#contactcenterworld, @liveprosoftware

Author: Kimberly Amos, Knowledge Management Solution, livepro

There is no question that customer support is becoming an increasingly complex business.

Customers are becoming are more educated in finding information online via self-service, in forums, and so forth. When it comes to contacting your business for live support, chances are the questions they are asking are becoming increasingly complex.

Ensuring your staff have access to the right information, therefore, has also become an increasingly important component in supporting your team, which in turn are supporting your customers.

When it comes to managing documents, data, policies and knowledge to support your team, you need to decide between choosing between a file manager (applications like SharePoint) or a purpose-built Knowledge Management System for your organization.

It is essential to weigh up what features you require and how these will benefit not only your customer support staff but also how your customers’ satisfaction will be impacted.

What is a File Manager?

To break it down, a file manager is a secure place to store, organize, share, and access documents from any device. All you need is a web browser.

There is often no single sign-on issues, and you can use it to sync work or school documents (from a shared site or OneDrive) to your computer for offline use.

If your organization has a limited amount of information and the interaction between your employees and clients is quite limited, then a file manager may be all you need.

Although it is easy to get set up on a system like SharePoint – upload your digital files and you’re done – this complicates things on the back end for the user. Imagine needing to answer a question like, how do I get a refund? With a file management system, you would search for the location of the Refund Policy document, then open it, check its index, find the section or sections related to refunds, read them, and, eventually, you would find your answer. Now, imagine being the client to have asked that question, and waiting on the phone for your contact centre rep to go through those steps to find the answer.

The easy up-front set-up will end up costing you and your team on the back-end in call handling times, customer satisfaction, efficiency, and – in the worst case – being unable to respond or to respond accurately to a question.

What is a Knowledge Management Solution?

If you have a lot of documents, policies, processes, or knowledge that is accessed regularly, then it may be time to start looking at a knowledge management system. When you need to keep your business moving forward, you don’t want file names, you want answers; that’s what a knowledge management solution (KMS) delivers.

Knowledge Management requires work on the front end to structure information as it goes into the system, thereby making it easy to use and easy to manage throughout its lifetime.

When a customer asks how to get a refund, you use the intelligent search aspect of KMS, and you go straight to the answer. You are empowering your organization to serve up the right information to employees and to customers who prefer to self-serve.

The benefits are auditable. A sound KMS system will let you track the usage of documents, the activity of users, and enlists a feedback loop so that your content is always up-to-date and relevant.

Benefits of Knowledge Management Solutions

The benefits of a KMS are extremely valuable not only internally with training and onboarding your staff efficiently, but you can also distribute announcements about new products, policy changes, promotions, or critical information.

Clients get benefits like quick and consistent answers, reduced risk of receiving wrong or outdated information, and improved customer satisfaction due to quick and accurate service – often without having to transfer or put the client on hold.

Some of the common reasons why Knowledge Management Solutions are worth the investment include:

• Intelligent Search functions: Rather than making staff scan through vast amounts of text and data (which costs time and money) a KMS takes every user to the right answer quickly and efficiently.
  
  
• Functionality specifically for customer service: With unique features designed to benefit Customer Service operators such as bookmarking favourite or frequently used pages, the ability to provide feedback on the content instantly, and notifications of new and important information.
  
  
• A customizable platform: The KMS can be customized to suit your needs and is continuously evolving to reflect changing customer requirements.
  
  

How Information is Delivered:

Knowledge Management Solution providers in the marketplace will deliver "knowledge" in different formats depending on the user’s needs. These may include:

• Announcements broadcast urgent temporary information (e.g. an upcoming event, an outage, or a promotion). Announcements notify each user directly so they cannot miss it. Administrators can target a subset of users and can then view a report showing which users have read the announcement; this is useful for compliance purposes.
  
  
• Document Notes provide short, concise, easy-to-read answers.
  
  
• Work Instructions are simple step-by-step process guides on how to complete a task or procedure, meaning that precision and consistency replace ambiguity and guesswork every time. The Work Instructions can be viewed as a flowchart or a series of instructions and questions and are useful for processes that may have more than one path to completion.
  
  

Your Best Practice Knowledge Management for CX Checklist:

Some of the features to look out for include:

• How easy it is for users to provide instant feedback for continuous improvement.
  
  
• Data governance capabilities. Leading platforms will enable you to ensure all knowledge is approved and correct before being published, dated for review, version-controlled and properly archived to deliver a full history.
  
  
• Permissions features so administrators can regulate who sees what.
  
  
• Comprehensive analytics and dashboards to empower you with customer and knowledge insights.
  
  
• Ready to use templates to get up and running quickly.
  
  
• APIs that allow you to easily integrate with other customer-facing channels so you can manage all your customer knowledge from one portal
  
  

Key Stats on the benefits of implementing a KMS Platform:

• Customer Satisfaction: Average of 15% improvement. When customers are increasingly satisfied, they spend more and stay with your company longer.

• Improved Compliance: 49% of KMS for CX users report improved compliance.