Maximize Business Agility with
Cloud-Based Knowledge Management
In today’s business environment, the only constant is change. New products are released with increasing frequency, and at times, greater complexity. Emerging social channels have changed the way customers want to communicate with each other, and with you. And, expectations for exceptional service make the customer service experience more critical than ever. With so many shifting dynamics, how can your organization create a customer service environment that is agile enough to adapt to these factors and still provide superior customer experiences?
Knowledge management is an excellent solution for supporting business agility. The right cloud-based knowledge management solution can help your organization achieve its operational efficiency and customer satisfaction goals, even during these challenging times. Here are five key ways knowledge management can help you maximize business agility.
1. Agility Through Rapid Deployment
One of the primary benefits of any cloud solution is the time to value, and knowledge management is no different. Cloud knowledge management offers the benefit of a rapid deployment to help your team start reaping benefits right away. Cloud architecture also provides the ability to quickly deploy and test changes and enhancements without a major investment of time or money. With no servers to manage or software to install, a cloud-based knowledge management system can be up and running quite quickly. Just be sure to take the time to analyze and verify the content you put into the knowledge base. Your employees will only use the system and realize benefits if they can rapidly find the information they need when they need it.
2. Agility Through Flexible Growth
Another important benefit of leveraging the cloud is the ability to grow your implementation as needed. In many organizations, knowledge may be needed more during certain times of the year, such as during holiday shopping or tax season. In other cases, unexpected events may drive a sudden rise in knowledge management usage. Standard on-premises deployments provide a fixed scale, and adding additional capacity can be costly as well as time-consuming. With a cloud deployment, you can easily expand your application as needed to satisfy your user base, and do so at a reasonable cost.
3. Agility in Onboarding
Today’s products, policies and procedures can be complex. In fact, in a customer service environment, there often is simply too much for agents to memorize and know. Historically, organizations were able to quickly educate new employees on the information needed to handle the majority of service requirements. Today, however, onboarding time has grown exponentially, and many organizations are concerned about losing the knowledge stored in the minds of long-time employees. As the demographics of our workforce change, employee turnover can rise, and with it, onboarding costs. Knowledge management can empower your customer service employees with knowledge in real time, rather than requiring them to spend months in training. This capability helps further agility in both onboarding and training.
4. Agility in Product and Process Change
In addition to its complexity, a company’s product and process information can also change rapidly, raising the question of how to efficiently and effectively disseminate it across your entire customer service organization. How can you achieve the agility required when information has the potential to change quickly and often? Customers expect the most accurate, up-to-date details, and they expect to receive it in a timely manner. To meet service goals and customer expectations, employees cannot give the wrong answer, nor spend too much time searching around for the right one. Knowledge management provides an elegant solution to this challenge. Because knowledge articles can be updated instantly, each employee can always have real-time access to the latest version.
5. Agility Through Omnichannel ?Interactions
Today, when customers have issues, they no longer simply reach for the phone. With live chat, social media and mobile self-service, customers seek help across a variety of emerging channels. That means your organization must be agile enough to provide service across all of these channels and more. Simply offering service, however, is no longer enough. Customers expect high-quality service experiences through their channels of choice, with fast, accurate answers. A central knowledge base is an excellent approach to providing this service. By leveraging a single knowledge base across all channels, your customers will receive the same answer and the same experience, regardless of how they choose to interact with you.
Now, more than ever, agility is a key asset and differentiator. Through the benefits of cloud-based knowledge management, your enterprise can achieve the agility it requires to provide high-quality experiences to customers—and service delivery that offers the accuracy, speed and consistency they demand.
Verint® is a global leader in Actionable Intelligence® solutions with a focus on customer engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance. Today, more than 10,000 organizations in 180 countries—including over 80% of the Fortune 100—count on Verint solutions to make more informed, effective, and timely decisions.