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Case Study 2: A Knowledge Platform for the Customer Contact Center of Union Investment |
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Walter Brenner, Lutz M. Koble, and Adrian Bueren |
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“Can you help me?” |
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Founded in 1956, Union Investment is the
third-largest German mutual fund company with assets exceeding USD 100
billion as of 2002. Union Investment offers public funds as well as
restricted funds. The range of public funds encompasses equity funds, fixed
income funds, money market funds, and mixed securities and property funds as
well as open property funds. These products are distributed exclusively via
partners in Germany in a co-operative of banks called the “Finanzverbund”.
The Finanzverbund consists of mostly medium-sized banks like the Sparda Bank
or the Volks-und Raiffeisenbanken, which pool some of their resources in
backend processes but are otherwise independent of each other.
Besides investment funds, Union Investment also offers services concerning
the administration of deposits for more than 3.5 million customers across
Europe. Union Investment has its headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany.
It also has affiliates and branch offices in Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland,
Spain, Italy, and Poland.1
Up to the late 1990s, Union Investment only provided customer service
to bank representatives and had no dedicated service department. Rather,
some employees from the department “Product Information” were available
by phone for bank representatives and handled this traffic besides their
regular jobs. With the booming stock markets of the late 1990s, however,
Union Investment experienced significant growth in the number of customers
and deposits. As a consequence, the old structure couldn’t cope with
the increased volume of inquiries anymore. Management therefore decided
to reorganize the company in 1999 not only to improve communication
to banking representatives, but also to allow customers to contact Union
Investment directly. |
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Customer Service at Union Investment |
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The Customer Communication Center (CCC) – interface to the
customer |
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Union Investment aims at sustaining its
competitive position by providing high-value customer service as well as
attractive financial products of all sorts. Customers typically have a
long-term financial portfolio strategy and quite different levels of
financial markets expertise. Therefore, they not only expect a broad spectrum
of products and services that fit their investment strategies, but also
superior service. This service demand exists regardless of whether the
customers turn to their local bank representatives or contact Union
Investment directly as their mutual funds specialist.
To achieve a high level of service without sacrificing economies of
scale, the organization is separated into two major units since the
reorganization in 1999. One is concerned with the efficient execution
of transactions ordered via the bank representatives while the other,
the Customer Service unit, is concerned with providing superior service
in the interaction with customers. Retail-customers can call Union Investment
directly to resolve problems with their existing portfolio as well as
to demand information on specialized products of Union Investment. The
Customer Service unit consists of the Customer Communication Center
(CCC), which processes all customer communication, and the supporting
departments “Service Management” and “Information Support” (cf. Figure
1). In the beginning, the unit was made up mainly of employees of the
former "Product Information” department. |
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Figure 1: Organizational structure of customer service at
union investment |
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It is the Customer Service unit that is responsible for applying concepts
of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in order to increase customer
focus and strengthen the competitive position of the company. As a consequence,
it is of significant strategic importance. This especially applies to
the CCC, which serves as the only interface to the customers of Union
Investment. The communication consists primarily of over one million
inbound telephone calls year. Furthermore, the CCC has to manage increasing
numbers of enquiries via other channels such as fax, email, or letter.
The services of the CCC consist of the provision of solutions for customers
having problems or requiring information on their status and past transactions.”
The CCC I consists of 80 employees who cover the first level of customer
support. The 40 employees of the CCC II cover the second level of support
with more complex topics and process enquiries in the form of emails,
letters, and faxes (about 6,000 a month). Most of the 90,000 monthly
calls are received on the first level and can be escalated to the CCC
II if necessary. Banking representatives may contact the second level
directly with questions concerning specific topics. Service Management
deals with reporting issues, complaint management and process design
as well as application support to the CCC. Information Support provides
knowledge to the CCC and resolves questions that agents can not resolve
by themselves.
The CCC attempts to increase customer satisfaction by resolving as many
enquiries as possible within the first contact (first call resolution
rate), making it unnecessary for the customer to call again. If enquiries
are resolved immediately, efficient means of escalation are used to
reduce overall cycle time. This means that the required expertise needs
to be located very quickly if the agent cannot answer the request herself.
Keeping the service level constant is quite challenging as the call
volume varies significantly during the day but also between different
times of the year (cf. Figure 2, Figure 3). The high level of skills
of the agents is helpful as each one can rapidly process questions concerning
a wide array of topics, making a first call resolution more probable.
However, this high skill level needs to be constantly renewed by training
measures. Ideally, these training measures are offered electronically
to enable agents to study them in off-peak hours. This way, agents who
are not busy can still use their time productively and generate benefits
to Union Investment by better serving customers later due to their improved
skill level. |
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Figure 2: CCC Call daily call volume in 2002 |
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Figure 3: CCC spread of call volume/half hour during the day |
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Figure 4 illustrates the role of the CCC as
a communication interface. Prospects or customers either get in touch
personally or pose their enquiries to the representative of the local bank
who forwards them to the CCC, usually by telephone. |
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Figure 4: Communication between Union Investment and its
customers |
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Supporting the Customer Communication Center with knowledge |
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The CCC agents all
have a banking background and can be considered highly qualified.
Nevertheless, they still need an effective information system to supply them
with the required relevant, credible, and timely information. Before the 1999
reorganization, only a small number of employees were involved in answering
phone enquiries. They all knew each other and were also aware of where to
find information that was stored in disparate locations. But with the
experienced explosive growth, management of Customer Service realized that
this need required an extra department and created Information Support in
2001. Most of the members of Information Support were initially recruited
from the CCC. Its scope of responsibility is essentially knowledge management
and training within the Customer Service unit: |
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Information Support consists of seven
employees who are responsible for creating, editing, and publishing all
content (or information) available to the CCC. Usually, this content is
forwarded from other departments to Information Support, where it needs to be
reformatted. Upon urgent requests from the CCC, Information Support researches
information specifically for that case. Such information is directly passed
on to the requesting agent and later published in “HelpMe”. As the CCC forms
the communication interface between Union Investment and its customers.
Information Support forms the communication interface between the CCC and
other parts of the organization.
To provide the needed information to the agents of the CCC, the users
of the knowledge platform “HelpMe”, there needs to be supporting processes
in place in the form of editorial and administrative processes. The
administrative process is concerned with maintaining the technical infrastructure.
Prior to the project, it encompassed such tasks as the manual administration
of the navigational structure of the platform and the manual check of
consistency concerning hyperlinks between different pieces of content.
The editorial process for Content Management for the CCC consisted of
creating, formatting, publishing, modifying and deleting relevant content.
These elements were designed as follows: |
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Information Systems supporting Content Management for the CCC |
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With the creation of
the Information Support department, management realized that adequate
information systems would be crucial to support the knowledge flow to the
CCC. Concerning the realization of Content Management Systems, a company-wide
project was to provide a solution for different areas such as the intranet,
the extranet and also the CCC knowledge platform. With this project in its
early phase, all other developments on a departmental level were suspended.
Yet, due to several organizational issues and rising pressure to reduce
costs, the company-wide project was never completed. Since the problem of
explosive growth in call volumes and CCC agents still persisted, Information
Support decided to set up its own knowledge platform with very limited funds
which became “HelpMe”. As a consequence, this project did not have an
official project status and because the IT department was not involved, they
would not provide support in any way for this new solution. |
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“HelpMe” is a Web-based Content Management System (CMS) to deliver information
to the agents in the CCC. This system provides opportunities for discovering
information (navigation) as well as experts in certain topics (so-called
yellow pages). Furthermore, it creates awareness for new items and changes
in existing content by highlighting these at prominent positions on
the platform (Figure 5). As a consequence, “HelpMe” is an important
part of the service process at Union Investment.
Figure 5: Support of the service process at Union Investment
Technically, “HelpMe” originally consisted of HTML files stored on a
local fileserver. From there, they could be retrieved with a standard
Web-browser. In order to create and manage the navigational structure
that linked those pages, a tool based on Microsoft Access was developed
in-house. The HTML file corresponding to the navigational structure
was recreated with this tool each time a document was inserted, moved,
or deleted. Furthermore, hyperlinks between the different documents
had to be checked manually with each deletion or revision of existing
content. In contrast to the email files, there was no search function
available in “HelpMe”. This hampered retrieval, especially because the
navigational structure had grown historically and was difficult to understand.
Security and user management did not have to be specifically administered
for “HelpMe” as the system was based solely on a file-server to which
everyone in the CCC had access. As a consequence though, it was not
possible to restrict access to certain areas or to personalize content,
for example by CCC-level.
The platform had been programmed by a single employee of the Customer
Service unit who had left the organization when the redesign took place,
without leaving any documentation. Besides being published in “HelpMe”,
new information was always sent via email as well. These emails often
included attachments of up to ten megabytes in size were sent to all
CCC agents. This caused storage problems on one hand, as email files
of all agents constantly grew and also caused significant traffic which
put a strain on network bandwith. |
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Improving Knowledge Flow— The Redesigning of “HelpMe” |
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Why “HelpMe” needed to be redesigned |
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While solving the
challenge of providing the CCC with knowledge for the customer to some
extent, the original version of “HelpMe” required some improvements which
would significantly increase usability and efficiency of the content
management processes. So the Head of Information Support decided to launch a
project to address these challenges of improving usability and retrieval in “HelpMe”
as well as to streamline the costly content management processes. The project
kick-off was in the summer of 2001. To improve the prior solution, the
project team wanted to introduce a new technical infrastructure based on a
standard software product which was implemented together with a conceptional
redesign of “HelpMe”. Since there were no experts in the field of knowledge
management in the organization, some external consultants took part in the
project to a lesser extent. For the most part, however, the members of
Information Support gained expertise about knowledge management by themselves
in the course of this project. |
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The redesign addressed the issue of complex structure by providing a
new navigational structure based on the terminology of the CCC agents
and implementing a search function. By concentrating the knowledge flow
on the channel “HelpMe”, redundancies to email were eliminated. For
the editors and administrators, the redesign aimed at reducing the costs
and time need for the costly content management processes. The new system
was to simplify conversion, publication and revision of existing content
and provide tools to better manage the navigational structure in “HelpMe”.
At the same time, budgetary and organizational constraints needed to
be complied with which meant that the software being selected should
be one that was already used in-house, thereby reducing costs and integration
efforts. By concentrating on the knowledge platform, the network infrastructure
of Union Investment would also be relieved of a significant amount of
traffic caused by emails with partially very large file attachments.
To evaluate whether the goals had been achieved, the team proposed a
system of performance indicators based on the user, editor, and administrator
processes. This allowed an analysis of the changes achieved at the level
of the CCC agents as well as the editors in Information Support. The
most important criteria were high system performance to make content
available quickly as well as high quality of content. |
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How “HelpMe” was redesigned |
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To properly align the new CMS to the
processes it was to support, the project team started with a process
analysis. After the project was delayed for several months, the project team
met for a two-day workshop in late January 2002 to analyze the processes of the
users, editors and administrators in using “HelpMe”. During this workshop,
the team also spent some time in the CCC, observing agents do their work and
checking on how they use the different information sources. Figure 6 shows
how the different user processes can be supported by “HelpMe”.
Figure 6: User processes are the basis for “HelpMe”
The process analysis was the foundation for deriving the requirements
of the new technical solution in a requirements analysis. Each requirement
was weighted to be “optional”, “important” or “critical”, depending
on significance. Using metrics for each requirement, the team determined
if the evaluated software solutions fulfilled these adequately, extensively
or not at all. By aggregating the 29 requirements in a benefit analysis,
the different products could be compared. For the comparison, points
were assigned to the weights (1 point for optional, 5 points for important,
10 points for critical) and to the fulfillment of criteria (1 for “adequately
fulfilled”, 2 for “extensively fulfilled”, 0 for “not fulfilled”). Figure
7 shows a snapshot of the benefit analysis for the part of the user
processes. To avoid selecting a product which required extensive and
costly customizing in order to fulfill the requirements, the project
team created a benefit analysis for an “out-of-the-box and a “customizing”
scenario.
Figure 7: Snapshot of the benefit analysis “Out-of-the-box”
Besides the requirements analysis, members of the project team were
also able to use a live system based on the evaluated products. This
proved whether the products could live up to their promises and enabled
the simulation of a typical working scenario. Within the simulation
some additional factors came up which the team simply hadn’t considered
when doing the requirements analysis.
Because of the limited budget, only those products would be evaluated
that were already in use in other parts of Union Investment. The first
system was Arago DocMe, a CMS which mainly focuses on supporting the
editor in publishing information and administrating the navigational
structure, while not integrating its own web server and therefore not
providing any functions to manage users or restrict access to the content
via a web browser. DocMe was already used to manage the extranet and
the Internet Website of Union Investment. The second system was Prionet
Pirobase. It too was already in use in the organization at a newly acquired
subsidiary. It is a typical web content management system, meaning that
it integrates the back-end for the editors and the Web server that controls
access for the users via a Web browser. The third product was Lotus
Quickplace of IBM. It was recommended by the external consultants as
it focuses on managing rather small amounts of content for users engaged
in a common project and is easy to implement. This product, however,
was not in use at Union Investment yet and would have caused significant
costs since the IT outsourcer of Union Investment did not have the expertise
required for running this application yet.
Since the benefit analysis yielded very close results, some Knock Out-criteria
were developed to better differentiate the products. A product that
would not fulfill all these criteria would be ruled out immediately.
Examples for these criteria were a reliable search function, no limit
of the size of documents or the securing of integrity in hyperlinks
within the CMS.
With the requirements analysis and the K.O.-criteria to back up the
decision, as well as the financial restrictions and the integration
aspect, the Union Investment team members chose Arago DocMe.
To ensure that the requirements were implemented adequately, the project
team developed a system design draft based on the selected software,
that described in detail how the requirements were to be implemented.
This document also served as a basis for the communication with the
software supplier, Arago.
Besides selecting and customizing the software, the structure of the
content needed to be determined to fit the preferences of the users
when navigating. The project team developed a consistent three-level
navigational structure that defines the most relevant business terms
in a way they are understood within the organization.
With the use of templates, the 3,9000 documents already present in “HelpMe”
were migrated to the new structure. In parallel, the project team created
the documentation of the customized settings in “HelpMe” and provided
training session for users and editors to ensure a smooth transition.
The project lasted for about one year. One important reason for this
relatively long project duration was the fact that the team was not
fully dedicated to the project. |
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How the New “HelpMe” changed business and support processes |
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The goal of the new “HelpMe” was to ease the
work of CCC agents and thereby enable increased performance. This was
achieved by reducing cycle times necessary for the editors to publish
information and facilitating access and retrieval.
The user process of the CCC agent is now better supported through improvements
in search and navigation. The revised navigational structure facilitates
the use of “HelpMe”. It consists of three levels, of which the first
level can always be accessed on the top bar and the others on the left
side, depending on the context (cf. Figure 8). It helps the user find
information where she assumes it can be found. If she cannot find the
needed information in the navigational structure, the new search function
offers an alternative to retrieve it quickly, for example, during a
phone call. Since the new system also supports metadata for documents
such as topic, author or publication date, agents can search specifically
for these keywords in addition to just searching full text. This is
quite crucial as agents only have a few seconds on the phone to find
relevant answers. So in order to avoid impatient customers, the system
needs to have a high performance but also provide a navigational structure
that is intuitive to the users.
Figure 8: User interface of “HelpMe”
The knowledge flow now concentrates on “HelpMe”, making it an important
part of the working environment of each CCC agent. Email is no longer
used to publish information. This way, it can be ensured that every
agent has access to all information, regardless of the time spent on
the job. Furthermore, only the most up-to-date version is available.
The “What’s new” function reminds the agents of revised content that
they would otherwise not notice because they have memorized the old
version already. |
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Within the editor and administrator processes, some of the time-consuming
manual steps are now carried out or atleast facilitated by the system.
Templates accelerate the conversion of content into a format that matches
the need of the CCC agents and can be displayed in a Web browser. To
support the editors, several templates for different types of documents
(i.e., news, charts, reports, etc.) are available. These templates can
be used in Microsoft Office applications and define the layout that
helps to automatically convert the content into HTML. They improve the
performance of the converter which can be customized specifically for
these templates. They also make the use of style sheets possible for
a centrally-managed layout. Thus, the editors do not need to redefine
the layout and formats each time a document is created. The templates
help the editors realize how the final result of their work will look
in “HelpMe”. Editors are now able to publish and disseminate content
directly from the office application, similar to the way a file is stored
on a local disk drive. The conversion is accomplished fully automatically
by the CMS which also publishes the converted HTML files. This offers
a great improvement in efficiency compared to the former system. The
office applications are used to revise existing content as well, making
the introduction of other applications unnecessary.
The administrator now uses a separate client. With this client, she
can administer the navigational structure of the site to automatically
include newly-added content. The administrator can also manage additional
components like indices, which automatically create tables of contents
for documents fulfilling certain criteria. Finally, the client can be
used to manage user groups among the editors, although not among the
users in the CCC. |
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Divide and Conquer |
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With worsening economic conditions, Union
Investment was reluctant to initiate large, enterprise-wide projects in the
area of knowledge management. In this regard, the new “HelpMe” can be
considered as a pilot project to indicate potential benefits of such
concepts. Although it was intended to effectively solve a problem within a
specific business process, service management, the achievement was widely
recognized upon completion. At the time of writing, other internal
departments at Frankfurt, Germany, as well as subsidiaries of Union
Investment in Switzerland and Luxembourg were eager to be show how the
solution works and to find out how they can use it for their own processes. “We realize how important the provision of the right information to CCC agents is to keep customers satisfied and ultimately make Union Investment successful. Redesigning “HelpMe” was an important step to provide this information to our agents. Combined with our CRM-System, all the information needed is now available at the touch of a button, improving service and the performance of our CCC agents alike,” notes Giovanni G., Head of Customer Service.
“HelpMe” is also a first step to introduce other knowledge management
tools in the future that not only focus on the retrieval of knowledge
contained in documents. As a significant amount of knowledge cannot
be explicated and remains in the heads of employees, a possible next
step could be to establish a skill management system to further improve
the access to experts on certain topics. This would also make the management
of competencies of CCC agents possible and indicate gaps on the department
level. Finally, a challenging issue is the topic of delivering knowledge
directly to the customers on the Internet and to also integrate mechanisms
to support the knowledge flow back from the customers to Union Investment
to enable continuous improvement in the future. “Of course, we can help
you.” |
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Case Study Questions |
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Prior
to the project described here, new information was usually sent first by
email to deliver it as quickly as possible and create awareness for the news.
In a second step, Information Support also published the information to
“HelpMe” where it was available on demand. Therefore, CCC agents had two
platforms from which to choose. This resulted in email becoming the preferred
channel due to better functionality. For one, a full-text search could be
applied to the email-file, which was not available in “HelpMe”. And just as
important was the ability to completely customize the information structure
within the email file for faster retrieval. This made it more difficult for a
central information repository to gain acceptance. When using email, however,
each agent had a different level of information accessible depending on the
time spent on the job. New agents started with no information and only
developed their own collection slowly.
