Add User Skill Level to Client Care's CRM

[#1]

Would be nice if new client care agents could see in the CRM what skill level the current caller/chat partner has. Once you have a client care agent who doesn't know you in the chat they could skip all the standard questions, warnings and approvals if they see you know what you're doing.

It's great to get those information, questions and warning if you're a new client. But once you know everything, they could skip it and save time on both sides.

[#2]

Interesting thought.    You raise a very good point.

I'm sure, from time to time, this procedure may have felt irritatingly condescending to some of our power users, who already understand the risks and costs of their requested changes.

As it so happens, in a recent survey, we asked Supported Users to rank their level of expertise.  (PLEASE NOTE: This is not what the purpose of that survey was meant to tell us.)

The difficulty is, how can we make this skill level uniform?  From how the user ranks themselves, (some would say '5' where others of the same skill level might call themselves 3's) and how the ClientCare agent would interpret this ranking?  Since nobody's expertise is equal across all subjects of support, it seems like this could only be determined on a subjective case-by-case basis, rather than objectively ranking skill level across the board.  And to do so may be objectionable to users who would prefer not to be ranked.  Would there be legal implications?  It's a slippery slope.

How would you suggest we could solve this?  Please understand, I'm certainly not knocking the idea down, but just trying to think it through.

It could be possible to give Supported Users the option to permanently opt-out of our obligatory "warnings" and "approvals", but the purpose of these is to ensure that you are aware of any potential impact from the changes you have requested, and to guarantee that we are able to allocate enough resources to cover the additional processing, where applicable, so that your service is never interrupted or delayed.  Also, sometimes the warnings let you know that historical data will be wiped as a result of a change. 

Would you be in favor of an opt-out on a user-by-user basis?

Do you have any thoughts to propose a way to do this without facing the difficulties I outlined above?  We're very open to suggestions.

I think ClientCare agents can try harder to listen for a sense of how strong the user’s understanding is.  I think this is one of our most difficult skills to practice because it’s a question of interpersonal insight and good communication skills.  For now, none of our agents would take it the wrong way if you let us know up front that you're already aware of the implications of your request.

[#3]

Good one Andreas, I love this idea.

As a supported user with several years experience, I do sometimes find it frustrating that contact with newer client care agents involves the whole "it must be user error' attitude, and subsequent back-and-forth until the client care person realises you aren't a) a complete newbie, or b) generally of below-average intelligence.  I must point out here that this never applied in my dealings with you, Jorgen!

In terms of your questions, Jorgen - I can see your point about individuals having varying perceptions of their own ability, but I'm also sure that individual client care agents build up their own views of the relative competence and experience of supported users they deal with. This could easily be incorporated into the CRM - who knows, perhaps it's there already, but Andreas and I didn't rate as well as we thought??

Joking apart, I wouldn't be in favour of doing away with change warnings per se,  As long as the warnings are relevant, I think they can still fulfil a purpose - not every supported user will have experience in every facet of the tool, and may still require a warning.

However, in personal dealings with client care, I think this would save a heap of time and angst.