Today’s customers expect organizations around the world whether it is in Australia, United States (USA), Canada, the United Kingdom (UK) or greater Europe to communicate with them through the channel of their choice. Some prefer telephone, text, others web or voice chat, email, or to self-serve via the content you have on your website or app. So it makes sense that the best Knowledge Management Systems deliver the answers to your customers through all available channels, and organizational knowledge is managed through one single source of truth. Now let us dive deeper and a look at why some organizations have not adopted this approach yet and what benefit they could get from it.
CEO at livepro
Looking Beyond the Customer Service Team
In today’s digital world of smartphones, live chat, social media, and apps the array of communication options is endless but we still see so many businesses stuck in the habit of using a Knowledge Base to only support their customer service team and not utilizing its multi-channel capabilities. The usability of the Knowledge Base is even more restricted when the knowledge articles have been written for internal use by an author who has not anticipated their use across different platforms and users. These knowledge articles can be lengthy and complicated, if you serve these to customers, you are expecting them to read, interpret and understand the information, and to compile an answer to their question. Best practice Knowledge Management Systems for Customer Service simplify these limitations and deliver “the answer” to the customer, not a knowledge article that needs to be deciphered. Customers do not want information; they want answers and quickly.
Now let us explore the difference between standard Knowledge Bases and a Customer Service Knowledge Management System that supports entire organizations through all departments and channels.
What is a Purpose-Built Customer Service Knowledge Management System?
A modern purpose-built knowledge management system (also known as a controlled knowledge management system) is the best solution for delivering answers to users from one single source of truth. These systems like livepro serve knowledge or answers to users through the channel they choose. This can be via phone, web chat, front counter, email, text, facebook messenger, etc.
The best purpose-built customer service knowledge management systems have the functionality to integrate with emerging and current digital platforms, such as cx contact center solutions like Genesys Cloud, Salesforce, WordPress and Zendesk.
A purpose-built customer service knowledge management system is the perfect solution for organizations with a multi-channel disconnect that is causing poor efficiency, increasing risk, and reducing customer satisfaction scores to the point where customer churn is becoming an issue.
Using the Right Tools to Satisfy Customers
Organisational silos and various platforms serving segregated touchpoints are major challenges to delivering a consistent and smooth customer experience. A 2019 global study of senior customer service and tech professionals by Ecosystm called out the increasing demand by consumers to self-serve, and the growing number of touchpoints through which they expect to do it.
In the study, 86% of respondents interacted with customers across at least three channels or touchpoints. You can imagine or maybe you have experienced the difficulty in managing at least three different knowledge systems and a customer who has received at least three different answers.
This is where a purpose-built Customer Service Knowledge Management System excels, providing one system that feeds all channels and departments, delivering answers quickly and correctly to agents.
To make a quick comparison, let’s look at a popular alternative, the Document or File Management System. It will direct staff or customers to a document where they must sift through a wall of text to find the answer they need. What does that look like in practice? Here are some examples:
- A customer has called your contact centre and is put on hold while the rep is searching for the answer they need: their patience levels are on borrowed time. The APCR study showed that 46% of consumers say that being put on hold for 5 minutes or longer is their biggest annoyance.
- A customer is searching your site or app for product/service details. If they are confronted with PDFs to download and multiple screens to scroll through, they will become frustrated and may begin a new search: a search for a competitor who has taken the friction away by integrating their knowledge base into a self-serve application on the website where customers can access these details easily.
Customer Service Knowledge Management solutions are also developed with smart search features that take staff and customers directly to the answer. There’s no need to put customers on hold or transfer the call and the average call handling times can be reduced by as much as 30%.
When dealing with complex policies, refunds and product models, the functionality of a KMS like livepro breaks it down into step-by-step tree maps, offering different paths of knowledge answers based on the customers responses. These speeds up a usually lengthy process and helps remove any margin of error when it comes to these complex calls or interactions. Over time you will notice a significant improvement in customer satisfaction, accuracy, and compliance.
What the Stats Say?
Omnichannel is more than a simple catchphrase or buzzword – it is a real challenge for virtually all businesses in all niches. In a global study conducted in 2019 by Ecosystm, 86% of senior customer service and technology professionals reported serving their customers across at least three channels or touchpoints. They need a system that supports this multichannel demand.
In 2020, respondents to the Ecosystm study expected that only 26% of customer interactions would occur over the phone, and 36% would be self-service. The critical time to ditch those standard one-channel knowledge bases and to implement a multichannel customer experience knowledge management system is now.
If you’re looking to upgrade your knowledge system, file manager or implement something brand new, check out the livepro case studies, whitepaper and get in contact with us to arrange a free trial and demo of our award winning 5 star knowledge management platform.
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