Today’s interview is with Micah Peterson, a member of the founding team and the VP of Product Management at ProcedureFlow, the next-generation knowledge management software that is designed to help companies visualize and navigate processes. We talk about two delusions that exist in the service space, particularly at the VP level, why followed procedures reduce AHT, how customer service can often be the dumpster fire of the company, and how text-based knowledge bases tend only to have a 3-year lifecycle unless they are properly cleaned and managed before they become completely dysfunctional.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The autonomous enterprise is like a North Star vision of where business is going – Interview with Kerim Akgonul and Peter van der Putten of Pega – and is number 478 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Highlights of my chat with Micah:

• ProcedureFlow was born out of an R&D department at a BPO where I had the opportunity to work on it and take it from a desktop tool to the cloud.
• There is this delusion among VPs who think that they need to introduce another channel when they have people who have no experience, or subject matter expertise, on the phone handling very emotional conversations with customers that often result in that person not being a customer anymore.
• There’s a delusion around minimally preparing people and then chucking them into the fray kind and thinking that they are kind of well-equipped.
• Everybody seems to be managing turnover and there’s a delusion and reality in that.
• The reality is that often you have a very short window of time with agents and so the focus should be on how do you make them an expert quickly so that the customers are handled well.
• It’s also a delusion that you’ve done a good job training and that your training program is adequate.
• The reality is that when you hit the floor, you don’t actually know what you’re doing.
• How do you insulate yourself from attrition and simultaneously get brand new people joining your center to operate as experts?
• The answer has everything to do with digital knowledge management, how you share knowledge and is it an effective program today.
• Are you operating via a playbook? The playbook has to not just be the rule of thumb, it has to not just be surface-level greetings and verifications disposition. It has to have guts, it has to understand what probing questions to ask, what scenarios and exceptions you need to be able to handle and how to do that explicitly.
• If that playbook is not there, or if it’s not good or it’s not consumable, then you’re going to have all the challenges of hold time, transfers, unhappy customers, bad CSAT etc.
• Followed procedures reduce average handle time.
  • When an agent is in control of a call (probing questions, understanding intent, choosing correct procedure, executing exceptions properly), the call duration will be optimal. When an agent loses control of a call and enflames the customer, it can take +10 mins to salvage the conversation (if at all). Shortcuts and hacks will come back to kick you in the butt.
• Where do all customer problems gonna go? Customer service. These problems could have come from any number of volatile places in the company.
• People care about the service and the experience that customers get, but they don’t necessarily always realize the externalities that can happen based on some of the work that they do or the organisational disconnects that occur here and there. Therefore, they don’t really understand the scope and the breadth of the work that people in service and support and contact centers do.
• While customer service is often a dumping ground for many of the problems that need to get fixed within an organization, giving people sight of those problems, how they’re getting fixed and how they can be avoided in future is an essential part of the internal conversation that should be happening within a company.
• When you have a knowledge base that has 100 articles, say, in it then it’s pretty easy to find stuff, and the information tends to be up-to-date and accurate. Then the company starts changing. There’s volatility in the company and we add new articles. However, somebody’s often moving a little too fast and instead of updating an older article, they write a new one. This repeats and over a three year period your knowledge base becomes increasingly dysfunctional because no one really manages it and it’s not really given the time or the money or the focus to keep it up to date.
• Large companies may have a few full time people dedicated to it but it’s still not enough people. There’s not enough resource in going into knowledge management.
• Knowledge bases are not designed with the user in mind and to be used in real-time.
• One hotel and resorts company introduced ProcedureFlow and they were able to do a one-hour orientation to what is procedure flow then they would give their agents live access to the systems where the trainer would sit at the front of the class and they’d start doing live work. Occasionally they’d have a question for the trainer, but essentially they were doing live work before lunchtime on their first day.
• One health insurance company used ProcedureFlow with agents that had two years experience but were nervous about taking calls about special drug authorization. Using ProcedureFlow they were able to give their agents very specific and explicit instructions about what to do and that helped cut down escalations by over 50% for those special drug authorization calls.
• One big box retailer was looking to solve hold times, errors and they were looking to move away from heavy SharePoint lotus notes, 200-page word documents. Moreover, in their back office they had ordered management issues and there were some escalation problems too. Using ProcedureFlow they were able to remove 29 seconds off of the average hold time, 30% reduction in escalations, a 12-point increase in CSAT on the associate rating and a 7-point increase on CSAT for the shop again rating. For that CSAT improvement, there was no increase in average handle time, which is sometimes is a tradeoff that people have to make. They had a pilot in November, were in a buy situation by January and after the rollout and some follow-up mapping, they got all of their stuff in there by March.
• One health care provider reduced their attrition by 12%, reduced the need for side by side coaching by 44% and was able to cut the total time to proficiency by 25%.
• It bothers me that there is a lack of focus on the playbook and scenario-based training in customer service and we’re doing the same old thing that we’ve been doing for 30 years.
• Micah’s Punk CX word: Uncompromising.
• Micha’s Punk XL brand: Zappos and Chick-fil-A.

About Micah

Micah is a knowledge management expert and enthusiast. He is Knowledge Centered Services certified (KCS), and has a passion for human knowledge sharing. He has been helping companies transform their knowledge management for more than 15 years.

Micah has created patented software to help build and maintain knowledge bases. As a member of the founding team, and the VP of Product Management at ProcedureFlow, he is able to use his passion to help organizations manage their knowledge in ways they never thought possible.

Check out ProcedureFlow, say Hi to them on the social media site formally known as Twitter @ProcedureFlow and feel free to connect with Micah on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay