Knowledge Automation Helps Stranded Drivers Get Back on The Road

Customer since: January 2019

Number of users: 150

80%+ reduction in time to retrieve answers

The Challenge

Viking, a leading Scandanavian roadside assistance company, was struggling to provide their stranded drivers with the incredibly fast, complex support they needed. Their CSRs were slowed down searching for answers across their enormous knowledge library and troubleshooting procedures required manual content navigation and took far too long.

The Solution

Viking sought innovative ways to improve contact center effectiveness through a unified support techstack and single workspace where CSRs find answers fast and deliver them instantly to drivers, creating exceptional customer experiences on a consistent basis.

The Results

  • Virtually eliminated time to find information from 4 minutes to less than 30 seconds, drastically improving first contact resolution.
  • Saved on physical labor and made support more cost effective by drastically improving collaboration between CSRs and stranded drivers via smarter content guidance powered by decision tree logic.
  • Reduced the need to run manual searches through a seamless CRM integration that powers relevant content suggestions to CSRs in real-time.

The Story

For over 60 years, Viking has provided their Scandanavian customers with the superior mobility solutions and roadside assistance they need way up north. To achieve their status as the market leader, they built a culture that emphasizes superior customer service experiences, with the aid of innovative solutions that allow them to remain at the forefront of their industry.

Why Finding Answers Was Originally Impossible

As a market leader, Viking needs to support all sorts of drivers, regardless of the type of vehicle they use. Over the years, their documentation on the thousands of different brands, makes, and models that are on the road accumulated within their content management system. Their knowledge base was suddenly unmanageable and unsearchable, incapable of bringing their representatives (CSRs) to the right documentation quickly and identifying answers because CSRs needed to manually navigate through deep folder structures, wasting precious time on each call.
The CSRs information problem didn’t end once they arrived at the appropriate folder. Support documentation that contained procedures, troubleshooting steps, and FAQs needed for resolving issues was difficult to follow and navigate. A combination of document scrolling and ctrl+f search to locate necessary information was the only way to get things.

The best-case scenario took a significant amount of time. The oft-occurring worst-case scenario was that a CSR would: 

    • Place callers on hold
    • Spend valuable time trying to locate the correct answer,
    • Return to inform the caller that they did not have the answer
    • Ultimately dispatch someone who could assist them in person.

The Search for an Innovative Solution

Determined to find a solution to their customer care problem, Viking conducted an exhaustive search. “It was difficult to find the perfect knowledge management system. Our team searched high and low and found many knowledge bases, but none of them were different, and that’s what I was looking for.” – Lead Project Manager at Viking.

For starters, Viking wanted a unified, single screen support solution for their CSRs to improve their day-to-day experiences, help them find answers faster, and manage exceptional customer experiences on a more consistent basis. After leveraging Shelf’s API to achieve a seamless integration with their homegrown CRM and ticketing system, their solution was a reality.

We went from a process where CSRs had to navigate through endless folders, to answers automatically being presented in real-time. It was transformational for our customer support. Now our CSRs just do the work that they’d normally do, and almost magically, answers appear on the sidebar of our CRM.”

– Eric Hepburn, Chief Operating Officer (COO)

Agent Assist is Transformative

Viking also developed an Agent Assist module, powering real-time answers from their knowledge using inputs entered directly into their CRM. Eric Hepburn explains, “It was an “A-ha! moment” for the company; not only were we able to achieve a single system feel, but we were able to leverage Shelf’s information architecture and unique search capabilities
to proactively push relevant results to our CSRs.”

Shelf has been invaluable to both company and customer. When customers call in, they expect that a vehicle will have to be dispatched to help them. Now, the company has a greater ability to collaborate with the caller to solve the problem and eliminate the need for physical assistance. This ends up being a huge win for customers, who get back on the road faster than they thought possible, and for the company, who operates much more efficiently because they dispatch fewer automotive technicians.