“Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.” Martin H. Fischer, German-born American physician and author
We’ve all experienced it: you’re frantically searching for a certain bit of important information, which you can’t locate in the FAQs or find anywhere else on a company’s website. So, you call into the contact center or initiate an online chat. You want to believe that the agent you encounter has the knowledge and experience to provide the answer to resolve your issue quickly and accurately. Sadly, that is not always a realistic expectation.
In a recent survey, Forrester Research asked 5000 customers “What creates the greatest pain when you contact a business for customer service?” The response was resoundingly clear: the lack of knowledge and consistency of information on the part of agents, followed by the difficulty of finding relevant answers on company websites. The feedback read like a litany of customer discontent:
- Different customer service agents give different answers (41%)
- Customer service agents don’t know the answer (34%)
- Can’t find correct answers on website (31%)
This disconnect has contributed to a 3-year decline in the perception of customer service. In reviewing the Forrester CX Index for 2016, 2017, and 2018, no single company offered “excellent” customer service in 2017 and 2018, and the number of companies offering “good” customer service declined from 17% in 2016 to 15% in 2018.
While this seems like a dismal picture, it is certainly far from hopeless. Most businesses have no shortage of information, but have so much content scattered in different places that it is often nearly impossible to find what is needed in the moment. The” magic bullet” to make information immediately accessible to agents has been around for years, but for some reason, knowledge Management (KM) systems have not yet been adapted by the majority of companies.
By capturing, organizing, and analyzing data for shared intelligence and improved performance through best practice implementation, effective contact center KM solutions can dramatically enhance customer support and agent productivity while reducing training time and customer frustration. Having the right KM system in place enables wider sharing of information across the entire organization, spurs operational efficiencies in rapidly communicating accurate intelligence, and helps ensure consistency across an omnichannel implementation.
But building, implementing and maintaining a successful KM program can be a daunting process. A business needs to determine the right procedures to setting up a single source of the truth for all users across all channels and institute a reliable method of measuring its effectiveness at every stage.
Discover how your company can take the right approach to get the ball rolling and put your program on a trajectory to success. Listen to “The 10 Steps to Building a KM Program that Works” presented by Verint on Thursday, September 12, 2019 on CRMXchange. If you can’t attend the live webcast, you can download it 24 hours after it is completed.
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