Enabling a Smart Customer Service with Knowledge Management

Posted On: November 23, 2016

Today, customer service has become a vital part of the ability of a business to promote products & services, to generate revenue. For instance, in the telecom sector, subscribers stay loyal to a service provider with more efficient after-sale support. However, with new technologies emerging and growing consumer expectations, operators should focus on delivering a smart customer service.

Delivering a better quality of service is not possible with the use of traditional operational approaches and support technologies. Today’s digital customer service techniques can help you support staff do more with less.

Knowledge Management for a Smart Customer Service

With more intelligent subscribers, a telecom service representative cannot respond to rising customer expectations with the traditional customer service methods & approaches.

These conventional approaches lead to a decline in KPIs, like customer satisfaction, speed-to-answer, first-contact resolution rates, and others, due to the lack of:

  • A centralized system for agents to learn, collaborate, and serve more effectively
  • The capability to empower self-service tools and options, like forums, wikis, and more, allowing customers to find answers on their own, with ease.
  • Analytical insights for organizations to improve their customer service delivery, to meet dynamically changing customer needs and expectations.

However, in order to deploy the best practices in customer service, service providers should integrate their support tools with a knowledge management system. Some of the benefits of a robust knowledge base, include:

  • Enhanced Agent Efficiency: An agent, leaving a customer service department is not a big deal, but the real loss comes when you lose the related experience, expertise, and knowledge. A collaborative tool that helps collect, streamline, and manage information prevents this loss, as well as empowers new agents.
  • Reduced Training Time & Efforts: This collaborated knowledge, when made available to every agent on his system, reduces the need to invest time in individual training. Instead of this, organization can focus more on developing their product/service quality, and the retrieval of the required support knowledge.
  • Faster On-call Resolutions: Equipping agents with the required problem resolutions help deliver faster and seamless customer service. This helps service providers deliver a smart customer service with an improvement on KPIs like call times, escalation rate, and first-call resolution (FCR) rates.
  • Improve consistency: A centralized knowledge management software allows the delivery of same, accurate responses to customers. A consistent delivery of customer service creates a positive brand value among subscribers, creating new opportunities for telecom service providers.

Thus, the customer service provider should invest in an efficient knowledge management system to ensure timely delivery of quality resolutions, for a smart customer service.

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