119 Curious About...Knowledge Operations Using "Find & Follow" Method in the Contact Center w/Greg DeVore, co-founder | ScreenSteps
Welcome to the My Curious Colleague podcast with me, Denise Venneri. I am a twenty year practitioner in the consumer engagement space having worked for two large CPG organizations. My intent here is really to share best practices with particular focus around the specialist and analyst roles and to give back to this great community because CPGCX rocks.
Denise Venneri:Hello, my curious colleagues. This week, I continue to be curious about learning more about knowledge in the contact center. Yes. We're back again for second in our series. And today, we're talking a little bit differently, specifically more about what's known as knowledge operations according to our guest.
Denise Venneri:And to help me understand just that is my colleague, Greg Devore, cofounder of ScreenSteps. Welcome to the podcast, Greg.
Greg DeVore:Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Denise Venneri:Of course. My honor. My honor. So let's get the conversation started, and let's begin with you telling us how you got to here.
Greg DeVore:Well, we started over twenty years ago, and we were originally hired to help train doctors and sonographers on three d 40 ultrasound systems. They're these $200,000 machines. And as we went into their offices, we found that despite them being flown across the country to be trained in person and all this training, they were just filled with sticky notes all over the machine. And we realized we're really approaching this wrong. We need a better way.
Greg DeVore:We really just need a better sticky note than when than than, you know, super elaborate training. And that started us on a journey where we eventually built a software platform that's a knowledge operations platform today. But even more importantly, we started really studying how are we training people in operational knowledge, this this knowledge of how to do things, how do I answer questions, how do I solve problems, and does it make sense, or do we need to kinda take a step back and rethink our whole approach to this problem? Which eventually led us to write a book and then develop a methodology called find and follow, which is a whole different approach to how are we gonna train, especially agents in a contact center so that they're confident, they're independent, and they they can handle all the change and complexity that gets thrown at them every day.
Denise Venneri:Yes. God bless our agents, seriously. So you said find and follow methodology. How do you go in and teach folks about how to use this find and follow methodology? And just take me through a little bit more specifics on how that's different.
Greg DeVore:Yeah. Well, the the first thing is it's it's a methodology. It may not be for all contact centers, but contact centers that deal with complexity and change. So if you have a high level of complexity or a high level of change in the contact center, which is most contact centers. Today.
Greg DeVore:Training. Yeah. To all the easy stuff is kinda being taken away by automation and AI, but they're left with these complex scenarios. If that's the the case, training or teaching is a strategy that can't work. It's like pouring a gallon of water into a 16 ounce cup.
Greg DeVore:It's too much information for the the agents to absorb and retain. And if you I mean, you've probably had this experience. You see a new agent in training, and then they're overwhelmed. It's there's so much information coming down. They're furiously taking notes.
Greg DeVore:And so what we said is there's a great book. It's called What's Your Problem? And it's all about reframing problems. Says if you reframe a problem, you're gonna come up with a radically different solution because we tend to develop solutions depending on how we frame the problem.
Denise Venneri:Right.
Greg DeVore:So if you're I'm in a contact center and somebody's not performing well, what's the first thing we say? We need better training. And so training involves teaching and memorizing. How we reframe that problem is we need better knowledge transfer. How can we transfer knowledge to that agent right in the moment they need it so that they can handle any of a gazillion situations without having to memorize all those situations.
Greg DeVore:And when you do that, now we have a whole different approach. So I think of it as I have a music background. I I have a degree in music. I think of it if you're if you're a musician, you know what sheet music is. Sheet music is designed so that you can perform something without having to have it memorized.
Greg DeVore:And if we design that sheet music right and I've got the right skills, I can perform a very complex piece of music without having to have it all in my head. And, really, in good musicians, they can bring it up and they can play right through it the first time. So we wanna think of that with our agents. We're enabling a performance for them. This is like sheet music for them that it's gonna guide them through the call, through the procedure without them having to put the caller on hold or memorize a ton of information.
Greg DeVore:So if we work there backwards, now we're gonna approach things very differently. We're gonna design recipes, and this find and follow framework helps us. The first step we do is we separate out foundational and actual knowledge. So have you ever seen those procedures that has, like, well, this is why we do this. It's because three years ago, this happened, and now we need to make sure we do that and x y z.
Greg DeVore:That's all foundational knowledge that makes it hard for an agent to follow a procedure in that moment. So what we do is we pull all that out. We'll say, we'll teach them that foundational knowledge, that why, the what, you know, what are the tools we're using, why do we do this, and then we just have them practice finding and following actual knowledge, which are designed like recipes or decision trees. It's kinda like teaching them to use a GPS instead of having them memorize a book of maps.
Denise Venneri:Right. So is it sort of like as you're talking about it in in my world, which was CPG, it kinda feels like consumer facing information, which there's consumer facing information which you want the agents to understand. And then there is nonconsumer facing, which is, like, the background and maybe tips for the agent that they don't want the consumer to know about. Am I thinking about that? Right?
Denise Venneri:Well, it's Like, it could be
Greg DeVore:but but even more specific, it's what does the agent do? So say somebody's calling in and they have a product and somebody ingested it or, you know, they they weren't supposed to and now you've got an emergency on your hand. Right? Right. There's a certain procedure that that employee needs to follow.
Greg DeVore:Okay? You want them following the same procedure every time when that situation comes up. And so they need to know, okay, what the product is, the fact that this is an emergency. But that recipe of exactly what they do, they shouldn't memorize that. We should bring that up so they can follow it, and now they're gonna be consistent every time.
Greg DeVore:Or say that there's a product recall, and now there's a process that we need to get that that thing shipped back to us and something else shipped out to them. There's a whole procedure about that. It might be different. Are they in The US? Are they outside of The US?
Greg DeVore:You know, has it been open? Has it not? All those different things, instead of teaching them that, will give them a decision tree that will guide them right through the process in real time. And that has a huge impact now on if we're onboarding agents. So we worked with one organization.
Greg DeVore:This was a public utility. Mhmm. It was taking twelve months for an employee to become independent to or to reach proficiency. By adopting this system, they reduced that from twelve months to about eight to ten weeks.
Denise Venneri:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Greg DeVore:So you shave ten months off of the time it takes for an agent to be confident and proficient. That has a big impact on the contact center.
Denise Venneri:Yeah. And to their satisfaction. I I I see that. Can we can we do another example of how a client may maybe use this methodology and what their results were?
Greg DeVore:Yeah. And this would be a good one on to show the difference. It's it's a mindset change. Right? So in most times, we we think we want our our agents to learn the information.
Greg DeVore:And the more they memorize, the more valuable they are. In our methodology, the more they memorize, the less able they are to change. And if we're dealing with constant change, that's a problem. So I'll give you two stories, actually. So we had one group.
Greg DeVore:It would take two weeks for change to go through their contact center because you can't train everybody at the same time. You always had to have people on the phones. People would be out. When they switched to this mode of training, those two weeks went down to less than a day because now people were just notified when they came into work, x y procedure has changed. Be aware of that when you bring it up.
Greg DeVore:And and they bring up the call, and it's like Google Maps. You know, if the road closes, it just reroutes you around it. So now they can change instantly. Another good example is a group. They were doing medical device troubleshooting, and they had to stand up a brand new contact center in a hundred and twenty days from scratch.
Greg DeVore:They got it out there. They got their training time down to two weeks, and they came out of the gates, and their their quality scores are 98%, and their SLA is 90. So they're killing it. They're doing great. After about thirty days, their stats started dropping.
Greg DeVore:Now you would expect agents, the more experienced they are, to get better, not worse. We went in and interviewed the agents. Said, what happened? Well, they said, well, in other contact centers where we worked, it was frowned upon if you used the documentation. It was frowned upon if you use the resources.
Greg DeVore:They wanted you to know it, and so they stepped away. And we could see in the analytics in our platform that they had stopped using it. And so management came in and said, oh, no. We want you. We we don't want you to memorize.
Greg DeVore:We want you to rely on this, and those stats went right back back up to where they are. So it shows that when we realize we're not good at working from memory, we can perform much better.
Denise Venneri:Interesting. Interesting. Hey. I'd be remiss, excuse me, if I didn't bring up AI. Yes.
Denise Venneri:Artificial intelligence. As somebody who's comes from the background that I come from, which is two large CPG organizations, you know, I I'm always like, wait. Are we behind on AI? What's it gonna do? What are the use cases?
Denise Venneri:So tell me from your perspective, I believe you're more in, like, a regulated regulated industries that you've given examples on. How is AI used as a facilitator, or isn't it?
Greg DeVore:So AI can be used lots of different ways, and it's important to understand which ways can you trust. So a lot of organizations a great place for AI is, you know, quality reports because that doesn't touch the customer at all. Right? It's not affecting what they're saying. It can automate that the the the quality measurements there.
Greg DeVore:Yes. Where people have been more hesitant or they've gotten a bit burned is when they're a lot of AI companies, if they're gonna do agent assist or agent guidance, they'll tell you, okay. Well, give us your junk drawer of knowledge. You know, give us your SharePoint, all the stuff you've got, and we're gonna feed that to AI, and then it will get generate answers for your agents. Important thing to understand about AI is it's only as good as the data you feed it.
Denise Venneri:Sure.
Greg DeVore:So it if if you're coming to AI, like, it's been trained on all these generalized knowledge that's out there, it doesn't know anything about your company. It doesn't know your internal procedures. It doesn't know your policies unless you give it to it. So if a lot of those things when we work with organizations, we find a lot of that information is stuck in people's heads.
Denise Venneri:Mhmm.
Greg DeVore:If it's stuck in people's heads, AI doesn't know about it. It can't use it. And when AI doesn't know what to do, it tends to invent things.
Denise Venneri:Mhmm.
Greg DeVore:So the way we help organizations with AI is saying, we just need to give it better data, and we'll use AI on that side of things of capturing it. So the biggest challenge is how do we get that information out of people's heads? And the barrier to that is actually writing the documentation, getting it out. So we'll use AI. We'll go in and interview them.
Greg DeVore:They're subject matter experts. We can take those transcripts and run that through our AI that then creates very clear actual paths and recipes or separates out that foundational knowledge that can then be used in our system or to feed other AI systems. And now you can trust the content that's being generated or or used in AI.
Denise Venneri:Got it. So it's being used very much in the upfront building, it feels like.
Greg DeVore:It's the building and the maintenance because Mhmm. Yeah. People people don't understand is when they look at AI, they look at it as a project of I'm gonna just write all this documentation, train the AI, and it will work. But any contact center that I've been a part of is changing all the time. Sure.
Greg DeVore:So it's not a project. It's a process of continually updating that AI with relevant information so that it can it can do the right things.
Denise Venneri:Got it. Okay. If folks wanted to find out more about you and what you're up to, what's the next step, Greg?
Greg DeVore:If you wanna learn more about the methodology find and follow, we have a book on that on Amazon.
Greg DeVore:You can find
Greg DeVore:it there. It has lots of contact center case studies and really lays out this framework of dramatically reducing the amount of information we have to teach agents for them to perform, you know, consistently and effectively. And if they wanna follow me on LinkedIn or reach out on LinkedIn, I'm there in Greg Devore. I post a lot there. The company we have is ScreenSteps.
Greg DeVore:You can find that at ScreenSteps.com.
Denise Venneri:Perfect. Perfect. Okay. So we are at the end, and I really appreciate you taking time this morning to, speak with us.
Greg DeVore:No. It's great to talk with you. Thanks so much. You have been listening to the My Curious Colleague podcast with Denise Venere. Thank you for your time.
