What if your employees were not only jacks of many skills but also masters of them? This approach will give employees opportunities to wear a variety of hats and provide them a growth path, while keeping them excited and reducing churn. It will be a sizeable and sustainable competitive advantage that will be hard to beat in the recent war for talent!

Check out the details below to learn how customer contact centers are the sweet-spot use-case for multiskilling employees.

The Plight of the Contact Center Agent

It is no secret that the job of a contact center agent is no walk in the park. As self-service technologies improve, automating routine interactions, contact center agents are getting the brunt of the work handling complex queries. This means agents need to be multiskilled to be successful. For example, they should be able to handle a variety of interaction channels and possess broad and deep product and functional knowledge.

The Challenge

Contact centers have long employed specialists rather than generalists—for example, hiring agents who specialize in handling a specific interaction channel (messaging, chat, phone), a specific function (service, sales), a specific product (home mortgage, CDs), and so on. These agents would then go through onboarding and training, focused on specific areas before being deployed in the contact center. While this specialty or single-skill approach has some benefits, it is too complex, risky, and expensive to implement and optimize as business needs change.
Multiskilling provides more flexibility and better utilization of contact center agents. But how do you do it at scale? The answer lies in implementing modern knowledge as a hub. A modern knowledge hub can help multiskill agents easily, cost-effectively, and at scale. It reduces the need to hire and train specialists and reduce or eliminate the need for complex skills-based routing, while maximizing the use of all agents in the contact center.

What Is a Knowledge Hub?

The knowledge hub includes and orchestrates information and content management, profiled access, intent understanding, search methods, reasoning, compliance, analytic insights, integrations with existing systems for 360-degree view and context, regulatory compliance, and conversational and process guidance (next best thing to say and do) in one platform. This guidance collects and curates trusted working knowledge from experts in all the required skill domains that the agent needs to master. Eliminating inconsistent and disconnected silos, the knowledge hub acts as an employee skills hub, serving up trusted data, information, content, and guidance in the flow of work to all agents in the contact center both proactively and on demand. This is multiskilling on an elevated level, where agents get access to not only the breadth but also the depth of skills across many domains.

Real-World Examples

The proof of knowledge-powered multiskilling is in the value pudding, which is nothing short of sensational! Here are some examples from our enterprise clientele:
Premier mobile service provider reduced training time by 50 percent across 10,000 contact center agents and associates in more than 600 retail stores, while improving first-contact resolution (FCR) by 37 percent and their brand loyalty by 30 points, as measured by the net promoter score (NPS). Their customer-facing workforce can now handle any customer contact, sales, or service!
Health insurance company reduced advisor training time by 33 percent and sustained advisor performance even when their more than 2,000 advisors began working remotely overnight when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Despite not having the “next cube” safety net in the new era of remote work, their advisors have been able to hit all their performance metrics, handling customer contacts across a dizzying array of health insurance offerings, recommending plans and providing member service.
Global bank slashed agent training time from 10 weeks to four weeks and improved first-contact resolution (FCR) by 36 percent, while enforcing compliance in service and sales conversations and processes.

One of our banking clients said it best: “eGain Knowledge enabled any agent to handle any kind of customer contact,” which is truly the holy grail of contact center operations! While we discussed the contact center use-case in this post, the knowledge hub can be leveraged to multiskill employees in other business functions as well. This will keep the workforce interested, motivated, and engaged.

Gain the edge with knowledge by developing a multiskilled workforce!

Originally published on ATD