Knowledge Management: An Essential Ingredient in the Seriously Smart Organization
Knowledge management is key to exceptional service across the enterprise. When organizations prioritize and create customer-centric cultures, the “everyone serves” mantra can be quite powerful. Competition can be fierce, which is why high-quality experiences, customer engagement and employee empowerment are so important in sales and service delivery. It’s where putting the best tools and resources in the hands of skilled practitioners can make a significant impact. This is analogous to the role of knowledge in today’s customer-centric organization—it’s an essential ingredient.
Take knowledge management. Organizations are leveraging knowledge management tools to unite information and experiences to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. Those that do this exceptionally well—“seriously smart organizations”—are even better positioned to deliver on their key customer and employee directives: know me, understand me, value me and empower me.
Today’s seriously smart organizations capitalize on:
Smart moments. Recognizing buyer intent and customer needs and/or delivering the right offer and support at the right time to drive more personalized, more predictable and more productive customer engagement.
Smart workforce. Helping ensure the right employees with the right skills are provided with the right insight to drive employee effectiveness and help adhere to regulatory compliance.
Engaged workforce. Empowering employees to do and be their best, and reward and inspire customer interactions that promote loyalty and contribute to the organization’s goal of continuous improvement.
In business, employees in the front and back office, branches and stores all have a role in shaping the customer experience. Every interaction should be contextual and personalized, resulting in customers continuing to engage with your brand. And each employee should be given the right tools and the best knowledge to use in tandem with their given skill-sets to complete a myriad of tasks and ultimately deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Seriously smart organizations are taking a strategic approach to knowledge management to gain competitive advantage through actionable intelligence—vital insights that enable them to analyze and act on information. By giving customers and employees access to resources and content enterprisewide, knowledge management helps support smarter answers, better decisions and better outcomes.
Serving Up Knowledge Management—Best Practice Use Cases
Developing strong knowledge management practices and tools support best practice use cases that map to key service and performance management initiatives that help:
Make every employee the “smartest” employee. Put intelligence at employees’ fingertips in the context of the task in hand to drive improved first contact resolution, quicker interactions and more complete and accurate responses. Empower employees to answer increasingly complex customer interactions involving extensive cross-channel insights, and empower customers to find the answers they need easily and efficiently via self-service channels.
Improve employee speed-to-skill. Transform training, e-learning and onboarding from a long, “learn everything” process to a more efficient, “learn how to find and use” model. Help shorten time to expertise from months to weeks, and boost employee efficiency, confidence, collaboration and value along the way.
Correlate knowledge with service performance. Analyze how and when employees and customers use knowledge. Give organizations a powerful means to understand how to optimize the knowledgebase and the customer experience itself. Rather than capture all knowledge, focus on knowledge that is most critical to an organization’s success in order to drive performance, growth and competitive advantage. Leverage knowledge for performance management to focus on “how best to do things” versus knowledge that’s merely “about things.”
Evolve customer experience through knowledge. Capitalize on every employee and every customer touchpoint to grow and improve knowledge and enhance experiences. Benefit from frontline employees and their rich repositories of knowledge about pain points in customer journeys and where technical or operational glitches may occur. Leverage knowledge from experience as a spark for innovation. Then identify and address those areas where knowledge can be injected into processes and transactions to aid both customers and employees, such as through channels like proactive chat.
Create and communicate change. Help employees and customers navigate change and rapidly pivot to address new requirements, such as process changes, new products, compliance mandates and new channels through the introduction of new knowledge across the enterprise and customer base. Change is disruptive to employees and customers alike; knowledge can counter fear, uncertainty and defection.
Putting Knowledge Management into Practice
For aspiring customer-centric organizations, these knowledge management best practice use cases can provide a “realization road map.” Organizations are drowning in data when what they really thirst for is knowledge. Armed with a robust knowledge management solution, organizations can address today’s most pressing customer and employee service imperatives without reservation—and provide the foundation to become a seriously smart organization.
Verint Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNT) is a global leader in actionable intelligence solutions for customer engagement optimization, security intelligence and fraud, risk and compliance. Today, more than 10,000 organizations in more than 180 countries use Verint solutions to improve enterprise performance and make the world a safer place. 1-800-4VERINT. www.verint.com