…and companies focused on delivering Knowledge Insight get much greater return.

I recently spoke with 1to1 Magazine editor Ginger Conlon about the importance of actionable insight within customer service departments and provided a few examples of how this helps deliver considerable ROI.

Injecting actionable insight into the process of resolving customer issues is a goal that most companies seek to achieve. At a high level, most business executives intuitively appreciate the relationship between a better understanding of customer issues and needs, and its impact on higher sales or greater client satisfaction.

Literally speaking, insight means gaining an accurate and deep understanding of something, for example a business situation such as a customer issue and its solution.

“Gaining insight” can consume more than 50% of the customer service department budget

The driver is quite obvious. For many companies, product diversity, complexity, and pace of change is increasing, and hence often more than 50% of their customer service bandwidth (we have even seen figures north of 70%) is consumed by activities associated with gaining understanding into customer issues and seeking a satisfactory solution for every single one; or basically customers (self-service) or agents consuming time gaining insight, and accumulating delays and frustration.

The currency of customer service is time. When you consider the cost per agent, per year of approximately $80K to $120K (fully loaded), my simple math computes this task of “gaining insight” at as much as $5M per year for a 100-agent customer service department. The more complex customer issues are the greater that costs are. We’re talking a great deal of money here.

The impact of insight challenges within customer service – we call it insight deficit – also goes beyond that direct expense. Insight deficit has huge ramifications on client dissatisfaction due to an inability to resolve customer issues fast enough and in a quality manner. It impacts revenue and reputational capital. Smarter companies will also understand its impact on agent dissatisfaction driving up costly turnover, hiring, training, quality, etc.

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