Main Digital Influences Strategic Alignment of Contact Center Operations

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Case Study at a Glance

  • Client: Global Credit Union
  • Industry: Financial Services
  • Size: Corporate (10,000+ employees)
  • Main Digital Services: Main (Discover)
  • Platform: Conversational Banking (Internal Virtual Assist/Chat Bot powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services), Real-Time Guidance (Cogito: Real-Time AI Coaching and Guidance platform), and Microsoft Dynamics and the Customer Service Workspace
  • Summary: The client engaged Main Digital to evaluate the current state of knowledge management and sharing within its contact center operations. The goal of this effort was to make recommendations to modernize operations and empower, enable and support front-line member service representatives (MSRs) to consume readily available and easily accessible information and insights to best serve members.

Overview

Main Digital conducted a strategic assessment to uncover how knowledge and insights are delivered to member service representatives (MSRs) and made recommendations to modernize this environment to drive increased effectiveness and efficiency across the department. Main Digital met with the client to understand and work together to define the problem statement. The client was eager to have Main Digital visit one of its contact centers to meet members of the team and to shadow real interactions MSRs have with credit union members. Working together in this manner allowed Main Digital to craft a work plan that the client team quickly supported, with recommendations and solutions to some of their most pressing challenges.

Opportunity 

The client identified knowledge management issues including:

  • Legacy solutions that no longer met expectations since newer and emerging technologies offered more robust features and capabilities.
  • The front-line and back-office knowledge management platform and search engine were no longer effective.
  • MSRs were no longer able to easily find relevant information, which increased call time with members.

Near-term recommendations needed to focus on building efficiencies in the process over other recommendations including the procurement and the implementation of new knowledge management platforms.

Main Digital Solution  

Main (Discover) services provided a variety of strategic solutions to support the client’s vision so that they could navigate their digital journey from ideation to delivery with confidence​. Main (Discover) includes:

  1. Discovery Labs to identify areas of opportunity across an organization. Main Digital provides assessment services across an array of digital solutions such as robotic process automation (RPA), process mining, and user interface/user experience (UI/UX).
  2. Packaged Insights and Analytics to accelerate growth, optimize team efforts, and improve the value chain by helping to gather and embed analytics across an organization or process.
  3. Technology Evaluation to identify business software solutions that best align with objectives.

Main (Discover) efforts provided the ability to work with leaders in various parts of the business including those that lead strategic efforts around emerging and high-profile technologies such as conversational banking, chatbots, and emotional AI. Seeing how these newer technologies can pave the way in modernizing a contact center setting and building recommendations around these helped shape the outcome of this project.

The Approach 

Main Digital interviewed 32 stakeholders, ranging from senior-level leadership to process subject matter experts and across more than 15 unique job titles, to gather inputs relative to, knowledge management and knowledge sharing. The team utilized internal datasets including but not limited to, employee engagement surveys, post-call surveys, scorecards, Adobe Analytics, and the MSR learning curve to bolster and complement stakeholder interviews where possible. Main Digital consolidated the outputs from stakeholder interviews and the various internal insight sources to create key themes that include weaknesses and opportunities for improvement within the organization. Key themes included improvements to:

  1. Resource Manuals – the key resource used by an MSR with the overarching goal of securing the assets of the credit union.
  2. Communication and Training – two key areas with the intent to keep MSRs up to date on key regulatory and business policy updates and confidence in their member interactions.
  3. Systems and Tools – the digital assets used by MSRs to be effective and efficient in their role of best servicing members.

Additionally, Main Digital worked alongside project stakeholders to design a practical strategic roadmap and approach to implement recommendations to deliver immediate and long-term benefits to modernize knowledge management. Each key recommendation was prioritized and a rough level of effort to implement was determined based on estimated scope, duration, and resourcing needs.

The Process

Main Digital marked milestones throughout the project to gather the details needed and then make recommendations based on the data captured. Milestone 1 – Main Digital conducted a strategic assessment of the current state of the contact center’s operations with a focus on knowledge management and sharing. The team held an engagement checkpoint upon completion of the assessment to share initial observations with leadership. This was a key milestone for the project as it gave leadership the opportunity to provide input and feedback to Main Digital’s work plan for the remainder of the engagement. Milestone 2 – Main Digital held an engagement readout at the end of the project to provide senior leadership with an executive presentation focused on findings and recommendations. Leading up to this, the team worked closely with its key project stakeholders to ensure alignment of the recommendations and that the team was speaking in one voice. In addition, the Main Digital team conducted working sessions with project stakeholders to build a practical and integrated strategic roadmap that included all key recommendations made and portrayed any existing or planned strategic initiatives.

The Outcome

Upon completing the evaluation of the current state of knowledge management and knowledge sharing within contact center operations for the client, stakeholders shared, “knowledge management is finally getting the attention and acknowledgment from leadership that it needed.” Main Digital was able to clearly influence alignment and agreement with senior-level leadership on new proposed recommendations for contact center knowledge management and sharing. Contributing Author: Michael Lopez