New Best Practices for the Information Perfect Storm
It's no surprise that workers, and customers, suffer "insight deficit" from the proliferation of systems, the movement to the cloud, increases in social media, multiple attempts to migrate data into "systems of record," and the growing amount and diversity of data. It's a perfect storm, and it's hitting right now.
In many organizations, workers don't know what information they have. A recent survey found that the majority of executives believe their companies have visibility into less than a quarter of information across all customer interaction channels, including social streams.
Staying Competitive
Forward-thinking companies are seeking advanced alternatives to providing an interactive, real-time, one-to-one, end-to-end customer experience. When engaging with customers, they do more than connect; they provide insight and knowledge—which is contextually relevant to that customer, and easily consumable, at that point in time. They access information about the customer, their particular products or services, any issues and how to resolve them, to bring true value to the connection.
Customer service organizations have looked to knowledge-centered support (KCS) as one of those methodologies that will help put in place a process to leverage the valuable knowledge assets they have created in their organization.
Imagine if every employee in your organization had insight into what the collective knowledge of what your company knows best—given their unique context—in a split second. The power this insight gives you is one of the founding principles of KCS. Insight technologies based on advanced enterprise search are very tightly aligned to the foundational concepts of KCS, most notably in solving customer issues through the process of capturing, structuring, reusing and improving information.
Master the Process of Capturing Information
For many organizations, information capturing is an add-on process of taking data from resolved cases and pushing it through a workflow that polishes the information for the general consumption of larger audiences for reuse. The challenge with this approach is that often, the information used to solve the issue already exists, but must be packaged or re-packaged and moved to a standalone knowledgebase.
In many customer service organizations, the heavily regulated knowledge vetting process can take weeks or months to move critical information that solved a ticket to creating a solution in a knowledgebase. So what happens? Rework becomes rampant and tremendous resources are wasted. Even though you may have a solution in the knowledge-vetting pipeline. your agents are likely resolving or attempting to resolve solutions without it. Better to serve up relevant information from any source the minute it has been created, with the "stage of curation," known.
The KCS principle this supports is making information used to solve one case, instantly available for others to use. When others use new information, they can identify it as valuable or not. With this identification and automated ranking techniques, the information automatically becomes vetted. Accessing the vast ecosystem of information is an effective way to substantially increase your organization's capacity to resolve issues quickly, and enabling your organization to easily scale without adding resources.
Companies that rely on their information ecosystem have experienced greater than 30% increases in FCR while reducing their overall case resolution time by nearly 15% within 90 days of implementation, and growing self-service customer satisfaction by 10%, and overall customer service satisfaction by 49 basis points.
Manage the Improvement of Information
Information improvement is also an ongoing concern. Dynamic tagging capabilities allow any user to tag a document in real time if there needs to be a correction or if the information needs to be reviewed. This might sound like a simple process, and in some traditional systems there is a process to do this, however information growth and diversity has outstripped most capabilities.
Consider a chat log, a tweet, or a community posting—all of which are outside the traditional knowledgebase. How does an agent flag that information to ensure that it is corrected or not reused in other issue resolution? Once information has been flagged for any reason, the user can go directly to the source of that information and correct it immediately through an insight console interface, such as Coveo, or follow an existing process if one is in place. Remember once the information has been corrected it is immediately updated in the index and available for others to continue to reuse. If the information in question is not information you own, such as a public community post or tweet, then the flagging mechanism can warn the user in real-time that this information is not correct and that it should not be used to resolve other issues.
Today's informational perfect storm requires new technologies and a new paradigm to facilitate KCS best practices. Gone are the days when a single knowledgebase could house all answers for even complex challenges. Leading customer support organizations are turning to advanced enterprise search-based technologies in combination with KCS to access, correlate, present and adapt the information needed to ensure successful and efficient, one-to-one customer engagement, regardless of the interaction channel.
Coveo transforms companies' ability to gain insight from diverse and overwhelming amounts of unstructured and structured data, whether it exists behind the firewall, in the cloud or in social media. Coveo's unified indexing technology connects broadly with all systems to create a virtual integration layer, from which role-based Insight Consoles present consolidated, correlated information mashups.
Coveo customers range from Fortune 100 companies such as Lockheed Martin, PepsiCo and Verizon, to Global 2000 companies such as GEICO, CA Technologies and T-Mobile, to mid-sized businesses such as Terumo Medical, IBM Netezza and Children's Hospital of Boston.
Download the research-based executive brief "Barriers and Benefits: Unlocking Knowledge to Engage Customers" at coveo.com/brief.