Five Key Benefits
Using Knowledge Management in Customer Service

As products become more complex and companies support broader product portfolios, the challenges of quickly and efficiently resolving customer issues multiply. The result is fewer cases are resolved with the first call. Even with significant technology investments, Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) members report a 24% net decrease in first-call resolution between 2003 and 2010.¹ Why is this happening?

Contact center investments have focused on telephony improvements, skills-based routing, workforce management and CRM applications, but the key area that has been woefully under-funded is knowledge management. These other investments, while important, only address 20% of service call times. Most of the time agents spend on the phone is engaged in research, discovery and communication of their search results to the customer.

In this article we’ll discuss several case studies that illustrate five key areas where knowledge management can deliver significant improvements in customer service.

Reducing Research Time
By understanding the customer’s intent and delivering accurate and consistent answers to the contact center desktop, you can cut costs, reduce average-call-handle-time and improve the overall customer experience. This is easier said than done. Agents typically must find answers to service issues hidden in a multitude of sources, including product manuals, marketing collateral, corporate policies, bug databases, case notes, etc. Requiring agents to sift through multiple applications and thousands of irrelevant and outdated documents takes time and leads to an expensive support call, as well as frustrated customers.

A knowledge management system equipped with powerful search that scans the enterprise to bring back only the snippets of knowledge relevant to solving the issue is crucial to reducing research time. Furthermore, an agent should never have to research a query that’s already been answered. Through case-linking and rapid inline creation of knowledge, enterprise-wide searches can be reduced as the system becomes smarter and more efficient.

As an example, by arming its front-line agents with fast, convenient access to the most relevant information, one InQuira customer has increased its first-contact resolution rates from 40% to more than 65%. In addition, these tier-one agents can now handle more calls because their research time has been reduced by 55%. Plus, they’re far less likely to escalate calls to more technical personnel.

Increasing Resolution Accuracy
Most questions can be asked in a multitude of ways such as “upgrade service,” “how do I upgrade,” “what are my upgrade options,” etc. But traditional search and content management engines interpret each word in these questions separately, bringing back hundreds if not thousands of irrelevant results. A KM solution that understands customer intent—including special terms such as product names and industry jargon—and maps the inquiry to pre-defined results, or that uses intent to intelligently navigate enterprise content, is the only way to guarantee a high degree of accuracy.

When the success of your insurance business demands that accurate answers be delivered to more than 70,000 independent agents as they write new policies, there is truly only one solution: knowledge management.

A well-respected specialty insurer discovered that its contact center representatives were struggling, achieving only a dismal 28% accuracy rate in their response to agent inquiries as they scoured PDF documents and regulations that were stored in multiple databases. As the independent agents depending on this critical information could write policies for a number of competitive carriers, this metric was certainly not encouraging new business.

Now its resolution accuracy of the first search by contact center reps has increased to more than 85%. As an added benefit, call times have been reduced by an average of 22%. These improvements in support consistency and research accuracy led to a 35% increase in the number of new policies written over a one-year period.

Reducing Training Time
Training and nurturing contact center agents is a critical step in building customer satisfaction and loyalty, but it’s also expensive and time-consuming. Agents are the “face” of your company, so it is vital that they are seen as intelligent and responsive.

Agents must be trained not only on your products and services but also on how to access information. Time spent learning how to navigate multiple applications where content may be stored—and the individual search terms, tips and tricks for each application—can add days if not weeks to training. A single KM platform with an intuitive interface dramatically reduces this type of training time.

One of the world’s leading research and development enterprises discovered these uncomfortable truths as its help desks, call center agents and sales divisions gradually became less and less effective. The implementation of a centralized, comprehensive knowledge base helped turn these factors around, reducing technical service agent training time by 20% and cutting retention-related costs by more than 3%. At the same time, customer satisfaction ratings increased by 10%.

Managing Increasing Service Volumes
As industry consolidation and acquisitions build the customer base for many survivors of the recent economic downturn, the need for more efficient customer support is rapidly surfacing. One InQuira customer experienced this effect firsthand. Following a key acquisition of one of its competitors, it saw its call volumes triple, while agents struggled to access siloed information stores and isolated support resources. Its previously profitable service offering quickly became a cost center and the support experience for its customers deteriorated to the point where its e-mail servers were filled with “hate mail”.