Looking Beyond the Customer Service Team
Today’s customers expect organizations around the world in Australia, United States (USA), United Kingdom (UK) and beyond 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’s dive deeper and take a look at why some organizations haven’t adopted this approach yet and what benefit they could get from it.
Looking Beyond the Customer Service Team
In today’s digital world of smart phones, 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 hasn’t 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 so they can 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’s 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 Standard Knowledge Base?
A standard knowledge base is a digital library of information about a company’s products, services, topics, procedures or departments. The information within a knowledge base is used by support teams and other departments to provide customer support. Contributors to knowledge bases (usually subject matter experts who know the ins and outs of the product or service, as well as CX Managers) are constantly expanding the base with more information. Knowledge bases usually include data such as policies, product/service specs, manuals, guides, descriptions, and any other information a support member may need.
Knowledge bases have been around for a long time and if they are not built within a modern technological architecture, updated regularly, and customizable to your industry they can be challenging to navigate and find the right answers quickly. This impedes productivity for customer service teams, flattens satisfaction levels for customers and increases AHT or transfers.
You might also find as you bring on board new software and platforms they cannot integrate with them causing a disconnect within the organizations channels and departments. This is not the sort of knowledge system you want internally going into 2021 and especially for your customers and potential customers.
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 a cx contact center solution like Genesys Cloud, or other CRMS, help desk and web software such 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.
What the Knowledge Management 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.
