eGain, a provider of on-site and on-demand multichannel customer service and knowledge-management software, has announced that British Gas, a U.K. energy provider, has implemented eGain KnowledgeAgent.

The KnowledgeAgent -- powered by eGain’s patented “Case-Based Reasoning” technology -- is significantly increasing first contact resolution and customer satisfaction rates across the “British Gas Pay As You Go Energy” division.

With more than 700 contact center agents, PAYGE deals with a wide spectrum of complex inquiries every day. The eGain KnowledgeAgent solution was selected to improve customer service, contact center agent productivity and first-contact resolution across the PAYGE division.

 

“Our customer propositions and range of services are varied, which can result in complex queries that raise a multitude of different customer issues and outcomes,” David Brand, head of transformation and change at British Gas PAYGE, stated. “In order to reduce the high repeat call rates and increase first call resolution, we had to take on the challenging task of moving from our existing Intranet solution to a more sophisticated knowledge base that would enable all of our agents to find the right solution at the right time, and it was clear eGain had the experience and technology to help us achieve this.”

At first, British Gas PAYGE deployed the on-demand version of eGain KnowledgeAgent to ensure the new service was operational and to benefit customers quickly without relying on extensive IT resources. In this pilot phase, British Gas saw an improvement in its customer service operations by increasing customer satisfaction scores by seven percent.

“We quickly realised we had a solution that was very easy to navigate and increased agent efficiency,” Brand said. “During the pilot phase, repeat calls on energy consumption, fault resolution and meter queries were reduced by 16-17 percent, and call wrap-up times were down by 29 seconds per call.”

With the immediate success, British Gas had the motivation to make the transition from an on-demand to an in-house deployment, rolling out eGain KnowledgeAgent across all of its PAYGE service teams. As a result, agents gained access to fast, consistent and accurate answers to complex queries by providing agents with a range of ways to get to information in the knowledge base.

The eGain solution has also effectively reduced the number of field service visits across the division.

“For a household brand like British Gas, where service is such a key differentiator, choosing proven solutions for contact centre implementations is critical to success in a competitive environment,” said Andrew Mennie, General Manager of eGain EMEA. “This is a great example of a large utility organization making use of powerful and intelligent knowledge base technology to provide value-added services and engender loyalty across its customer base.”

eGain announced in July a partnership with mobile device support vendor WorldManuals. By combining eGain’s knowledge management technologies with WorldManual’s device support content, support can be marketed to European service providers.