Gartner: Deploy a Knowledge Management Program to Support Work-From-Home
In this report, “Rapidly Deploy a Knowledge Management Program to Support Work-From-Home Customer Service,” Gartner analysts discuss the importance of deploying knowledge management to support remote employees.
What Is Knowledge Management?
You’ve probably heard the term knowledge management. But do you really know what it is? More importantly, do you really know the benefits of knowledge management?
Knowledge management is a solution which can help you understand, share, and effectively connect people with information they seek. The benefits of having a single source of truth with knowledge management and efficiently delivering answers to questions are numerous.
Benefits of knowledge management include:
- Lower average handle time
- Increased consistency
- Lower contact volume
- Reduced escalations
- Increased first contact resolution
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Reduced training times
- Increased employee engagement
- Multi-skilled agents
- Up to date information
Knowledge Management can help you adapt and respond to COVID-19
The global pandemic has created upheaval for your customers and your employees. Sudden surges in remote employees and increased customer inquiry volume and types can result in your agents feeling overwhelmed and customers feeling frustrated.
Your employees are struggling to answer new customer questions about COVID-19 without the resources they would normally access. Knowledge management can help your agents find and share the information needed to answer both customer inquiries and questions they may have themselves. Knowledge management can also help ensure the answers agents access are consistent, up to date, and easily accessible.
Your customers also benefit from knowledge management which allows them to find answers themselves. By leveraging knowledge management in self-service websites, customers won’t need to reach out to your agents if they can easily find the information they need about COVID-19.
Knowledge management uses AI and natural language understanding to make it easy for customers or agents to find the answer they need. Customers or agents can search using whatever terms make sense to them and even if those aren’t the exact terms in the knowledge article, the system will still know it is the right response to return.
1. Lower Average Handle Time
Everyone is looking for shorter handle time – customers are happy to get answers quickly, and organizations get the cost savings they require.
However, shorter handle times are only valuable when the call is still resolved with complete, accurate information.
A knowledge base provides a quick way to get reliable answers to even the most complex questions. One of the benefits of knowledge management is putting the information callers seek right before the agents for quick access and use.
When agents can efficiently and thoroughly answer caller questions, average handle times can be reduced. Read more about how knowledge management and other tools can help lower average handle times here: The Comprehensive Guide to Reducing Average Handle Time.
2. Consistent Information
As customers communicate with organizations on more and more channels, it is critical to supply a single source of the truth so agents can provide consistent answers to customer questions across phone, email, chat, SMS and social media.
A central knowledge base that is accessible across channels eliminates silos of information that can lead to different answers given to the same question. For example, BMW set out to identify a single source of knowledge for staff and customers alike, across all its touchpoints.
BMW implemented Knowledge Management to store and recall information in the same way the human brain thinks. By understanding intent and context, the solution can present the right results consistently, even if the words in the article don’t match the words in the query.
3. Lower Contact Volume
The majority of customers prefer to find answers to questions on their own. Since there is no employee involved in these transactions to provide answers, an easy to navigate knowledge base is essential to give customers a place to search for answers on their computer or mobile device.
One of the benefits of knowledge management is it connects customers with the answers they need. With an easy to use self-service website, more customers will help themselves and not require an agent assisted interaction.
IAG implemented knowledge management and other tools to enable customers to access information and transact business online. As a result, IAG has seen a dramatic impact to its annual phone and in-branch transaction volumes. The company has achieved an 18 percent call volume reduction and the growth in online self-service has resulted in fewer customer visits to its branches.
4. Reduced Escalations
One side effect of the popularity of self-service is that the issues that do arrive in the contact center tend to be the most difficult and complex. Because of this, agents are unlikely to know the answers and will rely heavily on a knowledge base to find information.
So how does knowledge management reduce escalations?
If the right information is not easily accessible, the call will likely result in an escalation to a more specialized resource.
A knowledge base can contain literally millions of articles, across a wide variety of topics. Even if an agent has never taken a call of this type, he or she will be able to resolve the issue with confidence.
With Verint Knowledge Management and Verint Web Self-Service, a Leading Grocery and General Merchandising Retailer enhanced issue resolution and increased contact deflection by presenting agents, as well as customers seeking assistance online on their own, with a consistent view of product information.
5. Increased First Contact Resolution
Knowledge base articles provide complete, accurate, up to date information, which reduces the risk of customers needing to call back because their issue is not fully resolved. Also, each knowledge article can automatically show related articles that can proactively answer follow up questions the customer may have.
Sky Deutschland improved first contact resolution by 8% by implementing knowledge management.
By creating a centralized repository of technical content, frequently asked questions, procedures and more, Sky Deutschland’s team could search the knowledge base using keywords and natural language – and provide consistent, accurate answers to customer enquiries, through whichever channel the customer chooses to communicate.
“The right knowledge delivered at the right time is critical to a successful interaction,” says Wiedemer. “…Verint Knowledge Management puts the right information at CSDs’ fingertips as they need it, enabling them to focus on the customer, rather than searching for information. The ultimate outcome is consistent, accurate answers to customers’ technical enquiries across all channels – and a superior service experience.”
6. Increased Customer Satisfaction
Employees need to be equipped to deliver the fast and accurate service which customers expect.
A comprehensive knowledge base is a very useful tool so that employees feel empowered to answer a broad range of customer questions, even on topics that they may not have encountered before.
When a knowledge management system empowers employees to answer customer questions efficiently and thoroughly, a huge benefit is an increase in customer satisfaction. SNS bank found a significant increase to customer satisfaction after only three weeks of implementing Verint Knowledge Management.
By giving employees greater insight into clients’ products and previous inquiries, customer satisfaction went “through the roof” – which is a significant benefit from having a knowledge management system.
“We did not need conversations to speed up, but we did need them to improve in quality. With the combination of our client management system and Verint Knowledge Management, this goal was achieved—and we saw customer satisfaction go through the roof after only three weeks.” – Ben Roosenthaler, Product Owner of the CRM system, SNS Bank
7. Reduced Training Time
Employee turnover can be extremely costly. Each time a new employee is onboarded, weeks of time are spent training the new individual on the vast array of information required to help customers.
A knowledge base that contains the information needed to answer customer questions can significantly reduce training time, allowing trainers to focus on soft skills and customer engagement.
Tele2 enabled more focus on employees skills training and improved its knowledge transfer after implementing a knowledge management system. Since Tele2 employees can now find a wealth of information on their own, the company has to spend less time on knowledge transfer during training sessions. This translates to the company being able to focus more on skills training.
8. Increased Employee Engagement
It’s important to provide the tools for employees to feel engaged, do their job well, and feel confident and motivated in their work. A comprehensive knowledge base is a very useful tool so that employees feel empowered to answer a broad range of customer questions, even on topics that they may not have encountered before.
Also, the younger workforce is accustomed to looking up information rather than memorizing and will rely heavily on a knowledge base to find answers for customers.
Equiniti implemented Knowledge Management to develop a more consumer-centric service. The company noted: “Adoption amongst employees has been fantastic. It’s not often you can say this about technology, but the team really enjoys using the system. User voting, quality scores and feedback are all visible. It gives genuine purpose to their work.”
9. Multi-skilled Agents
Specialized agents can cause frustration and inefficiency, as customers get transferred from employee to employee to get an answer. When each agent can access the full breadth of information in a central knowledge base, there is less need to specialize agents for tier one calls.
Your contact center will make better use of your resources if agents are skilled to handle a wide variety of calls.
Empowering your agents with fast answers and a 360-degree view of the customer can help you solve customer issues faster. This can save you money while also valuing your customers’ time. For more ways to help your agents reduce costs while improving CX, check out our page dedicated to helping you save money.
10. Up to Date Information
When issues arise, up to date information is paramount. Weather issues, communication outages, and software bugs can all generate an influx of calls demanding up to the minute answers.
One great benefit of knowledge management is it gives agents a place to see the most current information on a frequently changing situation.
Providing top-notch customer service isn’t easy, but with a tool like knowledge management, you can empower your customers and employees with the information they need.
Customer service issues will only grow in both number and complexity, which is why now is the time to be sure your contact center is equipped with a knowledge management system.
Now that you know the many benefits of implementing knowledge management, what are you waiting for? Click here to begin harnessing the powers of knowledge management.
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