Five Key Benefits
Using Knowledge Management in Customer Service
Knowledge management can help scale existing agent resources to handle increasing volume by helping them work more efficiently. It can help inexperienced agents learn from institutional knowledge through the KM platform. It can help reduce the time it takes even top agents to do research while improving their accuracy and their access to distributed knowledge sources.
One year after implementing its solution, its customer support website was named one of the “Top Ten Web Support Sites” by the Association of Service Professionals. In addition, by allowing customers to effectively search for consistent and accurate answers via the Web channel, it saved $5.8 million in the first year.
In a second example, one of the UK’s leading wireless telecommunications providers has shown that call deflection can not only save significant money in the contact center, but it can also reduce customer churn. When it started on this journey, it required an average of eight calls to resolve customer issues with some of the newest smart phones. It has now adopted online customer discussion forums that handle more than one million hits and resolve as many as 7,000 cases per month. As the head of e-services notes, “If we had to staff for this volume in the contact center, we would need to hire 19 additional agents.” Not only has their effort paid off in cost savings, but their discussion forums have created a self-help community of users that have a greater sense of loyalty to the provider and its fellow customers.
Creating Service Insight
The number one advantage that a comprehensive knowledge management platform can provide is insight. This type of service insight can be used to push more interactions to the Web channel by improving answer delivery and consistency. It can help you pinpoint where online-to-assisted channel escalations are coming from and how to prevent them. It can show you where you may have knowledge gaps and where to take corrective action. And it can show you emerging service issues through the moderation of discussion forums.
By enabling ongoing learning and easy authoring and editing, effective knowledgebases can foster improvements in every front-line interaction. By analyzing Web sessions and presenting the results to a representative’s desktop along with an escalation call, the agent can focus on providing new information, rather than repeating the answers a customer may have already tried. This type of multi-channel integration not only reduces call handle time, but also improves the customer’s experience.
When the CSR discovers the right answer for the customer, he or she can easily add that content to a knowledge article or recommend the solution to the technical authors for review and adoption. Once published in the knowledgebase, this new solution can be quickly utilized by others in the contact center as well as on the Web self-service site and in customer discussion forums.
“We have more than 1,500 technicians worldwide, and any one of them can start a document and submit it to a global document flow process. You need a strong tool to facilitate that,” said the company’s director of global online services.
The One-Second Productivity Increase
You may have already invested heavily in a CRM or contact center desktop application. Even with all the proven productivity increases you’ve read above, you’re probably asking yourself, “Why should I put KM on the CSR desktop? My agents are already overloaded with Alt-Tab functions and myriad system log-ins.”
The good news is that you don’t have to add to that burden. Knowledge management systems already have deep integrations with the most popular CRM applications, including Siebel, Oracle Contact Center, Oracle CRM On-Demand, and SAP CRM. Agents do not need to switch applications or log in separately to gain the benefits of knowledge management. Answers can be easily linked directly to the customer’s case and re-used by others in the contact center to solve similar problems. Integration such as this significantly reduces the time-to-resolution for novice agents as well as more experienced representatives. As shown in the equation below, the savings of even one second can have a tremendous affect on contact-center economics.
Cost per call = $8.16
Average call time @ 7.56 min (454 seconds) = $0.02/second.
Calls per agent per day @ 72 x number of agents @ 500 = 36,000 calls per day.
Save two cents per call per day and you can save $262,000 per year.
Source: Benchmark Portal, Purdue University, Center for Customer Excellence
So, can having a knowledge management application integrated into your existing CRM desktop save you one second per call? How long does it take you to switch applications on your desktop and get acclimated to the new interface? I’m betting it takes longer than a second.
Looking ahead, the challenges of customer service and support will only get more complicated, more complex, and more demanding. Reducing research time, improving search accuracy, cutting agent training requirements, managing increasing service volumes and gaining service insight will all be instrumental in helping to build your brand value while simultaneously managing the costs of your customer support operations.
Whether your focus is on reducing costs or improving the customer experience, there has never been a better time to investigate the benefits and productivity improvements made available by the implementation of a complete, comprehensive knowledge management platform.
InQuira is a leading provider of intelligent knowledge solutions that connect people to the answers they need. InQuira provides enterprise knowledge solutions for Web self-service, contact center support and knowledge intranets, built from a single technology platform that makes it possible for companies to provide a consistent customer service experience across Web, phone and community channels.
For additional information, visit http://www.InQuira.com.
1 TSIA member benchmark report for 2010, J. Ragsdale.