Knowledge Management to Optimizing the Overall Customer Experience

Knowledge Management to Optimizing the Overall Customer Experience
Implementing knowledge management in the contact center can have a profound effect on the quality and
efficiency of your service operations. Implementing knowledge management, however, requires careful
planning and its success depends on an implementation with targeted goals and the development of
knowledge that is closely aligned with customer service consulting.
Plan the Implementation Strategy the Right Way
Knowledge management is not only a technology implementation; it is a deep cultural transformation in
people, processes and tools. As a result, you need an implementation team that can ensure development of
high quality knowledgebase content and rolls out a realistic plan. Management will need to understand the
relevance of knowledge management and how it contributes to business goals. Knowledge management must
be viewed as part of the vision for optimizing the overall customer experience and empowering the support
organization to achieve this vision.
Start with deployment in the call or contact center rather than customer web self service, whereby you gain
the opportunity to test and improve the usefulness and depth of solution content. Self-service customers will
thus experience a more mature and robust customer service implementation that will lead to higher rates of
adoption and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.
A Robust Knowledgebase
A robust knowledge base contains content that is appropriate to customer questions and can be easily
traversed to find the best possible answer in the shortest amount of time. Knowledge base content is
different from content management systems or file systems and is highly focused and developed with an
awareness that it must be easy to find and use. Content needs to be logically organized and generally
presented in a tree structure with the most general information at the higher level and specific product
information at lower levels.
When establishing standards for content creation, keep the following in mind:
• Each piece of content should contain just one idea.
• The style should be simple and practical with steps for resolution explained logically and concisely.
• Rather than providing exhaustive descriptions, content should be as short as possible and use a direct,
informal tone.
• The content structure should be uniform and use a consistent vocabulary and taxonomy.
Consider the following best practices when designing content workflow:
• Minimize the number of steps in an approval process. This helps to reduce the time lag between when
content was created and when it is published, which is especially important for critical content that
was initially omitted from the knowledge base.
• Follow authoring standards, such as the Consortium for Service Innovation’s Knowledge-Centered
Support (KCS) workflow. KCS recommends streamlining the workflow process to ensure it does not
contain arduous review loops. It also recommends that a solution is visible selectively, based on its
position in the lifecycle as well as the entitlements of each user.
Maximize the Value of your Knowledge Management Solution
The knowledge base development process should also include decisions about using resolution techniques
beyond basic and advanced search. While these will require more up-front work to create, they will provide
agents and eventually customers with alternative methods for finding solutions by offering guidance that
helps them pinpoint the most appropriate answer.
Know more - customer service solutions, eservice

---