The internet is a wealth of information. It is an endless horde of expertise on every topic the mind could imagine, created by the ultimate human amalgam. It’s been argued that the internet is one of the greatest inventions of all time due to its unmatched ability to merge every culture and corner of the world into one place, but all of that comes to naught without the proper searching power. If search engines and organizational tools hadn’t been developed in its wake, the entire internet would amount to an oversized kitchen junk drawer.
It’s pretty difficult to overstate the importance of a high speed, multifunctional search engine. Where would your company be without it?
For one thing, your knowledge base would be inaccessible to your agents. This has an effect on almost everything they do. Without the proper information at their fingertips, employees will be more and more frustrated by difficult customer service calls that they aren’t properly equipped to field, customers will be frustrated by inept and slow service, and your reputation as a company will be tarnished from the get-go. It’s been shown that First Call Resolution is a key performance indicator for your customer service department, and a part of meeting that goal is providing your team with the information they need to actually answer questions on the first try.
The search bar will also ease your customers’ experiences when accessing the knowledge base themselves, whether that is through the self-service portal, the FAQ section, or the knowledge base itself. If your customers have no trouble finding the answers they need, they will be quickly able to wrap up their concerns and move on with their days, which is exactly what they want. It’s also what your employees want, as customers who are busy resolving their own problems won’t take up space waiting for personal support, relieving stress on the phone lines, e-mail support lines, and live chat queues. Employees who have less on their plate provide exponentially more satisfying customer support, and have way more free time to apply themselves wherever else the company may need them that day.
On the internal side of things, having a five star searching system (complete with natural language search and result ranking capabilities) will help your agents out when sorting through customer files and text from previous tickets and ticket attachments. This means any snippet of conversation that goes on between you and your customer is readily available the moment you think of it. That’s a huge advantage.
Across the board, securing for your team dynamic, capable search features will improve the quality of service and the quality of satisfaction from the customer’s perspective and the agent’s. Get in touch with PhaseWare today to give that junk drawer a makeover and start seeing the positive side effects roll out.
Other blogs in this series:
Imperative Assets: Reporting
Imperative Assets: Scalability