Planning for Adaptive Customer Support
With accelerating business cycles, every part of a company must be ready to adapt to a fluid business environment. For the customer-support organization, this often means being prepared to absorb corporate acquisitions, new product launches and incremental product enhancements faster than anticipated.
Gone are the days when company development cycles churned out new products in a predictable rhythm, when corporate growth was more organic than acquisition-driven and support managers had budgets that grew in parallel to the top line. Support managers today must struggle with a broad array of issues, often with little or no increase in manpower or budgets.
A well-developed knowledge management strategy can enable a support manager to handle rapid changes, while continuing to optimize resources and increase the influence of support throughout the company. A holistic approach to creating an adaptive organization takes into consideration both technology and process challenges.
Design a Trusted System
The heart of any successful customer support organization is a trusted system—a common repository which holds the best information available across the company. Most often this is a knowledge management application. Key factors to consider in establishing a trusted system include the ability to author, manage and maintain content within the system, the ability to aggregate information from disparate sources throughout your organization and the ability of the system to integrate the system into the core applications of your support organization.
The adaptive support organization recognizes that knowledge is created during every support interaction. Whether it is a simple search request that improves the intelligent search engine’s results, or a fresh set of procedures that leads to a better break/fix solution, a trusted system should capture relevant knowledge during each interaction. Content creation within the trusted system requires a robust workflow process, allowing for timely editorial review to confirm the validity of new solutions.
The adaptive organization also recognizes that a great deal of knowledge resides outside of the support organization. A dynamic trusted system can incorporate this external knowledge—oftentimes marketing material, manuals and other formal documents—into its results so that support personnel have access to the best information that is available. By enabling external communities, through forums, the adaptive organization can also capture a wealth of customer knowledge within the trusted system.
Critical to the success of creating and maintaining a trusted system is its ability to integrate into the key applications that power a support organization. A flexible, trusted system should seamlessly integrate into incident management systems, CRM applications and Web portals to allow for easy, in-process access to both obtain relevant knowledge and create new knowledge in a timely and efficient manner.
Define an Adaptive Process
A trusted system alone cannot enable an adaptive support environment. Along with implementing a dynamic knowledge management system, organizations often find a need to rethink how support personnel handle rapid changes within their environment.
A key theme that emerges is the idea of training to process, and not to products and features. Traditional support organizations spend significant amounts of time educating both new hires and existing employees on specific company products and features. In a dynamic environment, this training can be obsolete within weeks, and can create an endless cycle of re-training.
An adaptive organization doesn’t focus solely on product-oriented training: it relies on the trusted system to continuously generate and provide new and reliable knowledge to support personnel as they need it. Given this dynamic knowledge management approach, support personnel can rely on the process of interacting with the trusted system to find the best possible answer, instead of having to memorize a rapidly changing set of products and criteria. As new products, product revisions and acquisitions are absorbed by the company, support can be ready to handle these changes with the trusted system.
Adaptive Customer Support
Customer support is increasingly becoming the primary connection that customers have with their vendors. Even the most dynamic organizations can look flat-footed if support is ill-prepared to handle a broad array of unplanned, unexpected support requests. By enabling a trusted system through a powerful knowledge management application, support can be prepared to handle a rapidly changing environment. The adaptive customer support organization can drive customer satisfaction, improve key contact center metrics and often drive product improvement cycles.
KNOVA, a Consona CRM solution, maximizes the value of every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle. Built on an adaptive search and knowledge management platform, KNOVA’s suite of applications integrates with CRM implementations to help companies increase revenues, reduce service costs and improve customer satisfaction. Industry leaders including AOL, Ford, HP, Novell and H&R Block rely on KNOVA’s award-winning service resolution management applications to power an intelligent customer experience on their websites and within their contact centers. For more information, visit
www.knova.com.