The oft-quoted statement: “Knowledge is power,” is more relevant today than ever. But the challenge is to mobilise it. After all, taking knowledge from various systems and transforming it into operational and customer benefits is no small feat.
Consider the sheer amount of information that resides within corporate environments. Far from remaining static, it continues to grow exponentially. Internal teams – like contact centre agents – waste valuable time looking for the right information to deliver it to the customer – in the right format – at their time of need.
Moreover, customers expect fast and accurate answers. When they don’t get them, contact centre conversations can go from bad to worse.
Indeed, it only takes one or two disappointments for a customer to look for alternate solutions, and few things upset them more than incorrect or inconsistent answers.
The solution is to harness knowledge with an advanced Knowledge Management System (KMS). With a finely tuned KMS, agents will save time, reduce overhead costs, and deliver a positive experience.
Unfortunately, the process of centralising knowledge into a single, easy-to-use system is incredibly complex. Why? Because knowledge is everywhere.
The Benefits of Knowledge Management
In organisational settings, knowledge management unlocks an understanding of customer wants, needs, and preferences. It also allows service teams to answer their queries with little hesitation.
As an Enghouse guide states: “At its heart, the concept of knowledge management is simple. It starts with collecting information from those that have it, such as subject matter experts, and then delivering it to wherever it is needed, in the right format to whoever needs it. However, turning the concept into reality is more difficult.”
“At the same time, the importance of knowledge in the contact centre is growing. Customer queries are increasingly complex, while the information itself is changing rapidly, requiring knowledge to be kept accurate and up to date.”
Accessing Knowledge – Contact Centre Problems & Challenges
A typical contact centre agent faces the following challenges:
- High volumes of repetitive questions take up agent time.
- Complex product and service offerings require longer onboarding and training.
- Multiple sources of knowledge are scattered across the organisation, often only in the head of employees.
- Global multilingual audiences.
- Customers expect fast and accurate answers regardless of channels.
Managing Knowledge in the Contact Center
The solution is to centralise information into a knowledge base. This will help businesses deliver answers to whomever needs them.
“The key is to tailor the information to the situation and the capacity of the audience to utilise it,” said Steve Nattress, Product Director at Enghouse Interactive.
It’s also important to be consistent across all channels like IVRs, chatbots and websites. And with agent-assisted channels like voice, web, chat and email.
“The knowledge has to be everywhere,” said Nattress. “And the Enghouse Knowledge Base can deliver it where it’s needed.”
A Video Is Worth 1.8 Million Words
Gone is the day when a picture was worth a thousand words. Now, as Forrester research estimates, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words.
Indeed, video has rapidly become the preferred media to deliver information. One-third of users in the US have watched one tutorial per week. Forrester also estimates that 75 percent of employees in the US prefer a video to reading text.
“The goal should always be to get the information fast,” Nattress said. “Enghouse uses advanced AI to deliver exactly the right piece of information – or even the precise piece of information within a video that contains the answer.”
Combined with email and web chat tools, the Enghouse AI engine automatically suggests answers to the agents by understanding customer intent and matching it to content within the knowledge base.
“This goes way beyond keywords,” he said. “The minimum unit of meaning is a sentence.” The Enghouse Knowledge Base can analyse sentences and gauge context, which is a powerful tool. Even better, it allows agents to focus on higher-level inquiries while other customers find answers on self-service channels.
The Power of Making Knowledge Available to Everyone
When knowledge is power, it often comes down to making that knowledge available everywhere. At that point, it has value for everyone that it interacts with.
Customers get fast and accurate answers when dealing with agents using a knowledge base. They also benefit directly from web self-service and a video knowledge board. Agents are empowered with knowledge at their fingertips, giving them the confidence to focus on building a rapport with customers.
“One of our customers cut their on-board training time in half by making the Enghouse Knowledge Base the very first system new agents access on their first day.”
This results in greater efficiency as complete and accurate answers enhance FCR. And this leads to happier and more loyal customers.
Understanding your customers and answering their questions are two facets of improving First Call Resolution (FCR) and other mission-critical CX metrics.
How Enghouse Approaches Knowledge Management
Enghouse Knowledge Management Solutions are designed to make self-service channels highly effective. They can expedite resolution time, leading to a meaningful and rewarding customer experience.
These are some of the benefits of Enghouse Interactive knowledge management practice:
- Projected annual savings of $1-3 million using enhanced self-service.
- Optimises CX with data analytics to diagnose and address usability, which can enhance self-service process flows.
- Retains corporate ‘tribal knowledge’ and prevents the loss of valuable knowledge with proper content creation and curation.
- Maximises FCR with information sharing and lessons learned with agents and supervisors. This enables them to resolve more issues in the first call.
- Lowers support costs by deflecting calls from real-time interactions to relevant sources of information. Transactional support costs may also fall dramatically.
- Frees-up agents to focus on higher level issue resolution because customers can access self-help with easy access to information.
- The Enghouse Expert Content Management technicians create, optimise, and curate content which helps drive more self-service adoption and usage.
Enghouse Offers Complementary Solutions
Enghouse Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) provides a comprehensive, operationally flexible contact centre platform without the headaches of owning it.
Indeed, the vendor offers solutions for enterprises and SMBs, ensuring successful and effortless customer interactions, no matter the size and budget.
These contact centre solutions are fully scalable and platform agnostic, available on-premise, in the cloud, or in hybrid settings.
Across each environment, its portfolio is deep with modular capabilities, allowing businesses to add functionality such as Self-Service, Quality Control & Analytics, Enterprise Video Collaboration, and Integrations, as their requirements evolve.
As such, Enghouse is ready to support all organizations in meeting unique specifications and arming agents with the customer service capabilities they need to deliver exceptional experiences.
Finally, Enghouse also offers a heralded CCaaS solution for Microsoft Teams. Check it out below.
Final Thoughts
With the rise of data comes the rising tide of information – and increasing complexity – along with the risk of lost opportunities. Information is useful when it reaches the right person at the right time. Only then will it become meaningful knowledge.
But bridging the chasm between data, information and knowledge isn’t easy. KMS technology backed by the right technical team is the answer. Enghouse Knowledge Management Solutions provide the necessary tools for this complex challenge.
Because knowledge is everywhere. And Enghouse Interactive’s Knowledge Management Practice will ensure that knowledge is available whenever customers need it.
For more information about our knowledge management tools, check out this free on-demand webinar where Steve Nattress, Product Director at Enghouse Interactive and Steve Morrell, Contact Centre Analyst and Managing Director at ContactBabel, discuss the challenges and solutions of knowledge management systems in contact centres.
