Embracing Context-Aware Knowledge
Cutting-edge technology empowers agents and customers with the information they need—on demand and in context. As a rule of thumb in customer service, any customer issue not resolved quickly will see its cost roughly triple. When you factor in research time, contact and context re-establishment time, time spent finding and bringing in experts to help, escalation time, time wasted on interruptions and more, you've got quite an inefficient, costly problem on your hands. The problem goes beyond simple process efficiency—it comes down the agents' and customers' ability to get the right information at the right time.
And in a world where knowledge is everywhere, it's an increasing challenge for knowledge managers: how to make sure that every agent and every customer has access to the information they need, when they need it and in context? The Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) contends that less than one-third of its members have a traditional knowledgebase technology. Instead, many are embracing the chaos that big data, social media and the move to the cloud create.
Unified indexing and insight technology enables just that—tapping into companies' full knowledge ecosystems and providing support agents, employees and customers with contextually relevant information. This unprecedented access to actionable insight has helped companies achieve dramatic results, such as a 30%+ reduction in case resolution time, 10%+ increase in customer self-service satisfaction and more.
Leveraging Knowledge
The need to make the most of organizational knowledge—to get as much value from it as possible—is greater now than ever before. Organizations of all sizes are finding themselves with overwhelming amounts of information, often locked away in silos—different systems, different departments, different geographies and different data types, making it impossible to connect the dots and make sense of critical business information.
Traditional knowledge management initiatives have considered knowledge a transferable commodity that can be stored in a system of record and used mechanically. Yet, in reality, knowledge goes beyond data and information, and is personal and contextual.
Data is factual information—measurements, statistics or facts. In and of itself, data provides limited value. It must be organized into information before it can be interpreted;
Information is data in context—organized, categorized or condensed;
Knowledge is a human capability to process information to make decisions and take action.
The building blocks of knowledge are everywhere—fragmented, complex, unstructured, and often outside the systems of record (in the cloud, in social media). The key is to bring it all together, and presenting it in context to users.
Context-Aware, Knowledge-Centered Support
Unified indexing and insight technology is the way that forward-thinking companies access experts and knowledge in the 21st century. Technology like this brings content into context—assembling fragments of structured and unstructured information on demand and presenting them, in context, to users.
Designed for the enterprise, unified indexing and insight technology works in a similar way to Google on the Internet, but on the heterogeneous systems (e.g. email, databases, CRM, ERP, social media, etc.), locations (cloud and on-premise), and varied data formats of business today. It securely crawls those sources, unifies the information in a central index, normalizes the information and performs mash-ups on demand, within the user's context. The user consumes the context based on his or her needs, actions or interests.
Service and support agents can solve cases faster. No longer do agents need to search across multiple systems or waste time trying to find the right answer or someone who knows the answer. They will have relevant information about the customer or case at hand, right at their fingertips: suggested solutions, recommended KB articles, similar cases, experts who can help, virtual communication timelines and more.
Customers can solve complex challenges on their own. Logging in to customer self-service, customers will see a personalized and relevant view of information from the entire knowledge ecosystem (from inside or outside your company) intuitively presented so they can solve their own challenges.
Knowledge workers can stop reinventing the wheel. When every employee can access relevant information, locate experts across the enterprise, and know what does and does not exist, they can finally stop reinventing the wheel.
A Higher Return on Knowledge
Bringing relevant content to the fingertips of your agents and customers will increase productivity, create happier employees and drive higher customer satisfaction. These are the best practices that companies are following to achieve a higher return on knowledge:
- Consolidate the knowledge ecosystem. Bring together information from enterprise systems and data sources, employee and customer social networks, social media such as Twitter, Chatter and others. Connect overwhelming amounts of enterprise and social information to get a complete picture of your customers—their interaction histories, products, levels of satisfaction and more.
- Connect people to knowledge in context. Connect users to the information they need (no matter where it resides) within their context.
- Connect people to experts in context. Connect the people (the experts) associated with the contextually relevant content to assist in solving a case, answer a key challenge or provide additional insight to a particular situation.
- Empower contribution. Allow users to create, rate content and share knowledge about customers, cases, products, etc.
- Personalize information access. Present employees and customers with information and people connections that are relevant, no matter where they are, and no matter what they are working on. Just like the suggestive items on the ecommerce websites you visit—the experience is personalized, because it knows what you're working on.
Leveraging knowledge has never been more important. For additional best practices, visit www.coveo.com for a free copy of the Coveo eBook, Measuring a Return on Knowledge in a Big Data World.