Dynamic Case Management

For Customer Service

By Ajay Khanna
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 2

Executive Summary 3
What Is a Case? 4
Case Workflow 4
Case Participants 4
Case Information 5
Case Policies 5
Case Documents 5
Metrics 6
What is Case Management? 6
Challenges in Customer Service 6
Technical Challenges 7
How Dynamic Case Management Meets Challenges in Customer Service? 8
What Makes the Case Management Dynamic? 8
Task Distribution & Processing 8
Next Best Action Scripts 9
Knowledge Management 9
Customer 360-Degree View 9
Auditability and Interaction History 10
Multi-Channel Interaction Support 10
Integration with Legacy Systems 10
Adaptability & Agility 10
How KANA Service Experience Management (SEM) Helps 11
Model Driven Case Definition 11
Efficient Task Management 11
Adaptive Desktop 12
Knowledge Infused Processes 12
Unstructured Processes 12
Audit Trail 13
Case Analytics 13
Integration 13
KANA SEM Support for Dynamic Case Management 14
More Information 15
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 3

If you think case management is all about capturing customer notes and efficient
call wrap-ups, think again. In today’s complex and unpredictable world you cannot
anticipate the type of case your knowledge worker will get. Therefore, you cannot
design or “code” your applications for all possible scenarios. What you need is an
efficient and dynamic system that adapts to the context of each customer and is
flexible enough to accommodate any unforeseen scenarios that customer
interactions present.
This paper discusses what case management is and what its components are. It
discusses some of the current challenges in the customer service organizations
and how a dynamic case management system is suited to meet those challenges.
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 4

A case can be defined as a series of interactions initiated by an occurrence of an

event that needs investigation and response from an expert. The case is
completed when proper response is delivered to the stakeholder in the case. It
includes the interactions between the stakeholder and representatives from the
organization, a collection of reasons and any supporting artifacts about the
incident. The case can be a legal case, a billing dispute, a trouble ticket, a refund
request, etc. Some cases need a lot of investigation and may run for months, like
an immigration application, while others can be of the one-and-done type that can
be resolved in a single call, like credit card activation.
A case is always initiated by an event. This event can be “fraud has occurred,”
“customer received an incorrect billing statement,” “customer faced a service
disruption,” “customer faxed an
order,” etc. Whenever such an Industry Examples of Cases
event occurs, a customer service
interaction results and a case is Communications Billing disputes
initiated. When the issue is Trouble ticketing
Phone activation
resolved or the desired service is
delivered the case is completed Health Care Patient self-care
and closed. There are a number Referrals requests
of components of a case. These Financial Services Credit card fraud reporting
components include case Bill inquiry
workflow, case participants, case
Retail Merchandise returns
information, case rules, and Refund management
case documents.

Let’s review what these components are:

This component describes the series of activities in a case. These activities can
occur in a sequence or in parallel. There is a start activity, intermediate activities
and end activities. For example, for opening a bank account you may go through
activities like application, credit check, application review, approval and account
setup. A series of such steps or activities is called the case workflow.

Any step in case workflow needs to be performed by a participant or the

stakeholder in the case. This participant can be your agent, your customer, your
partner, etc. Activities can also be performed automatically, referred to as system
activities, in which the system acts as the user and completes a step in the
workflow. For example, if your customer fills out an account opening application,
the next step is a credit check, which is performed by the system calling an
external application like Transunion, Experian or Equifax.
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 5

Case information is all the data that is required to process a case, like information
needed to open a bank account, for example. In this example we may ask for the
customer’s name, address, phone number, social security number, work
information, and anything else needed to make a decision on the customer’s
account application.

Any business process is governed by a set of rules or policies. For example, if the
applicant has a high net worth, the case priority is set to high and additional
services, like a personal banker, free checking or overdraft protection, are offered.
Or if an application is not completed within two days, it may be escalated to the
express processing group. Or if the credit score is less than 480, the application
is denied. These types of rules will determine the path that a case will follow
through the workflow, the user experience that will be delivered to the agent and
the customer and finally the result of the case.

Sometimes there is a need to attach documents to a case so they can be

reviewed and made a part of the “case folder” (we will come back to the concept
of the case folder later). For example, an applicant needs to attach a copy of their
birth certificate, a pay stub and a current picture with an application for a new
account. These documents will flow along with the case, along with any other
data, and are used to make decisions on the case.
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 6

Metrics are a key part of case definition. They allow us to measure the
performance of the business. These metrics could be quite generic, like call
handling times, case processing time and cost per interaction, or specific to the
case management process, like up-sell revenue per interaction, etc.

Case management involves initiating a case, processing it and taking it to a

meaningful closure. It involves the collaborative design of workflows to determine
the sequence of activities. It involves dispatching the right activity to the right
person at the right time. It involves providing the knowledge needed by the case
owner to complete their task. It involves capturing the history of the case and
producing audit reports on demand. It also involves capturing all events and data
about the case and analyzing it to improve the customer service process.

In the global world economy, more often than not our customers, partners and
colleagues are geographically distributed. In order to process a customer request
we need to access dozens of systems, like CRM, ERP, Billing, Shipping, etc. The
processes are running across system, functional and enterprise boundaries. One
part of a process may be handled by business outsourcing partners while another
part is handled by dealers. In this heterogeneous ecosystem, how can we make
sure that we are process driven and deliver consistent customer service? And
since these legacy systems are not connected by a single end-to-end process,
they are integrated unnaturally, creating application and process silos in the
organization. To work on a case, agents may need to log into dozens of systems
or have a desktop littered with numerous applications and Alt-Tab between them.
This presents some serious visibility challenges. Since there is no end-to-end
definition of the case process, there is no common understanding of it. Moreover,
there is no unified view into the case that can provide real-time information about
the case or the CSR team performance. Agents and managers only come to know
about a service failure after it has happened. An even worse situation is when a
customer reports a problem and you had no idea the issue even existed. Visibility
into the processes is the key to improving them and taking actions at the right
moment so that service disasters can be avoided.
Because customers these days expect to be able to reach you via multiple
channels – phone, web, email, etc. – consistent service is also a big issue.
Consistency in service – not only across channels but also across multiple agents
in the same channel – is required but quite hard to deliver.
Customers have also come to expect instant or near real-time resolution of their
cases. This may be via self-service, phone or email. Competition today is tougher
than ever, and the barrier to switching services or products is getting lower and
lower. This is true across all industries including communications, retail,
healthcare or financial services. Customers can change service providers in
minutes.
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 7

The business environment is dynamic. There are continuous changes in political,

economic, social and technological factors that ask of you to adapt and adapt
quickly. Failure to do so may cause a missed market opportunity or hefty fines
from a regulatory agency. The ability to react faster than your competitors
provides you with a competitive advantage. You should be able to continuously
improve your processes without having to revamp and rebuild the contact centers
every 2-3 years. The infrastructure needs to be agile and extensible.
Over the past few years many customer service responses have become
automated or have moved to self-service, which effectively means that only the
hardest cases are coming to call centers. Now agents are expected to have much
deeper knowledge and cases need more investigation, resulting in increased call
handling times. Agent training costs are going up and so is agent turnover. Agents
are dissatisfied because they do not have the right tools to serve customers
effectively. Agent dissatisfaction is also causing high attrition rates in support
centers.
Delivering quality customer service is only one dimension of the challenge.
Service managers are under increasing pressure to reduce costs and be effective
in cross selling and up selling additional services. They must maintain a tight
balance between business and the demands of customers.
This situation has created the perfect storm for customer service managers who
are trying to balance both customer and business objectives.

Ubiquitous CRM systems are not designed for interacting with customers. They
are a system of record –to store data. That’s what they are designed for - data in
and data out. Secondly, they are also not well integrated with all internal and
external customer information sources, so information remains fragmented in
various systems like CRM, ERP, Accounting, Billing, Shipping, etc. This makes it
very difficult to describe and understand an exact situation in customer service
groups. The processes are locked in silos and information is presented without
the context of the overall process.
Fragmented data makes it a challenge to perform real-time and meaningful
analytics. When you capture customer data over various interactions, you want to
be able to learn from that information and improve the process for future
interactions. But very few systems today provide experience feedback that
amounts to a round trip optimization of customer service processes.
Most customer service systems are designed with agents and the phone in mind.
They are not well suited for self service, email response, or more leading edge
channels like SMS, chat, iPhone applications, etc. But you cannot afford to have
separate systems for each of these channels or to inadvertently deliver
inconsistent service through disparate channels.
Case management needs collaboration. Agents need to consult each other to
resolve a case. But the technology today does not support this to the fullest.
When collaboration does occur, it happens outside the customer service system,
resulting in a broken audit trail on how an agent reached a particular resolution.
The organization is unable to benefit from the knowledge of how an agent may
have solved a peculiar case. That information is not made part of enterprise
knowledge management but instead remains as tribal knowledge.
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 8

None of these issues can be solved by classic CRM systems or other trouble
ticketing systems out there. They were not designed to manage the global,
distributed, flexible and dynamic nature of today’s business.

As seen in the above challenges that the business and customer service
environment is quite unpredictable. The business environment is changing
continuously. As service providers offer multiple services and products the
customer support calls are getting more complex. Customers are calling into
support centers with multiple requests. While CSR is with a customer finishing a
case, customer changes the context of the call and brings up unrelated issue e.g.
while inquiring about a bill a customer wants to add additional service to phone.
Many a times the service process gets so complex that it is virtually impossible to
write it down or design it using traditional tools. We may not even know the
sequence of steps in resolving the case as steps will be determined by the
information or evidence collected till that point in time.
The traditional case management or the CRM solutions fail to address these
issues. We need a Dynamic case management system. With Dynamic Case
Management organizations get unprecedented agility and adaptability to manage
dynamic service processes. Adaptability refers to the ability of the process to
change as the context of the case changes. This change may be change in
process steps, user interfaces or rules etc. Agility on the other hand refers to the
ability to change the process designs quickly and deploying newer versions of
processes allowing for continuous process improvement and quick time to
solution.

A Dynamic Case Management System provides:

Task management means delivering a given task to an

agent who has the right skill set at the right time so that
the case can be processed within the service level
agreements (SLA) promised to the customer. There are
a number of factors that make this possible. If an agent
happens to be on vacation, we need to make sure
delegation of the task is possible. If a task is in
jeopardy of missing an SLA, system escalation of the task might be required.
Change in the agent organization may require reassignment and redistribution of
tasks. Case management allows you to manage the distribution of all these tasks
and makes processing efficient.
As cases are getting more complex, agents often need to collaborate with each
other in order to process them. This is quite common in managed health cases or
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 9

legal processes. Dynamic case management ensures that the provision of

collaboration is provided within the system and all collaboration is recorded and
available for audit.

To make sure all your agents are your best agents and that
their training costs are kept to a minimum, you need script
management. Scripts prompt agents to ask the right questions
and provide suitable responses to your customers. Depending
on customers’ responses, it further prompts agents to ask the
next question until a solution is reached. This eliminates the
need for thick binders with operating procedures for agents to
refer to while interacting with a customer. The use of scripts also reduces call
handling times and provides consistent service, no matter which agent takes the
call.

Since case processing is all about knowledgeable workers

resolving customer cases, knowledge is an important
component of case management. Knowledge management
integrates the organization’s knowledge with the process so
that the right information is available to the agent at the right
step in the process, allowing him or her to be effective. It
brings knowledge from multiple resources to the agents’
finger tips. Integrating knowledge with the customer service
process is more than just the ability to search; it is contextual to the customer
interaction and adapts depending on the interaction or according to any change in
information provided by the customer during the interaction.

Knowing your customers is critical in solving their

problems as well as identifying up-sell and cross sell
opportunities. When a customer gets in touch with you,
your agents needs to know the customer value, churn
propensity and all the issues reported or orders placed
by the customer. With this information at hand, an agent
can deliver the appropriate level of service to the customer and save you from
losing a high value customer. We all know that acquiring a new customer is much
more expensive than retaining an existing customer. Your existing customers are
much more profitable than newer customers. Case management brings all the
information about the customer onto a single user interface, right in front of the
agent as soon as the interaction starts.
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 10

At any point in time you should be able to discern how a

particular case was processed. This might even be a
regulatory requirement, especially in financial services or
health care. Case history can include all status changes to a
case, who did which task at what time and discussion threads
or collaborations that occurred while processing the case. By
retrieving all this information with the click of a button, you
save a tremendous amount of time and cost on audits.

Customers today
expect to be able to
reach you via multiple
channels at their
convenience. Customer service centers need to support phone, email, chat, fax
and internet as channels for support. The challenge here is providing customers
with consistent service no matter which channel they use. A customer can initiate
an interaction or a case from one channel but choose to continue it using another.
For example, someone might report a billing dispute via email or the web, but then
call your support center to find out the status. In such a situation, their experience
needs to be seamless. Dynamic Case management provides interfaces to all such
channels while still keeping the underlying process for case resolution the same.
You do not have to design different processes for different channels.

As we discussed above, many challenges today

are due to very heterogeneous systems. By
integrating all the systems into an end-to-end
process, case management eliminates the need
for agents to log into dozens of systems or Alt-
Tab between them to resolve cases. The right information is retrieved and
delivered to the right system from a single user interface, allowing agents to focus
on helping each customer from a single point of entry.

Dynamic Case management by its definition needs to be

able to manage unstructured processes because
situations can change at any point in the process. These
situations cannot be coded or predicted during the
design time beforehand either, because they are
unpredictable. Even if you could somehow determine all
possibilities, the process design itself would become
very incomprehensible and rigid.
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 11

Dynamic Case management makes a provision for agents to determine the path
of the process as the interaction progresses. The agent desktop is also adaptive
and morphs as the interaction changes or the customer context changes.

KANA SEM provides comprehensive dynamic case management functionality that

you need for your customer service applications. KANA SEM is a platform for
developing and deploying agile customer service applications. It allows service
managers to design the right experience for their customers and their business,
orchestrate the experience across their people and technology, and listen to the
outcomes so that they can continuously make the experience better. KANA’s
SEM platform allows us to build case management solutions that solve specific
pain points in the customer service space.

Some of the key features of the SEM platform include:

Easy to use model

driven case definition
allows business man-
agers and analysts to
define the customer
experience flow in the
terminology that is
meant for customer
service managers. A
rich, out-of-the-box set
of flows and information
objects allows for quick modeling. The web based tool allows for collaboration
between business and IT and provides reusable components that enable
solutions to be developed faster than traditional development utilities.

KANA SEM helps you to

design and manage
efficient task distribution
per your specific business
needs. There is support
for delegation, reassign-
ment, etc., so that the
right task is delivered to
the agents with the right
skills at the right time.
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 12

Service Experience Management (SEM) delivers the solution with the Adaptive
Desktop. The Adaptive Desktop dynamically responds to the needs of your agents
during each service interaction. Channel-agnostic and context-driven, the
Adaptive Desktop provides access to all of the contextual knowledge,
applications,
and tools
needed to
resolve an
inquiry. It
delivers an
interactive
experience
that leads
agents and
customers to
satisfactory resolution by providing the
right blend of process, data, and knowledge at
the right moment.

KANA SEM delivers the

right blend of knowledge
and process at each
step needed to lead
CSRs and customers
through an interaction.
It dynamically modi-
fies the experience
to account for unex-
pected responses and
your or your customers’
changing requirements.
With rich intelligent
search and enterprise knowledge at their finger tips, all your agents become your
best agent. It takes the guess work out of the equation and helps your agents to
resolve cases efficiently and consistently.

KANA SEM allows

agents to eliminate
ad-hoc processes
“from the main pro-
cess. Agents can
also go back and
forth in a process
without leaving pro-
cess breadcrumbs
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 13

that allow them to move unstructured in a process. This helps agents to work with
the customer as the interaction is moving rather than force the customer
interaction to move as the rigid process forces them.

The ability to audit is

the key to ensuring that
the case is meeting all
regulatory and com-
pliance needs. It helps
organizations keep their
compliance costs low
and avoid unnecessary
penalties. KANA SEM
logs all case interact-
tions which can be re-
trieved at any time with
the click of a button.

KANA SEM provides a very

flexible information store to
capture the data and events
of customer service process-
es. This information store is
then used to create real-time
dash-boards or reports to
monitor the performance of
customer service centers. You
can monitor the performance
of support teams or service
de-livery to a particular cus-
tomer. Managers can deter-
mine the SLA or the metrics that are important to their customers and the
business and monitor those. If the metrics are not achieving their targets, then
managers can take corrective action to adjust or change the process design to
meet those objectives.

Integrating the legacy system

is a key requirement of any
case management system.
This integration ensures that
tasks are delivered to the sys-
tems that they are best at
performing. Integration also
ensures that customers have
access to multiple channels for
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 14

interaction and receive consistent service no matter which channel they choose.
KANA SEM provides a very rich integration framework to integrate your customer
service case management processes to legacy systems like CRM, SRP, Billing,
Ordering, etc. The SEM process orchestrates activities at the business level and
makes sure that the underlying systems are getting updated or providing the
required data to complete the case.

Criteria KA Comments
NA

Case Definition  Web-based business user modeling

Case Worker Adaptability  Adaptive desktop morphs as per context
Ad-hoc Processes  Agent can start a process from within a
case, go back and forth between steps
Drag-n-Drop  Drag-n-drop steps, forms, scripts to
Development assemble customer service application
Reusability  Sub-process, forms, scripts, business
objects, process steps are all version
controlled and reusable
Object Model  OOB case management object model
Integration Ability  Rich integration infrastructure to any
system or application
Interface Design  Auto-screen & form creation form same
web-based modeling tool
ECM Support  Support for documents in process and
integration with document management
systems
Knowledge Management  Knowledge management including
search and scripting
Audit Trail  Full history capture of case processing
Versioning  Processes, forms, scripts, steps, find,
search, screens are all version controlled
Case handling and  Scripting and dynamic solution search
Guidance from knowledge base
Dynamic Event Actions  Visual event to action mapping
Reporting & Analytics  OOB analysis and data store for
standard BI
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 15

KANA helps the world’s best known brands master the service experience.
As the leader in Service Experience Management, KANA provides solutions that
deliver a customer-focused service experience that successfully balances
customer interests with business goals. Service Experience Management
uniquely unifies business process, case and knowledge management for
customer service organizations. It leverages KANA's expertise in delivering
consistent service across all communication channels, including email, chat, call
centers, and Web self-service. KANA's Service Experience Management solutions
allow companies to control every step within each customer interaction to deliver
the ideal service experience. KANA's clients report double-digit increases in
customer satisfaction, increased revenue growth while reducing contact center
costs by an average of 20 percent. KANA's award-winning solutions are proven in
more than 600 companies worldwide, including approximately half of the world's
largest 100 companies.
To learn more about how the KANA suite of multi-channel solutions can help
you create customers for life, call 1-800-737-8738 or visit our website at
www.kana.com.
 Dynamic Case Management For Customer Service 16

KANA Software, Inc.

840 West California Avenue, Suite 100
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
T 650.614.8300
F 650.614.8301
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Published: 11/2010