intuitive will
reduce time to proficiency for new agents lower handle times improve first contact resolution
and drive customer satisfaction it's a pretty tall order so we're talking today with an expert on the
topic berg hughes who's the senior manager of call center operations for ge healthcare
welcome to the show burke thanks for having me bruce glad to be here this is a topic that's been
really important to us here at ge healthcare and glad to share anything i can about it
we really appreciate your your presence here so uh just for our audiences uh benefit burke has over
30 years of contact center leadership experience even though he looks like he's just 25 like i do
he designed and implemented the quality assurance program for staples north american
staples north american contact centers and led the first multi-channel contact center for staples
he served as vice president of consumer service at teleflora where he drove a 20 increase in
average order value and later became vice president of operations for buy seasons
where his teams regularly earned bizrate's circle of excellence award he is currently in his fifth
year as senior manager of call center operations for ge healthcare where his team recently achieved
the center of excellence recognition from benchmark portal a great accomplishment
indeed and a very accomplished career so berg your center at ge healthcare takes calls
really literally that can have life and death consequences could you explain for our listeners
the importance of knowledge management in that kind of environment you know one of the things we
talk about a lot is improving lives and moments that matter because ge manufactures healthcare
equipment everything from mris to ultrasounds but it's equipment that nobody's using it for fun
right it's a critical moment in your life for the life of a loved one when you're finding out what's
my diagnosis what's my treatment going to be those are truly the moments that matter most in our
lives and that's where ge healthcare wants to be there but because those moments are so critical we
cannot afford to make a mistake and that's where knowledge management and improving our knowledge
management system has been so important to us in addition to those those moments we're dealing with
nurses and doctors and medical technicians who are on the floor especially in the times of this
pandemic we know how stretched these folks are and the last thing they can afford to do is spend
extra time on us or have a mistake made and like you said the every call has the potential for life
and death situation we're always dealing with customers who have multi-million dollar service
relationships with us and these are some of the nation's largest hospital chains every one of
them has unique needs that we have to be able to accommodate and meet them where they live and then
all of that is an environment where we're highly regulated by the food and drug administration
and if you think about it an error that we made could literally shut down an emergency room
and it could cost a patient their life so that's why it's so important we don't make errors
and that's why knowledge management is critical to us absolutely absolutely no pressure right
well you know what caused the ge healthcare to re-examine its overall knowledge management
strategy this time around yeah i think ge has always done a great job of documentation
that goes without saying right we undergo audits every year we've got iso certification the issue
isn't that we have things documented and we know what we're supposed to do it's really how usable
is the way we had it documented on a four-minute phone call so when i started one of the first
things that i was asked to do was to lead an rfp on the outsourcer front looking for
a bpo who could help us not just in handling our contacts but also really help us move our customer
experience to the next level to take that step from good to great which is always a really tough
step to take and we were looking for somebody who could help us and all of that and an important
part of our bpo selection process was really who could help us the most with knowledge management
and as we went through that process we wound up finding a partner who has helped us able to help
us find and implement a great knowledge management system that works perfectly for where our need is
and being able to handle that four-minute phone call and get the right information
quickly and that was huge for us well you know i'd like to underline for our listeners that
bird wasn't just looking for something that worked he was really looking for something
transformative just think of what he said just now and in my experience when you do
that you always end up looking at knowledge and how it's shared in the organization
so when you started evaluating cam not options what were the most important factors
well for us because we have to be there 24 7 365 we literally can never afford to be down
we needed a high availability sas product that wouldn't put more strain on our i.t department
but would be something that's a software as a service uh we needed somebody with a proven
track record of success doing things that we were trying to accomplish uh we needed to have great
controls in place because we wanted the ability for our agents to contribute to that knowledge
but do it in a managed way um and at the end of the day we needed something with really strong
search capability that had ease of use for both our agents and our administrators the
ability to organize that information in a way that was logical to our users and and met them
again where their need was on that phone call getting the right information quickly yeah that's
a that's a great list of factors for uh sort of a requirements document really that you can use as a
checklist or a spreadsheet template to rank things in a structured way tell us more about finding the
right answer quickly in your highly complicated context yeah the the challenge i think with most
knowledge management systems is they're really not managing knowledge with the contact center in mind
they really tend to be more about document management if you think about what sharepoint was
and what a lot of knowledge management is it helps you find the right document but not specifically
that point that you need for the question that you have right now within that document our goal was
to try to meet those agents where they lived by by flowing out the common interactions that they had
and then building the knowledge into that workflow so if you look at our job guides what you would
see is they're actually really interactive at each point where there's a decision in that
workflow and it can fork the agent will select a radio button for their particular situation and
continue down that path seeing only the knowledge that applies to them and that's really been a game
changer for us that's huge that's huge so you're a big proponent obviously of organizing knowledge
in this kind of a workflow format is that something you've had experience with before ge
you know i think every contact center is different but when i was at buy seasons we were very very
highly seasonal so we're bringing in hundreds of agents for the halloween season for example and we
had good knowledge articles housed in sharepoint but what we found is and i think this happens in
a lot of contact centers that the agent jumps from problem to solution and they miss all of the steps
in between so they think they know the answer and as soon as they hear that initially they
want to solve the problem so we built something there that was pretty rudimentary but it walked
the agents through the workflow so somebody wanted to return something it would say is it over fifty
dollars under fifty dollars then are they the us or the canada and walk them through the steps to
that right answer um and really what we did there in a lot of ways is kind of what i used
foundationally here at ge to say let's take that workflow and flow it out but then add our
knowledge in at each separate step and stand at point along the way so that agents work through
that workflow but every bit of knowledge that they use is built into that workflow um and it's it's
really been a simple way to use kms for us and uh the agents have found it very easy to use for them
sounds great well they say the proof is in the pudding so tell us about the results your
knowledge management initiatives have had at ge healthcare you know we we had two very high level
and aggressive goals when we uh we added our kms um the first was really to reduce
the time to proficiency for our agents and the second was to reduce our error rate because we
already talked about how critical it is that we don't make mistakes and we don't have defects
so what we have seen is that the time to proficiency for our new hires was cut by 50
um so basically we cut three months off that time to proficiency and we defined proficiency
as being able to consistently meet the group averages for quality assurance and handle time
so both from an efficiency standpoint and a quality standpoint they're hitting our goals and
they're they're right there with the experienced agents cut 50 off of that time we also saw our
error rate the number of defects reduced from 1.6 percent which was pretty good when we started
especially in the complex environment we're in down to more recently we are at
0.05 percent so we virtually eliminated the errors that the agents were making and we attribute that
almost 100 to that knowledge management system and those kinds of accomplishments were recognized
by km world magazine when we won their reality award just last year um and since then ge has
expanded this to include other departments our part sales department our multi-vendor department
we're actually looking at bringing our contracts department and some other departments in later
this year and the agents have really become owners of knowledge which i think is one of the most
critical pieces of this and it's helped us to make this knowledge management system live and breathe
and stay accurate all the time because instead of just being consumers of knowledge and using this
to look up information the agents if they have a question if it's not working well for them if
their search didn't come up right the first time if something's not clear if they hear from another
department that something has changed they're going in and providing us feedback every time that
happens we get thousands of pieces of feedback a year from the agents that the person who manages
our knowledge management system evaluates dig into and then we'll make updates and changes
um and that's been huge because i think if the knowledge management system is just a tool that
they're using and they don't feel ownership about it that's how it gets dated and agents
stop paying attention to us to it this has really helped us keep on track and uh it's
been incredibly important for us having the agents feel like they're owners of that knowledge and the
system has made it easy for them to do that that's fabulous i mean the ownership and engagement with
the system on the part of the agents is really so important uh well done congratulations for that
well recently gee healthcare earned benchmark portal's designation as a certified center of
excellence do you think your knowledge management system played a role in that achievement
yeah absolutely it did because to me though the benchmark portal process was really an intensive
review of our performance both from an efficiency and a quality perspective so our customer
experience and how efficient and cost effective we were and looking in depth at things like agent
satisfaction customer satisfaction etc um and to me the kms cuts across all aspects of that
if you think about it our accuracy is so important for customer satisfaction and customer experience
handle time impacts um the the cost and the agents they are even affected by
having the right knowledge management system in place because it makes their job easier and
if an agent gets frustrated because they have a customer on the phone that they can't help or they
have a customer email that they can't answer and they have to go to two or three people to
find an answer it's harder if they have to dig through other documents what we have found is
the knowledge management system not only makes it better for the customers it makes it better from
a cost standpoint but it also improves that agent experience and it's helped us to really keep our
agent turnover low and hang on to some really good resources and we feel like that's been a
differentiator for us on that front as well okay that's great well even limited time can you just
bullet point a few other important items from your experience that could be of help to our audience
yeah i think my my biggest piece of experience for anybody using knowledge management
is to devote time up front when you're doing an implementation first of all make sure that you
you've got a system that works for the contact center because very often uh other systems are
forced in on us for knowledge management that may work for other parts of the company but they
aren't right when you've got a customer on the phone and have to find the right answer quickly
so find the right knowledge management partner and then once you do that devote your time into
that implementation up front because it's the ultimate garbage and garbage out experience
we devoted a really significant amount of time to engaging our end users before we even went
live with our implementation to find out what it was that they wanted making sure that this would
work for the agents on that four-minute phone call because they know better than anybody else
how it needs to be organized and how it needs to be laid out then we spend a lot of time on
how do we organize that information and making sure the information was right and accurate and
if where we saw procedures that could be combined or simplified we spent a lot of time doing that
as well so i would say that implementation is absolutely critical um and you want to
find a tool that's right for a contact center you want to spend the time on implementation
then make sure you're engaging your agents so that you keep the information up to date and
make them owners those are the three things i would say are most critical
okay well that's great well listen i want to thank you for these great insights uh and to
our listeners i invite to explore our learning channel for content that will help you with all
kinds of best practices uh again thanks berg wonderful we really appreciate your time today
and uh so i'm bruce belfury signing off on today's call talk caramel thank you
you