Last year, the ScreenSteps team did a customer story with Stephanie Beal, a manager at a contact center. She told us how she used ScreenSteps to decrease the time-to-proficiency for new agents by 75%.
Before ScreenSteps, it took about 60 days to get new agents to a strong level of proficiency. With ScreenSteps, it took 15 days.
I remember being on the call and asking her to clarify, not sure I fully understood. How could ScreenSteps do that?
Stephanie then broke it down for me and explained how she formatted help articles as "call flows" that could walk support agents through any customer interaction. She continued to explain her main focus during new-hire training was to teach new agents how to use those call flows efficiently so that agents could help a customer on a call without having to memorize everything first.
Over time, call agents would eventually become experts at responding to customer questions and would probably rely on the call flows less and less. But Stephanie could get new support agents on the phones in two to three weeks, proficiently helping customers well before becoming experts because the new support agents could use her call flows.
One Year Later 5 Metrics are Even Better
Stephanie will be speaking at a contact center conference on October 30, 2019 in Chicago, called ICMI Connections. She's going to share how she trained new support agents using ScreenSteps, and what the results were.
Looking over her presentation, I noticed that the metrics are even better today than they were a year ago when we first did our customer story.
- When Stephanie first did the new-hire training, it was 10 days in a classroom. Today, it's only six days in the classroom. When Stephanie first did the new-hire training, new hires spent five days under close supervision after training. Today, it's only four days. That means that after only two weeks (instead of three weeks), new agents are able to hit the floor and answer any customer question right out of the gate (that's an 83% improvement from when they weren't using ScreenSteps).
- The average support interaction decreased by one minute and thirty seconds (1:30) because support agents are able to answer the question without tapping their neighbor on the shoulder for help.
- Several agents have no hold time (never put a customer on hold to find an answer) because the call flows walk them through all the steps. The average hold time for all agents is under 30 seconds.
- After call work decreased to under 60 seconds (time spent wrapping up a phone call) because the agents are more efficient during the call.
- The average Quality score increased by 8 points.
For a contact center that answers hundreds of phone calls a day, these metrics are huge. Management is able to get new-hires answering calls five days sooner, they are able to handle more calls in a day (which means more revenue since they get paid by the call), and they are not sacrificing quality.
Inspiration for the Workflow Article
After our team spoke with Stephanie a year ago, we were inspired to create the Workflow Article––a new type of article that allows you to create "Choose Your Own Adventure" style articles.
For contact center's like the one Stephanie works for, these articles can be used to create call flows that include scripts, decision trees, and step-by-step instructions that enable call agents to handle any call.
For SaaS support teams, these articles can be used to walk customers and support reps through difficult procedures, deflecting tickets and enabling Tier 1 Support Reps to handle more complicated questions.
And for any organization that uses technology, workflow articles can be used to walk employees through even the most difficult of procedures, reducing the number of mistakes made and back-and-forth emails sent, asking for help.
ScreenSteps Will Improve Your Business Operations
Stephanie's story is one of dozens of customer stories we have heard where ScreenSteps has improved business operations. For her, ScreenSteps decreased the time it took to get new employees to a high level of proficiency by over 80%. For others, ScreenSteps has improved technology adoption, decreased the time it takes to train employees, decreased the number of mistakes employees make, and decreased the number of interruptions managers get during the day.
Whether you need to write articles that answer simple "how-to" questions, articles that describe straight-forward procedures in a checklist, or articles that walk through complex procedures in a workflow, you can do it with ScreenSteps.
If you want to see any of those improvements in your business, sign up for a trial of ScreenSteps today!
If you already use ScreenSteps and want to try out the Workflow Article for documenting those complex procedures, contact sales@screensteps.com to get set up!
