Knowledge Preservation in Customer Retention Centers
- Yuval Markowitz
- Jun 1, 2007
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 3
The business world we participate in is abundant with service providers, from telephony, internet, and various logistics services to viewing services. Our customer base is our most valuable asset. Nurturing and developing existing customers is one of the five organizational growth engines.
To maintain customer satisfaction, we establish customer service centers. These centers are primarily designed to provide service to customers and maintain their satisfaction, but they are also designed to retain customers who wish to terminate their relationship with us. At the forefront of these service centers are customer retention centers, responsible for handling customers whose satisfaction has been compromised or who have received better offers from competitors.
In some organizations, service representatives are required to perform customer retention actions using dedicated tools and escalation, and only after exhausting their tools is the customer transferred to customer retention centers.
By nature, the amount of information and knowledge flowing through customer retention centers is substantial and directly results from dealing with customer service, for example, information about promotions, benefits, engagement agreements, customer retention benefits, and sales. Additionally, most employees in these centers are students or young people before beginning their studies who view this work as temporary, leading to a very high employee turnover rate.
The amount of knowledge in these centers, combined with the high employee turnover rate, often causes the loss of extensive knowledge acquired and accumulated during work. This knowledge is the core of customer service centers' activity, and its loss severely damages customer retention efforts.
For knowledge preservation, it is recommended to use a series of tools that are fundamentally designed for sharing and preserving knowledge. These tools are generally well-known in knowledge management, but in this review, we focus on this specific important population and the context of their tool usage.
Customer Retention Portal
Customer retention centers generate substantial information and knowledge in their ongoing work, such as retention reports, competitor status reviews, dedicated customer retention tools, lessons from debriefings, and more. The importance of the portal stems from the need to channel and present context-dependent data, information, and knowledge, all this in a short time while a dissatisfied customer waits for an immediate response. Using a customer retention portal can achieve two main objectives:
Preserving knowledge in the customer retention center – The knowledge accumulated in customer retention centers is extensive and important for several reasons, from immediate use with customers through ongoing training (conducted through it) to the portal serving as a basis for building new retention tools. A customer retention portal can serve as a basis for preserving and organizing knowledge, making it retrievable and accessible to the entire center.
Sharing knowledge of retention solutions with customer service centers – The contents of a customer retention portal can serve as a tool for customer service centers to maintain customer satisfaction while still "in their territory." Focused content organization and regular updates in customer service retention can reduce the number of referrals to customer retention centers and lead to concentrating efforts on more complex customers to retain.
In addition to knowledge items accumulated in customer retention centers, which are important to include in the portal, it is highly recommended to incorporate knowledge-sharing forums in the customer retention portal. This focus topic will cover "hot" topics in the world of customer retention and retention news that will provide real-time information on retention rates, hot offers from competitors, and more. Integrating the portal into work processes is important to ensure it becomes a working tool. A good example of integration is the inclusion of referrals to the customer retention portal under relevant branches in the menu trees of information systems and various process sites that already exist in the organization. This situation will concentrate all relevant information in one place and contribute significantly to customer retention efforts.
Insights Repository
Insights combine experience (Experience, Best Practices) and lessons learned (Lessons). To build an insights repository, it is recommended to focus on collecting experiences and lessons that typically exist in the center but are scattered and not in regular use:
From Implicit to Explicit – Collecting Experience
When a customer retention representative performs a retention call with a customer, they primarily rely on information and data in CRM and operational systems related to the customer. This data is often insufficient. Customer retention is a kind of art in which each retention representative develops tools to find the right way to bring the customer back and keep them in the company's embrace. The tools are built based on the representative's accumulated experience, successes, and failures experienced, promoting and inhibiting phrases used in their work, and tips or advice received in various feedback frameworks or team meetings. These tools are the employee's knowledge assets. These knowledge assets typically remain the property of the customer retention representative and, as such, usually remain personal and not shared. Therefore, it is recommended to conduct a process in which veterans are interviewed, and knowledge assets are collected from customer retention representatives and their managers. The collected knowledge assets will be anchored and compiled in the insights repository.
Alongside experience, it is recommended to collect lessons learned within the center:
Lessons Management – Collecting Lessons
There are successes and failures in the daily activities of customer service centers, including customer retention centers.
In most cases, the lesson-learning process results from failures. It is recommended that a proactive lesson-learning activity be conducted that will anchor the process and produce extensive knowledge. There are countless methodologies for managing investigations and extracting lessons, some better than others. Each organization adopts the methodology that best suits it, and rightfully so. Conducting investigations and extracting lessons is to know how to replicate successes and reduce recurring mistakes.
Typically, after conducting an investigation and extracting lessons, work procedures are refreshed, briefings are held for representatives, and more. The investigator usually keeps the investigation and the lessons accumulated following it as documents and not documented as lessons. This leads to providing a specific response to a specific case and, on the other hand, reduces the chance of change that would prevent the recurrence of the case in the future. To lead to change and avoid repeating mistakes, a process of lesson management should be maintained.
The knowledge accumulated from collecting experience and lessons should be managed in an insights repository, and options for reusing knowledge assets and accumulated knowledge should be anchored.
Innovation Forum
The work of customer retention centers is based on a basket of solutions designed to convince the customer to stay with us and not turn to a competitor. But "nothing lasts forever." One of our greatest sins is reusing existing solutions that may no longer "do the job." Establishing and maintaining an innovation forum will lead to new knowledge and, from there, to refreshing existing solutions and creating new ones.
The competition between companies, where all means are legitimate, and information passes between companies through mystery shoppers and more adds importance to the need for an innovation forum. Its main purpose is to create a competitive advantage through new solutions that differentiate our basket of solutions from competitors. The innovation forum should be built based on a heterogeneous group of role holders (customer service representatives, customer retention representatives, team leaders, marketing department representatives, and more) to get the most benefit from the innovation forum. These will bring a knowledge load, each from their field, and a perspective with a corresponding character. Within the forum, it is recommended to conduct guided brainstorming sessions to raise new ideas and build new tools that will repel competitors' offers. These tools that will be created will give us the required competitive advantage. Organizations that do not maintain innovation forums may stand still, sometimes retreating backward in the intricacies of relentless competition. There is an advantage to having face-to-face meetings in this forum, backed by a collaborative working environment where products, processes, and thoughts can be shared.
Conclusion
Customer retention centers are knowledge-intensive centers. The level of risk arising from not managing knowledge is very high and can significantly damage the organizational growth engine.
In this review, we have provided examples of several tools that provide a systematic solution for knowledge management in a customer retention center. These tools, accompanied by nurturing culture and enforcing complementary knowledge-sharing processes, can significantly reduce the number of customers who actually leave.
Knowledge management in a customer retention center can be a significant component of success.
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