Leading Utility Transforms Digital Customer Service with eGain AI Knowledge

Company

This 25-year-old payroll and human capital management SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) provider is one of Fortune 100’s fastest-growing companies. Its product suite delivers a platform for professionals to manage benefits, core HR, payroll, talent, and workforce management. The company has more than 33,000 clients and more than 1,000 account managers and implementation consultants. Annually, its customer service agents handle about 4.5 million interactions and over 15,500 new clients.

The Hard Challenges

The business was experiencing hyper-growth, adding new clients regularly and launching new products every year, year after year. As frontline agents struggled with the breadth and depth of customer queries, escalations increased. There was knowledge within the organization, but it was tribal or in silos scattered across the enterprise. How could the business connect its client with the agent who knew the answer? Also, agents needed to go beyond technical support and offer best practice guidance and expertise. There was an urgent need to get contextual knowledge in front of agents when the customer was on the line. The provider faced a three-dimensional challenge.

Managing constantly increasing contact center volume
Keeping up with product knowledge
Providing value-added support and advice

Goals and Objectives

The organization’s previous experiences with knowledge implementations had been disappointing. These failures stemmed from technology limitations and poor agent adoption. Content was out-of-date or irrelevant. Moreover, these legacy solutions did not offer conversational guidance, which is especially important for situational problem resolution. The company had learned lessons from the previous failures. It was determined to avoid the same mistakes and to steer the next KM initiative to success. Goals were identified.

Create an effortless experience for customers and agents
Enable front-line agents to become expert advisors, not just average account managers
Have an infrastructure for community collaboration, where agents can identify what clients want and be able to explain to them how to achieve it using the company tools
Implement a knowledge platform that can scale customer service with business growth and product expansion

Having been burnt before, there was apprehension and pushback on yet another knowledge initiative. The new solution would have to quickly improve confidence in both the knowledge process and the knowledge content.

Solution

RFP and eGain Innovation in 30 Days pilot After a comprehensive RFP for vendor selection, eGain Knowledge Hub™ was selected due to its functionality, natural language search engine, domain expertise, flexibility to build connectors to CRM systems, and its unique pilot program, eGain Innovation in 30 Days, that allowed the company to roll out the solution for free in the real world and achieve critical mass quickly. eGain jumpstarted the knowledge pilot by federating content from existing systems in the organization. Analytics helped the team to determine which content was relevant and should be migrated, and which process to capture and convert into AI-enabled conversational guidance. The pilot project was so successful, it became the production system for the knowledge implementation. Beta phase A Beta team was created that had access to the early production system. The company was mindful about involving all stakeholders right from the beginning. Information was shared freely and soon colleagues were clamoring to be involved. Team leads and subject matter experts were rotated into the knowledge team to work on the content and process know-how. Incentives were offered to encourage feedback about the system. Even the CEO was involved in testing the knowledge system, further driving usage and adoption. Implementation eGain Knowledge Hub was deployed first for agents, to make it easy for them to help customers, leading to enthusiastic agent adoption. Agents used eGain’s product capabilities to guide customers confidently through processes. eGain Knowledge-powered self-service portals were then launched to allow customers to resolve queries by themselves. This allowed the business to scale customer service cost-effectively and support growth. The SaaS provider took knowledge availability to the next level for customers by embedding eGain’s capabilities into their own products, providing instant in-band answers wherever the products were used. eGain’s out-of-the-box connectors allowed seamless integration of eGain Knowledge with Salesforce and other third-party tools in the organization. This was done to automate tasks and synchronize information and processes across systems eliminating the need to repeat or manually track work. Knowledge is embedded in products, tools, and workflows, and integrated with external tools. Contextual, personalized knowledge is served in portals for client users. The eGain solution even includes ROI analytics to measure call deflection and right-channeling.

The Stunning Benefits

In six months, the provider saw

10x more knowledge articles being contributed per month compared to the previous initiative
6x more suggestions
460% increase in average monthly searches
40% decrease in escalations to second-tier support
300% increase in article views

Approximately 80% of the company’s employees use eGain Knowledge Hub and adoption is increasing every month. The organization has seen transformational results.

60% improvement in confidence in answers
62% improvement in consistency of answers
67% improvement in time to answer
65% call deflection to self-service Customer service agents are answering questions more correctly, more quickly, and more confidently and usage is growing across both self-service and agent-assisted service.

eGain continues to work with the fast-growing company to create value from new capabilities and use cases. eGain Knowledge Hub is not merely a contact center tool anymore. It is a strategic operating platform being leveraged enterprise-wide to drive customer success and agent engagement. The result is a win-win-win, for the agents, customers, and the business.

This production pilot was a really big aspect of what helped us to be successful. We could get some realworld experience in a production-like environment, understand what we were getting and understand how to work with it and how to be successful.