The quality of customer service and implementation of successful customer experience management strategy is acknowledged as the top most priority in most businesses as customer satisfaction plays a considerable role in lifting a company’s growth rate. Satisfied customers share their reviews and spread the brand’s goodwill to others, as a result, increasing the company’s audience.
In today’s digitally connected world, customers need assistance on multiple channels that too faster and consistent information delivery on every channel.
Changing Landscape of Customer Service
Earlier, most customers wanted to get in contact with a live service, speak to someone on call by calling the customer care service number, but the scenario has changed in today’s world. Customers do not wish to connect through a phone call waiting in a queue. When a customer has any problem or query with a product or service of a company, rather than speaking to someone they search for a solution themselves and are willing to resolve their common queries by themselves.
Today, when customer experience is a necessity for all the industries, knowledge base software come to the rescue.
Deployment of a robust knowledge base not only organises all the organisational information onto a single platform and supports customer-facing personnel in providing relevant answers to customer questions but when deployed on digital channels, powers self-service interactions to drive efficiencies and revenue.
What is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge management is a crucial element for building a strong and effective customer service strategy. It is a process where a company’s collective knowledge and information are shared and maintained and thus implemented for the company’s multi-fold growth.
Knowledge management and improved customer service
Let’s look at the foundation of your business processes, to clarify- the product/service and process information . Any query or experience would fall right on its face if your representative or agent won’t have necessary knowledge to address the query or problem and today it must be done in a timely manner with minimal wait time or unnecessary transfers.
Try and recall any interaction with a representative. You might have sensed the person’s empathy or product-awareness within a few seconds. This would have set your expectations. Either you might have thought, ‘Ok, I would get my problem resolved in the next few minutes’, or ‘I am stuck with this person’.
At the business end, the first interaction was made possible with a robust knowledge management system.
Here are top ways knowledge management helps boost customer experience:
- Early problem detection and smooth resolution
- Simple, yet exhaustive problem-resolutions
- Fast agent onboarding and on-the-job training
- Omnichannel automation with language consistency
Importance of Knowledge Management
The most successful companies are constantly trying to make improvements in their customer service and knowledge management system helps to achieve this goal. Even if an organizational customer’s experience is the best believing, but you can’t sit back and relax as customer expectations are constantly changing.
The few ways how knowledge management helps the company for successful customer experience management are figuring out the customer’s problems and queries much faster and quicker, then solving it smoothly with relevant solutions and also keeping the solutions to their problems simple by wisely using the contextual knowledge to solve customer’s problems and queries and also by keeping information consistency across all channels.
Companies who focus on delivering great customer services should be at the proactive end of the process.
Knowledge management tools recognize customer concerns and automatically helps with the context of the problem to agents. Customer service agents on the other hand can use the semantic search capabilities while solving a customer’s problems which results in faster and accurate resolution.
The process of knowledge management system includes gaining knowledge from the customer and making the most of use of it by developing an effective process. Maintaining a proper way of collecting data, using and sharing them from customers will help in customer retainment.
AI, The Leading Trend in Technology
Talking about the technology in today’s world, it is improving day by day and becoming more convenient for businesses as well as customers. Also, as the customers are more willing to get their issues solved without them having to speak with anyone on call or by putting much of their efforts by searching on the web, companies are using the leading trends in technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) for their customer service. Companies are constantly observing the best AI for their customer service improvement.
Even though there are a lot of advancement opportunities for the companies because of ever increasing technologies by understanding their customer more deeply, yet it is also a great challenge.
AI backed knowledge management is making both human and machines intelligent.
Conclusion
Around the world, customers have become more and more empowered. They have a resounding voice in terms of testimonials, reviews, as well as direct opinions and multiple channels to raise their thoughts and experiences, freely. Keeping knowledge management at the heart of customer service operations is a necessity and a way forward.