KM in the Expanding World of Multi-Channel Customer Service

The number of communication channels available today is exploding. Customer service, if it is done right, should not restrict customers to a particular channel. Instead, it should offer many communication options so that customers can interact using channels with which they are comfortable and which will lead to quick resolution of issues.

Response from a customer service center must be equally flexible. Customers should be able to choose to receive a response via multiple channels including SMS, email, chat or voice.

A knowledgebase, tightly integrated with a case management system, must be at the heart of a multi-channel customer service strategy. The combination of a rich base of knowledge solutions and case management that extends across channels ensures that agents always have the same view of the customer and deliver a consistent answer to a question every time, regardless of the channel used to ask or answer the question.

So what should you look for to successfully implement a knowledge solution in the world of multi-channel customer service? These are the points that need to be considered in order to ensure that you have a firm knowledge management foundation: 

• Usability—How should a Web self-service experience be optimized to entice customers to use this channel, preferably over all others? If customers cannot find answers to their questions, how can they escalate to an agent using different channels, such as Web forms, free-form emails or online chat sessions, without having to repeat the question?
• Findability—How do you design a desktop so that agents, irrespective of skill, training level or personal preferences, can reliably and rapidly find the information they are seeking?
• Relevancy—How do you optimize the relevancy of knowledge within the knowledgebase so that it contains only the answers to the questions that your customers are asking and is not filled with extraneous information?

Usable Knowledge

In a perfect world, the optimal online customer service experience should start before a user even becomes a customer. The website should be easily navigable, with a consistent interface propagated throughout the site. Breadcrumbs and recently viewed pages should be displayed to help orient the user within a site.

If users cannot find the right information, they should be allowed to escalate questions to an agent. Each individual's session history, including searches made and pages viewed, should be captured and passed to the agent so that the agent can understand what the user has already done. Sophisticated sites also run under-the-covers searches on questions as they are escalated in order to present a likely solution to the user, thereby passively de-escalating a request before it reaches the call center.

Once the user becomes a customer, any visit to the website should be personalized. The site should have memory of every transaction and action for each customer—purchases, past and pending service requests, transcripts of chat and email interactions with agents, as well as a history of any self-service interaction that was escalated to an agent. The customer's search history should also be preserved, so that search results can be tailored to the individual's interests and preferences.

Usability should also extend to the agent desktop. Information within the agent desktop should be displayed in a structured manner, such as mimicking the familiar browsable folder structure to display know-ledge categories on the left, a list of solutions to consider in a middle pane and details of a solution in the rightmost pane—a layout that helps agents easily navigate to the right solution. Forward-thinking sites allow agents to tag content they frequently use so that it is readily available, or to share lists of favorite solutions between agents to allow novice agents to be rapidly trained. They also allow agents to choose a look for the interface that suits them best and to rearrange information elements on their desktop through Web portlets.

Findable Knowledge

Too often, searching a knowledgebase is presented as the best way to find an answer to a question. Unfortunately, searches often overwhelm the user with too many answers to consider and may not be appropriate for all users.

Customer- and agent-facing sites should have much more than basic search tools to help optimize the content-finding process. For example, novice users need more help than standard keyword search provides and are often more comfortable with a guided search approach, which leads the user down a particular discovery path. More experienced users may prefer browsing a folder structure. Yet others prefer keyword or natural language search. In addition, search techniques should include phrase search as well as the ability to search within a specific product category.

Clarifying questions should be used to narrow relevant search results and guide the user to the most relevant topic. Spelling suggestions for mistyped words should always be available. In addition, sites should show a list of the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) along with important service alerts, new content and changes to existing solutions so that the user has access to the most up-to-date information at all times.

Relevant Knowledge

In a traditional knowledgebase implementation, a knowledge author writes an article, which is an answer to a question that a customer is likely to ask about a particular product or service. This article is routed to a reviewer, who has the authority to approve it for addition to the knowledgebase or to send it back to the author for corrections. Once published, the article is available in a read-only manner to customer service agents and to customers via a self-service Web portal.

A reporting solution is often coupled with a knowledgebase to help administrators understand the types of questions that customers are asking and to pinpoint the most frequently used solutions as well as knowledge gaps in the knowledgebase.

The challenge of this model is the relevancy of knowledge, because authoring is performed by someone who is not on the front lines, constantly fielding customer questions.

This authoring flow also introduces a delay between authoring new solutions and having them available within the knowledgebase—a process which is a must for companies that require solutions to go through legal or compliance reviews before being published.