A Better Customer Experience Begins with Knowledge Management

Time is money. That saying has taken on a new, more complex meaning in the digital age as more and more customer interactions shift online. Your customers have more options to solve their problems than ever and they don’t like to have their time wasted. Just as they’d get impatient with a slow waiter at a restaurant, people get frustrated with slow or difficult to navigate websites as well as never-ending engagements with customer support. The difference is that most people aren’t going to leave a restaurant over slow service. They will, however, leave a website and possibly abandon a business that gives them more questions than answers.

Forrester research found that customers most value companies that respect their time. Makes sense, right? But how do you respect a customer’s time when your organization’s information sources (aka, knowledge) is fragmented and inaccessible?

An excellent knowledge management (KM) infrastructure is key to helping customers resolve queries themselves and empower support agents to find solutions quickly. By investing in KM, you create a foundation that seamlessly consolidates data and files that are essential to delivering relevant, intelligent, and timely answers and insights to your customers.

So, what can your organization do to leverage KM to improve your customer experience (CX)?

Defining the Answers: Content Unification

One of the essential pillars of delivering a positive CX via KM is making all of your organization’s data and content accessible to key stakeholders like internal teams, support staff, and the customer.

This can be achieved through content unification. Content unification knocks down pre-existing barriers that separate a particular dataset (either structured or unstructured) from a person trying to search for and access it. Instead of multiple siloed platforms containing needed information, “one source of truth” is created that’s indexed, searchable, and accessible to internal teams and customers alike. Simply put, having a unified content base allows your agents to address customer issues more comprehensively in less time.

However, once you’ve successfully built a unified content base of structured and unstructured data, you now may have an enormous, unwieldy amount of data that can be difficult to sift through. It’s akin to having a 1.5 million-listing FAQ page on your site. Where content unification can really make your KM stand out is when it’s augmented by modern AI technology.

Defining What’s Relevant: Natural Language Processing & Machine Learning

The universal availability of knowledge is great! However, it’s practically valueless if you don’t have a way to manage and surface relevant answers and insights efficiently. Two AI technologies that help make the universe of corporate knowledge usable are natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning.

Let’s first analyze NLP. NLP is applied to the corpus of knowledge and helps create an understanding of the content and and what information exists within. It understands the people, places, companies, and other entities that exist within the index.

NLP is also used to understand users’ queries. Tools like autocomplete, spelling correction, and advanced syntax enable users to search in familiar and natural ways. NLP concepts like lemmatization use variations on words such as plurals, tenses, genders, and more to ensure that when someone searches “running,” they’ll also find matches for “run” or “ran.” NLP is what enables platforms to understand that when a user types “Who coined the term Internet of Things?” they’re looking for a person, not a description of the technology.