There is no doubt that accurate and rapid resolution of customer requests is key to the delivery of excellent, cost-effective customer experience.

Whilst that excellent, cost-effective customer experience is quite obviously a great outcome for customers, it typically also results in more fulfilled employees, better delivered business objectives and great reputational benefits.

Speed-to-competency is often talked about. But how often is the focus on the speed rather than the competency or the competency without the speed? Let’s face it, it’s challenging to train and embed new knowledge effectively, with both accuracy and speed, in any organisation.

Customer Science recently helped a large government organisation to realise millions in savings by moving 30% of staff from a position of low competency to high competency. Competency improvement was a highly effective lever, resulting in more accurate and rapid resolution of customer requests, a reduction in customer effort reflected in higher customer satisfaction levels and of course, more confident and less stressed staff.

The challenge is how to build capability in our people effectively and rapidly and to keep that momentum going on-the-job.

This week I have been exploring ideas of how knowledge and its application could be accelerated to bridge obvious gaps in customer experience delivery. Imagine being able to utilise technology that identifies an individual’s knowledge gap, provides the training to address the gap and verifies that the gap has been resolved.

I’ve been exploring how realistic these concepts are with our own Sarah Staveley and clever technology companies such as LivePro, Kineo, Genesys, UIPath, Tigerspike and Call Journey.

I discovered that it’s possible to identify knowledge gaps with a combination of real-time analytics tools, knowledge tools & coding in CRMs. This information can be used to trigger a relevant training platform with online learning that incorporates skill verification and even diverts work away from an employee until competency has been re-verified. A coach could equally be notified to assist in addressing the gap as an exception to online training.

The application of these tools could also be applied more broadly to help identify ongoing training required to address business trends rather than just individual knowledge gaps. Taken a step even further, predictive analytics could be used to anticipate possible new patterns of customer request and address knowledge gaps before they are gaps!

Traditional approaches to competency building tend to be slow to be effective. A successful model for today is illustrated below.

I believe that knowledge is valueless unless applied. While this sounds obvious, we still see companies focusing too much on the look and feel of content or how much learners like the content, rather than its effectiveness in addressing customer need.

I am still exploring this concept with the team at Customer Science. I welcome any contributions to the discussion.

Even better, if you want to trial implementing some of the ideas in this blog, let me know. I would value the opportunity to work collaboratively to bring the ideas to life and prove the benefits.

Start a conversation with Todd here.