Increasing Customer Satisfaction to 70%+ with Verint Knowledge Management

Handling Increasingly Technical Customer Queries

Sky Deutschland AG is a rapidly growing German media organization broadcasting satellite- and cable-based digital subscription television services in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The organization is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sky plc and has around 5 million subscribers. 

Sky’s continuing development has transformed the television business, with innovations extending from Sky Go and Sky on-demand, to other new ways of connecting television and viewers. While these innovations are propelling growth, they are also creating new challenges. In particular, the increasing technical complexity of broadcast services demands more regular system updates to the Sky platforms installed in customers’ homes. 

This complexity in turn puts pressure on the quality of customer service, with first-line support agents in the call centers frequently struggling to resolve increasingly technical inquiries during the initial call. Robert Wiedemer is the Head of eCare Help at Sky Deutschland. He explains, “The broadcast market is becoming increasingly competitive, and the overriding goal at Sky Deutschland is to deliver a responsive and engaging customer experience. However, customer growth together with the increasingly technical nature of the inquiries was putting pressure on the first-line agents in the call centers. Our first call resolution rate was falling, transfer rates were rising, and we needed a more efficient approach to finding the answer to specific questions.” 

Sky Deutschland has 3,000 customer service representatives (CSRs), operating across twenty service centers. Previously, the technical support teams relied on largely manual processes to respond to customer inquiries. “When a customer contacted Sky Deutschland through their preferred channel, the CSR had access to a knowledge base, but it wasn’t connected to our Siebel customer relationship management platform. Time was wasted while they switched between different systems, descriptions, and even screenshots to resolve the inquiry,” says Wiedemer.

A Centralized Repository That Delivers Contextual Knowledge

In response, Sky Deutschland has deployed Verint Knowledge Management. It provides a centralized repository of technical content, frequently asked questions, procedures, and more, enabling Sky Deutschland’s CSDs to search the knowledge base using keywords and natural language – and provide consistent, accurate answers to customer inquiries, through whichever channel the customer chooses to communicate. Integration with the CRM platform also provides the CSDs with relevant customer context, including purchase history and other data such as technical details, contracts, and errors, to automatically filter and personalize responses. Data from fields in the CRM system can be dynamically added to content to filter and personalize responses, often eliminating the need to search.

The Verint platform provides contextual knowledge to handle 8.5 million calls and 3.1 million email and whitemail documents every year. 

Among many integrated features, the German broadcaster has the flexibility to quickly draft new technical content using pre-packaged templates, collaborate on the authoring and approval of this content, and let CSRs search for content quickly and easily. Verint Decision Trees also help guide users through complex issues by asking a series of questions to narrow down the issue, while conditional logic can be added to progress questions automatically based on customer information from the CRM. The script designer allows these flows to be created visually. 

Knowledge management reports are also used to help the Sky team understand how users are consuming the content to help them produce content that is more responsive to the needs of customers. New reports can be created in minutes and subsequently shared with the necessary stakeholders to determine the success of the knowledge management program.

Consistent, Accurate Answers Deliver a Superior Customer Service

Verint is helping to transform Sky Deutschland’s technical support, increasing first-contact resolution, improving the consistency and quality of answers, enhancing compliance with regulations and company processes, and reducing agent training time. 

The organization has experienced the following advantages using Verint Knowledge Management: 

• Increased customer satisfaction rate to more than 70%
• Reduced average call handling time to 8 minutes and 9 seconds, while improving response accuracy
• Improved first contact resolution rate by 8 percent
• Delivered rich technical knowledge for a wide variety of user types and communication channels
• Reduced employee training time by delivering relevant information automatically when needed

“The right knowledge delivered at the right time is critical to a successful interaction,” says Wiedemer. “We also believe the key to engaging customers effectively is to empower the employees who serve them. Verint Knowledge Management puts the right information at CSDs’ fingertips as they need it, enabling them to focus on the customer, rather than searching for information. The ultimate outcome is consistent, accurate answers to customers’ technical inquiries across all channels – and a superior service experience.”