Call centre solutions that improve customer service

This month, Synthetix is launching the first of two major, pending products – important building-blocks in our vision of a connected, coherent strategy for online customer service excellence.

The first of these call centre solutions is version 2 of our dedicated call-centre agent desktop, Synthetix knowledgeAgent (now knowledgeManager).

A few years ago, it became clear to us that customers liked to use our  web self-service products, faqtAgent and smartAgent, in their call centre as well as their website.  Why not?  These call centre solutions gave them instant access to thousands of quality, ready-made questions and answers and cut call durations.

But there were a few problems; the informational needs of customers and call-centre agents are not the same.  They converge quite a bit, but call-centre staff need to have quick access to things like customer email templates, restricted product information, internal notices etc – items that they wouldn’t wish to publish straight to the web.  Furthermore, call-centre agents used the tools in a quite different way, continually searching for their ‘favourite’ answers.  This is fine, but our software ‘learns’ from the choices that users make, processing that valuable information to optimise search results.  If call-centre agents start using the software, we would no longer get a true picture of what customers ask, limiting the value of the management information produced by our systems.

So, we thought, why not develop a version of our proprietary knowledge-base technology, just for the call-centre?  Thus, Synthetix knowledgeAgent was born.

Version 1 was quite a simple divergence from our standard faqtAgent FAQ software, allowing call-centres to build a superset of their web self-service knowledge-base and expose it to agents through an easy-to-use full-screen interface. We added collaboration and community features to our call centre solutions too, enabling operators to comment on FAQs and quickly report dead links or out-of-date information, as well as enterprise-level editorial controls.  Using our instant on-a-keypress knowledge-base searches (Sorry, Google, we we’ve been doing this for two years before you ‘invented’ it!), knowledgeAgent was blazingly fast, ensuring that agents could obtain answers quicker than ever before.

KnowledgeAgent was a hit with our clients, and now runs the knowledge-base for critical call-centres such as London 2012.

Our latest revision is a massive upgrade, simplifying the look and feel to make training on and using the product quicker than ever before.  As well as further improvements in search speed and accuracy, kM 2.0 introduces folder-based navigation of the knowledge-base, taxonomies up to 10 levels deep, powerful filtering controls and bookmarking of favourite FAQs.  Also included are improved security and upgraded document-management features.  It’s now a call centre solution that larger enterprises can invest in, organising and storing much more of their information.  We haven’t seen any other call-centre knowledge-base approach the raw speed of knowledgeAgent for looking up information.  Unlike our web self-service software, knowledgeAgent is priced by the ‘seat’, which means that it’s cost-effective for even the smallest of call-centre operations to implement.

Synthetix is proud to announce that the first recipient of knowledgeAgent 2.0 is operations of consumer brand giant Unilever, who went live yesterday in the United Kingdom with a massive knowledge-base containing in-depth information on hundreds of product lines, including foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care.  Unilever are launching knowledgeAgent over the next few months in most other European markets.  We’re thrilled that our call centre solutions are being used by one of the world’s largest consumer companies, the name behind famous household brands such as Marmite, Lynx, Dove, Knorr, Flora, Walls and Persil.

Synthetix believes that a channel-agnostic knowledge-base is the best way to provide online customer service at the lowest overall cost.  Our software aims to put your FAQs wherever your customers are.  For those that ring your call-centre, Synthetix knowledgeAgent is there to make that dialogue as smooth and fast as possible.

If you think Synthetix knowledgeAgent could have a place in your call-centre, contact us to arrange a demonstration.

Oh, and check back  next month for news of the next major plank in our online customer service product strategy.