Creating a Knowledge Centric Customer Support Desk
Today's Customer Support Operations can range from basic to very complex. The days of asking to “speak to the manager” are a thing of the past. Most of us have even come to expect automated call forwarding recordings, long wait times and the arduous process of having to carefully explain our situation (sometimes multiple times to several different agents). It is no wonder customers and agents alike often get frustrated in the process. Providing the best customer service experience is beneficial for your customers and employees.
An often overlooked component of customer support is the integration of knowledge management into the process. Being able to quickly and effectively deliver knowledge when needed improves the support process in several key ways. Here are just a few:
Providing Customer Self Help
Encouraging customers to find their own answers creates a win-win situation all around. A public facing knowledge base on your company website is all that is needed to provide this information to your customers. Implementing self-help information delivers 24/7 answer to your customers while reducing call volume. Overhead costs are reduced. Customers are happy.
Training Tools for your Employees
Utilize your knowledge base to host your essential employee training materials. Policy manuals, training guides, employment forms, videos and more can be made readily available to employees within the customer support software tool. What’s best, a web based knowledge base allows employees to access the information from any browser – whether a desktop work station, or any remote location that has web access.
Create a Support Documentation Repository
A centralized knowledge base becomes the one stop ‘go to” place for support information. The KB can be set up to hold all of your company’s support documentation. Agents are empowered to quickly find answers right within the customer support software to more effectively support their clients.
Ensure Best Practices are Followed
Ensure all of your agents are following the same procedures and giving the same answers. A centralized KB allows your agents to quickly search for an issue and follow your company’s approved methodology for providing support. You can also foster agent sharing, where agents can submit articles for management review based on repeat customer issues. Once the submission is received, managers can create public facing self-help articles to assist customers with common questions.
Integrating knowledge base software with your current customer support software empowers agents and reduces call times. Your support operations will run smoother resulting in improved customer support.
