In the first, second and third articles in this series, we walked through Guidepost statements; how to talk to your employees and making sure your managers are player-coaches, not enforcers. In this article we talk about one of the most important foundational elements for your service organization.
Does your service and support team employ a case-first approach? Not sure? Hint: If you continuously feel like you’re chasing your tail, constantly drowning in escalation-after-escalation backlogs, and your cases seem to grow increasingly complex, you are probably running your business on a case-first model.
Further, look at how you measure “success”: If the bulk of your measures grade how quickly your team handles incoming cases rather than how effectively they capture new knowledge and reuse the knowledge base, then you are case-first.
With a case first approach, 60 to 90% of problems have been solved before, yet your team repeats solving the case, often in their own particular way each time the customer experiences a similar problem. And when agents solve the same, mundane issues again and again, they lose interest in their work, and you lose employees.
When a service and support organization measures success by how long it takes to resolve an issue or how many issues are resolved in a shift, it focuses on firefighting, not preventing fires. This case-first approach takes a lot out of employees, and quickly leads to burnout.
One thing every high-performing service organization has is a knowledge-first culture.
Now more than ever, with the Great Resignation and massive and ongoing disruptions due to COVID, a knowledge-first approach to service and support is essential for ensuring employee engagement and retention. By placing managers in the roles of coaches rather than enforcers, where they guide and advise team members, you create an environment where employees are motivated to improve knowledge every time they touch it, simply, joyfully, in the workflow.
Do you want to learn how to create an environment that motivates and inspires your team?
Take 30 minutes out of your day to see our webinar on moving from a case-first to a knowledge-first culture.
Do you want to exactly know how to make a knowledge-first culture stick?
Contact us about getting access to our innovative Klever Knowledge self-paced online module which helps organizations manage, share, and optimize their existing knowledge to create more value for both users and customers.
Klever Knowledge was born from KCS®* Knowledge-Centered Service, which was designed for the intense support environment where survival depends on what you know and how fast you solve problems. But we know KCS® can seem overwhelming. Klever Knowledge brings clarity to KCS®.