How Relevant Knowledge Drives Superior Customer Experiences
Engaging with customers and understanding how well your organization manages these interactions is essential to building customer loyalty. This article will focus on concrete solutions that will help improve optimum customer experiences and help organizations differentiate themselves for competitive advantage.
Knowledge is everywhere. Agents and customers demand more relevant and personalized experiences. Are your employees and customers able to access relevant knowledge to create positive customer experiences?
Customers today are interacting with companies more often and via multiple channels-customer contact centers, websites, social media, etc. These customers—including B2B—expect more personalized experiences every time they interact with your agents, employees and website.
Unfortunately, most customer-support operations today are simply overwhelmed by data, more often than not leading to inaction. The deluge of social media content, survey data, rising interaction volumes, KBs, recordings, chats and more flowing through customer-support operations can easily lead to information overload without a strategy in place. In fact, a recent poll conducted by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) revealed that 87% of member companies that responded to the poll (which include the largest B2B technology companies) are not even close to getting the most from all of their knowledge assets across systems, the Web and social media for customer service and support.
To deliver the meaningful, personalized experiences that customers increasingly expect, you need a strategy to leverage the wealth of information so you can truly "know your customer." That's why a new paradigm is emerging-one that embraces the diversity and variety of content to offer faster, more contextually relevant customer experiences across every customer touch point.
Elevating the Customer Experience
Search and relevance technology enables companies to respond to customers with greater relevance and immediacy by unlocking knowledge across systems, the Web and social media. The technology is reinventing the customer/company dynamic by delivering the most relevant knowledge from anywhere to your agents and customers—in the CRM, portal or website—on demand.
Designed for the enterprise, search and relevance technology brings together data from varied systems (email, databases, CRM, social media, etc.), locations (cloud and on premise) and in disparate formats. It securely crawls those sources, unifies and normalizes the information, and performs mash-ups on demand-similar to what users find on consumer websites. The technology brings content into context, relying on the situation of the user—e.g. an agent solving a case in Salesforce—to anticipate and proactively offer usable content directly related to the issue at hand (such as solutions, related articles and suggested experts), from across the vast knowledge ecosystem.
Search and relevance technology places unprecedented relevance in the hands of your agents and customers to elevate the customer experience:
- Customer support agents can solve cases faster. Agents no longer need to search in multiple systems or waste time trying to find the right answer or someone who knows the answer. Agents instantly see all relevant information about the customer or case at hand from everywhere (solved cases, KBs, community content), allowing them to respond to customers quickly with personalized and relevant information.
- Customers can solve complex challenges on their own. Logging into customer self-service systems, customers can access intuitively presented and personalized information extracted from the entire knowledge ecosystem (both inside and outside your company) to solve their own problems.
- Website experiences are more engaging and relevant. Search and relevance technology turns your website or customer portal into a dynamic content hub. Show visitors the contextually relevant content or product recommendations to help them find what they need quickly, and increase conversions.
Leading-edge companies adopting search and relevance technology are seeing exceptional results. For example, by optimizing its website's search capabilities to help members find the information they need, TSIA achieved an increase in membership renewals and deeper customer engagement-63% rise in login activity and nearly twice the number of downloads. At Deltek, Inc., access to collective enterprise knowledge has cut case-resolution time by 20% and increased client satisfaction.
Search and relevance technology is rapidly becoming the only way to be relevant across multi-channel interactions. Companies that adopt these new search-powered methods to exploit their collective knowledge to elevate the customer experience will create new value for customers and reap significant rewards. Those that do not will be outpaced.
Discover how search and relevance technology can foster customer centricity in your organization. Visit www.coveo.com and download a free copy of the Coveo eBook "Social CRM: A Handbook."
Coveo makes companies more relevant and responsive to their customers by providing technology that delivers in real time the most relevant, context-aware information for every employee and every customer. Recognized as a visionary by Gartner in its 2013 Magic Quadrant, Coveo has more than 2 million users and 500 customers globally. Among Coveo’s customers are GEICO, Lockheed Martin, L’Oreal Switzerland, SunGard and YUM! Brands.
For more information, visit www.coveo.com and follow us on Twitter @coveo.