In the customer service environment, an effective knowledge management solution combines troubleshooting and resolution documentation, case histories, and customer information into a single, searchable repository with tools for workflow management, content collaboration, and reporting.
With customer service agents spending a majority of their customer interaction time searching for solutions, effective knowledge management allows these agents to reduce search time, increase solution accuracy, and provide a more consistent customer experience.
Solution elements
- Smart search: Natural-language search provides a ranked list of potential solutions from a variety of sources—FAQs, articles, stored responses, and previous cases
- Customer self-service: Secure web portal enables customers to submit incident tickets, check status, search the knowledgebase, retrieve documents and downloads, and participate in community forums
- Content collaboration: Create specific user roles with content authoring and editing access for customer support agents, managers, trainers, executives, or any other people responsible for creating, updating, or maintaining knowledge articles
- Workflow management: Configure workflows to create easy-to-follow, consistent processes and enforce compliance to standard procedures
- Complete customer view: Provide greater context for search and troubleshooting with detailed customer and case histories including several key data points
- Reporting: Analyze how agents use content along with trends in customer issues to enable the evolution of your knowledgebase to support changing agent needs and meet customer demands
- Multi-channel support: Provide access to the knowledge base for all agents regardless of support channel (voice, e-mail, or chat)
Benefits
At the most basic level, customer service is the ongoing process of answering questions and solving problems. As you layer in other factors—cost, resources, customer expectations—the formula becomes more complicated. Regardless, knowledge management enables the most basic function of customer service. Doing it well is imperative to customer service success.
By investing in the right knowledge management solution, your company will improve agent productivity by reducing search times and improving accuracy. You will create a more consistently rewarding customer experience. You will reduce service costs by deflecting volume to the lower-cost customer self-service channel. And, you will gain valuable insight into your customer service processes and performance through reporting.
With the right knowledge management solution, there’s much to be gained; and nothing to lose.