How Knowledge is Changing Customer Service
Highlights from a four-part blog series and eBook by Esteban Kolsky for Coveo
Knowledge management has been linked to customer service for a very long time. In fact, whenever we hear the words “knowledge management” we immediately assume we are dealing with knowledgebases and support issues. That’s because creating, storing, indexing and searching for the right information to help customers is what drove the last series of improvements to customer service in the name of Web self-service in the early 2000s.
Today, the rise of online communities, social networks and the customer-driven economy—all of which empowered the customer to not only want the information, but demand it faster and better—is driving a new shift in the world of knowledge management. We are moving to a world where knowledge only has value when it is being used, not when it is being prepped to store. We are moving toward an ecosystem where the customer, the company and all other interested stakeholders become partners in the search for better knowledge.
As the previous stores of knowledge are losing their power, a new breed of context-aware technologies has emerged to help companies capitalize on their collective knowledge—across enterprise systems, the Web and social media—to present it to customers and employees when they need it.
Three Rs of Effective Customer Service
If your organization is like most, you have spent the better part of the past 20 years making sure your customer service organization runs like clockwork. You have invested in a multi-channel solution to be able to respond to customers across all channels, and a workforce optimization system to ensure that your employees are always available when needed. You keep track of the great job they are doing, and you continuously focus on getting all metrics to be the same as other organizations.
In other words, you are running a streamlined, hyper-efficient customer service organization. Right?
Most organizations are still stuck in the old model of making their customer service operations ultra-efficient. When the “age of the customer” began with the advent of social networks and customers reclaiming their voice and control of the conversation, they also demanded that organizations become more customer-centric. That was the tipping point; that was when efficient contact centers needed to become effective contact centers.
Efficiency is about running the leanest organization at a low cost. However, this is not necessarily what customers want. Effectiveness is about delivering the “three Rs” of effective customer service and this is what customers want and need: The right information. The right channel. The right time.
Effective customer service centers are always finding the right information, the right knowledge, at the right time, every time regardless of channel (or at least the ones that make sense). Becoming hyper-effective at customer service requires access to the right knowledge.
Using Knowledge to Satisfy Customers
How can you ensure you always have the right, updated and verified information at hand in your knowledgebase? You can’t.
As the world becomes more complicated and the necessary knowledge is no longer stored in knowledgebases, the new imperative is finding internal or external experts in real time, tapping into their knowledge and providing that back to the customer on time to solve their problem.
The best approach is to combine your static knowledge contained in enterprise systems with the dynamic collective knowledge that happens in social media and online communities—and offer that to the user at the right time. The information must be searchable, easily available, and constantly automatically updated as necessary.
By using technologies that crawl, correlate and contextualize knowledge from across your information ecosystem, you can begin to get more out of your existing knowledge. You can use the knowledge about products, support issues and customers’ needs and desires to provide service proactively when a new event happens. You can mine the transactional and operational data, agent notes and other knowledge from closed service interactions that you collect to improve your collective knowledge.
In short, with instantly accessible information from across your information ecosystem, you can ensure you have the right answer to the problem a customer has, at the right time, in the right place.
Context-Aware, Knowledge-Driven Service
Search and relevance technology is the way that forward-thinking companies access knowledge and experts in the 21st century. The technology brings content into context—assembling fragments of structured and unstructured information on demand and presenting it, in context, to users.
Designed for the enterprise, the technology securely crawls your knowledge ecosystem (e.g. email, databases, CRM, ERP, customer communities, social media, etc.), unifies the information in a central index, normalizes and correlates the information and presents relevant mash-ups on demand. The technology is context-aware, relying on the situation of the user (such as a case in Salesforce) to anticipate and proactively offer enriched, usable content directly related to the situation at hand (solutions, articles, experts, etc.) from across a vast and growing knowledge ecosystem.
- Service and support agents can solve cases faster. Agents no longer 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.
- Customers can solve complex challenges on their own. Logging in to customer self-service, customers 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.
- Employees 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.
Customer service may be the first to experience this paradigm shift in knowledge management, but the remaining departments in the organization are not far behind. Companies that adopt new methods to exploit their collective knowledge will reap significant rewards—increased effectiveness, happier employees and higher customer satisfaction.
Coveo takes knowledge management to a new, more relevant level by securely connecting with and harnessing an organization’s big, fragmented data from any combination of cloud, social, and on-premise systems. Learn more at www.coveo.com.