By
Matt McConnell
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Date Published: March 17, 2014 - Last Updated August 22, 2018
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Comments
The customer journey spans all elements of a company, with the contact center impacting and being impacted by other areas of the business. A recent McKinsey & Company study found that satisfaction on customer journeys is 30 percent more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring happiness for each individual interaction. It also lowers the cost of serving customers by as much as 20 percent. More and more customer-focused organizations are acknowledging and acting on this reality by improving the customer experience across all touch points and connecting the silos that can degrade customer satisfaction. One key gap is often between field service and the contact center.
Intraday management technology has transformed the way agents are trained in the contact center by delivering information to agent desktops during natural downtimes in call volume. But what about employees in the field? How do they receive the critical information and training they need to be better prepared for service calls and deliver an outstanding customer experience?
Historically, finding time to train between back-to-back onsite customer visits throughout the day has been challenging for field reps. Current training methods are often inconsistent and mainly comprised of service bulletins – both hard copy and through email – for reps to complete during their spare time or save in a binder for future reference.
There is no way to track whether or not assignments have been received or completed.
In an effort to improve these training platforms, Intradiem met with one of its top customers to get a better understanding of how to find more time to train service reps in the field and provide more consistent service between the contact center and the field.
Understanding the Challenge
The company needed a way to communicate with and develop field service reps by pushing critical training to them in the field similarly to how they delivered targeted training and certification to agent desktops in the call center in between call handling.
In addition to assigning targeted training to individual field service reps and finding time for them to train, the company also needed a way to verify that specific certification and communications had been received and completed.
In the contact center, when a customer calls in, the agent is able to access a wealth of information on the equipment itself, as well as specifics about the customer and who the field service technician is who will be completing the work.
The company wanted to be able to also provide all of this information to field technicians in advance of a service call, as well as other information related to the upcoming customer interaction, so that the field rep would be well prepared with a clear understanding of the customer’s issue.
Finding time for training
This company had already been using Intradiem’s intraday management technology in the contact center to push targeted training to agent desktops during natural downtimes in call volume. But when is the “right” time to push training to service agents in the field?
Intradiem is currently developing a mobile app for the customer that would enable the company to push training to field service reps during downtimes between customer interactions. This downtime could occur, for example, when a technician has finished a service call early and has a few extra minutes to review training materials and alerts through a mobile app on his or her phone or tablet. A voice app could also be used to read training alerts and other customer-related information to reps while they are driving to the next service call, sometimes referred to as “windshield” time.
This new mobile technology will enable the company to determine the best time throughout the day to push critical training, knowledge base articles, alerts, text messages, push notifications and more to field service reps based on their individual schedules and downtime, using GPS and other systems. Once training and notifications have been assigned in the field, the technology monitors that the individual has received and completed the assigned activity session.
This revolutionary mobile technology platform, which works on Android and IOS, includes an admin console to manage employees in the field and assign tasks, as well as an employee console on the field rep’s phone or tablet. The admin console has the same look and feel as the Intradiem intraday management application used in the contact center, making it easy for learning and development and workforce management teams to adopt. The employee console looks like the agent’s console in the center – a mobile app launches and displays the field rep’s list of prioritized assignments.
Prepped and primed
The new Intradiem mobile app, will provide field service technicians with specific information related to upcoming service calls. For example, if a field tech is making a service call on a particular piece of equipment, a review of the complete ticket history on that model and unit can be pushed to their mobile device prior to arriving at the customer site.
Field reps will also receive any service alerts on that model, a recording of when the customer originally called in with an issue related to the equipment, and a quick profile of the customer that provides information about potential up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
Armed with this app, field service technicians will be more prepared to resolve issues quickly before moving on to the next customer as well as prepared for new cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. The improvements in this area of the customer journey will have far-reaching effects on the overall customer experience.
About Intradiem
Intradiem, formerly Knowlagent, is the leader in intraday management solutions for multi-channel contact centers. Intradiem’s customers achieve an invincible customer experience with a real-time workforce. Intradiem’s solutions automate manual processes such as intraday task management, intraday staffing, reskilling, channel balancing, and real-time alerts to ensure front-line workforces are poised to react to whatever the market throws their way. More than 450,000 contact center, field service, retail, bank branch, and back office employees around the world use Intradiem’s solution every day. For more information, call 888-566-9457 or visit www.intradiem.com.
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