According to a 2021 survey conducted by Auscontact Association and COPC, 62 percent of Australian adults have contacted an organisation regarding a customer care or service issue within the last three months. Over half (55% to 67%) admit to having left an organisation due to poor customer care, with the 30-to-44-year age range registering the greatest willingness to leave a business (67%) if there is unsatisfactory resolution to their customer care issue.
According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data, this is a significant age group with high earning and spending power now and for many years to come. Just as compellingly, they are still forming opinions that will guide future decisions.
Research like this highlights the role that knowledge management plays in today’s competitive business environment where the race is on to attain new and retain existing customers and make smart choices about innovations in communication platforms. It all starts with understanding what customers think of the customer care journey. Where are organisations meeting, exceeding and falling short of customer expectation?
Two thirds of customers have a level of dissatisfaction
The Auscontact Association survey asked members of the public about their reasons for avoiding taking action on customer service issues and found that a significant proportion—two-thirds of customers (61%)—are living with unresolved service issues.
The survey also revealed key barriers in the customer experience that resulted in issues remaining unresolved. Inconvenience, lack of time, and bad previous experiences are the main reasons for people putting off reaching out to resolve a problem they are experiencing.
Unless a business makes significant progress in these areas, they will be vulnerable to attrition as customers continue to look for better alternatives.
Covering the needs of all demographics
It is important to note the significant gap existed in the age brackets willing to self-find information across multiple channels such as websites and apps, email and social media before calling a customer service centre.
More than twice as many customers over the age of 45 compared to those under 45 (31% compared to 51%) wished to speak to an agent before trying any other channel, potentially reflecting a lack of IT confidence in older customers. However, the majority (66%) were ultimately forced by the customer service process (37% of these) or the complexity of the issue (28% of these) to use multiple channels to solve a single service issue.
Fiona Keough’s (CEO of Auscontact Association) four greatest insights from the report:
- Consumers are willing (and trying) to resolve issues themselves
- Consumers commonly need multiple channels to resolve a single issue
- Resolving issues is a massive driver of engagement, and that
- Consumer preferences are moving to self-service, in person, messaging and video channels
Simply put, poor service journey management is forcing customers to jump through hoops for single issue resolution regardless of demographic or preferred channel – which is ultimately leaving organsiations at high risk for increased attrition rates.
In today’s digital age, consumers are accustomed to technology making their lives easier. There is no exception when it comes to customer service, which is where many are falling short. Deeper into this article we will explore the role Knowledge Management plays in filling this void and giving agents the technology to serve customers the information they need quickly.
Key issues to be resolved
The report demonstrates that the need for consistent knowledge across all available customer service channels is clear. Key issues to be resolved are:
- Inconsistent answers across multiple channels due to multiple knowledge sources
- Lack of staff confidence in knowledge resulting in customers being pushed through multiple channels for issue resolution
- Lack of credible self-service technology options available to the consumer
How contact centres are looking to resolve these issues
Organisations in 2021 are moving towards enabling their customers to self-serve with modern technology solutions and focusing on implementing a single-source of truth philosophy in order to meet customer expectations.
Technology solutions must serve as a single source of truth with multi-channel capability and audience-smart content. Simply put, one single knowledge base that is able to connect to all customer-facing and internal tools to provide the same answer in varied detail depending on the end-viewer. Customers must be able to see the exact same piece of content in their self-serve channels that an agent would see in their internal channels, but in less detail.
There are many solutions on the market that cater for each of the individual issues above, but few solve each in a single system, thus eliminating the core problem. livepro Knowledge Management is the leading knowledge management solution on the market for customer service.
Specifically designed and built for contact centres, livepro is the single source of truth that connects to all customer facing channels and internal tools used by contact centres to ensure consistency, accuracy, speed and optimal customer experience.
livepro is a purpose built CX knowledge management solution (KMS) – this means it is one of the few KMS systems on the market today that is designed purely for the contact centre and their customers. Using a single-source of truth philosophy and smart features built for CX, livepro integrates seamlessly with the tools that are already being used in the contact centre to ensure answers are consistent in any channel. livepro has been proven to reduce AHT, hand-offs and increase staff confidence thus drastically improving customer’s service journeys.
“We’ve seen a lot more of our staff not just becoming competent in training, but confident when they actually hit the front-line with livepro at their hands”
– Matt Auld – RAA
“Since installing livepro we have reduced AHT from 10 minutes to 6 minutes. That’s a 40% reduction”.
– ME Bank
As highlighted by the report, the importance of a solid self-service offering in 2021 is vital. livepro’s self-service solution Open Access enables customers to find their own answers from the very same content used by the contact centre, only in less detail. This ensures that the same answer is available to any customer, given by any agent and through any channel. Not only can customers self-serve using livepro Open Access, other departments and stakeholders in the organisation can self-serve from the same single source of truth.
Using one knowledge management solution with full integration options and advanced permissions means that a customer can contact the organisation via their preferred channel and receive the same answer that they would receive in any other channel the first time, thus exceeding customer expectation.
Get in touch and start exceeding your customers expectations today.
