Life as a Knowledge Manager

Everyday we have over 2500 calls triaged over the phone.

Triage is defined as: The process by which projects or activities are prioritized to determine which should be attempted first, second, etc. (it is also known as “Sorting of Grapes”)

The Triage Team (for a call center) needs:

1 To ask appropriate questions to the client
2 To evaluate the call and classify the same into the appropriate queue

When the Triage Team assigns a call to a member of our company, the member needs a clear understanding of what the client is expecting from them so that they can provide a faster and appropriate response.

In our current situation we get calls from clients on:

1. Regular Support Requests
2. Departmental Phone Transfers
3. Areas which need immediate attention
4. Uncertain areas

Out of all these 4 situations we are able to handle the first three with appropriate procedures. However “Uncertain areas” are difficult to control due to the fact that they have random occurrences and do not have the correct triage policy set.

To reduce the number of “uncertain” client call domains we defined a process for Smart Triage:

1. Educate various departments
2. Gather a list of questions from the support techs and other departments
3. Prepare a database of appropriate questions needed to be asked by the triage team before transferring the call to the support techs.
4. Ask intelligent questions to the customers.
5. Direct calls to the right person so that the “First Call Resolution” goal is met.

Technology Used:

A Wiki for maintaining an updated record of questions to ask for each category of call.

This now brings us to the next project of:

1. Defining processes to keep the questions updated in the Wiki
2. Assign owners for various department related questions
3. Keep updating and recording trends in client call response quality.

This process will allow us to control the quality of calls and respond to the clients needs in a more efficient fashion.

We are a 600 employee company with at least 15-25 members being out of office at any given business day due to reasons beyond control like:

1. Out for work
2. Personal Days
3. Vacation
4. Maternity Leave
5. Sick Days
6. Jury Duty
7. Military Obligations

There are multiple instances when other team members have some work with a person who is out of office (on that very day). We have set appropriate policies for employees who are out of office. They need to:

1. Fill out an out of office form and submit it to the HR after approval from their Team Leads
2. Update their Email with an Auto-Responder (Vacation Message)
3. Set the External and Internal Greeting in the Phone System describing the out of office message
4. Send an email to a predefined out of office designated email address which notifies the team leads.

What we realized is that our method of communication was only a two way communication where-in the employee taking an out of office leave is communicating it only to the HR and the Team Lead. The problem lies when a colleague of the out of office employee tries to contact the employee. This is what happens:

1. The caller remains uncertain whether the out of office colleague is out on a break for coffee or is out of office
2. There is wastage of time and effort due to the fact that the caller assumes that the other employee will respond to the callers needs in a timely fashion (which is not going to be the case)

To eliminate this confusion we have:

1. Designed an module on our intranet website “Helpdesk” which will allow all employees to see a list of employees out of office.
2. The HR team has access to add/modify this list daily (hence keeping this list updated all the time)
3. We run periodic reports to check whether the data on the Helpdesk matches with our Payroll system (thus keeping both the systems integrated together)

With appropriate planning and policy definitions we have been able to educate all our company members the new policies and are able to save employee time by displaying them who is In-Office and who is Out-of-Office.