Knowledge Management for Customer Service

Knowledge Management for Customer Service

Is your Knowledge Management system working for your customers? Or do your customers spend a great deal of time searching through keywords and documents trying to find answers to their question? Do they become so frustrated they use more expensive channels or go to the competition’s web site?

In your effort to deliver self-service, you might have forced the customer to search so many documents for the answers that he sees your customer service as being content-centered rather than customer-centered.

Your customer is focused on his question, not on finding the most complete and detailed answer. He will search on keywords in his question, not in the answer! Your customer cannot find his tree in your forest.

In your Knowledge Base there may be over 10,000 pages. Some industries have more than 60,000 customer facing pages. Imagine trying to find the answer to a question in that forest! Can you imagine asking the Knowledge Base a question and getting 50 or more results, none of which appropriately answers the question? This is counterproductive, frustrating, and non-productive. It makes your company look downright inefficient.

Don’t let your document database bury your customers. Likewise, don’t let the plethora of documents bury your call center agents and make them ineffective.

• - Instead of 40,000 to 60,000 pieces of content, consider culling the useless documents.
• - List the 30-50 most common questions.
• - Write concise answers.
• - Post each question with its answer as its own document.
• - Use your CRM Knowledge Management system to categorize and index the questions.
• - Continue to monitor questions and add questions and their answers to a maximum of 300-500.

Each piece of information needs to be optimized for the channel through which it is delivered. Remember that a customer may not want as much detail as the call center agent may need. Give them access to different answers. You may even need a third set of answers which are shorter for use on mobile and social media. No customer wants to read five pages to answer his question, especially if he is reading it on his iPhone.

Tags: customer service, Customer Service Software, knowledge management