Knowledge management helps businesses with multiple contact channels and content repositories harmonize their internal knowledge and make it readily available to both staff and customers.
Supported by an intuitive omnichannel platform and knowledge lifecycle management, customer management processes can be automated and sales and service efficiency significantly increased.
Knowledge management goes far beyond shifting from sharepoint to a new tool. It addresses core difficulties faced by sales and service organizations and helps address them with disruptive new ways of managing information. Some of these will apply to your business:
According to a survey conducted by our solution partner eGain with the participation of 615 enterprise organisations the biggest issue facing frontline agents today is the ability to to find the correct answer for customer questions quickly and at the first time of searching. 26% of those companies believe that agents just do not know where to search for information, since most of these organizations have multiple sources of content.
In our experience the large majority of businesses utilize multiple legacy systems for storing information which must be used by frontline agents. The consistency and accuracy of the information stored in these systems varies greatly. In many cases the information at hand is often also out of date. In these situations the agent has no guidance of which source to “believe” and therefore consistency of answers across channels and individual agents cannot be warranted or guaranteed. Additionally, the lack of trust in the information available in these systems decreases their use and leads to agents turning to each other for clarification, thus slowing down customer service processes. 25% of experts ranked this issue as the most critical one.
20% of experts believe that the most difficult task frontline agents are facing is the need to repeatedly switch between multiple (in some cases in the double digits) applications and windows to manage an interaction with the customer.
14% of the respondents stated that the biggest issue is keeping up with changes in processes, policies, services and product details while also finding time to do actual work. Agents typically work under a lot of pressure to handle as many customer interactions as quickly as possible as average handling time is still a pervasive contact center kpi. This allows them little time to follow up on any changes and information. To make matters worse, news and alerts usually arrive in channels which agents do not monitor all the time, such as e-mail.
Having ambitious sales targets right from day one can be a daunting proposition for rookie retail store and contact center agents. Up to 50% of all new starters leave because sales expectations are not supported by the right tools, leading to high attrition.
Millennial agents are living a digital life and are used to relying on a wide range of digital tools to help them solve problems. They are increasingly reluctant to memorize large bodies of knowledge and prefer to become proficient in the use of tools that can help them dynamically answer the problems customers are asking. They take personalization for granted and have high expectations of any tool they use for knowledge management and process guidance: a rookie needs guidance at every step while a pro wants the freedom to jump over steps he or she is confident in.
Industries selling complex products and services tend to organize customer service staff around carefully defined competences with a high level of specialization. Additionally, each agent has a unique skill set – some are better at selling, some at solving problems. Identifying and sharing best practices in order to boost overall performance is a major challenge.
If contact reasons are determined solely based on outcome coding done by agents at the end of the interaction, accuracy tends to be in the 60 – 70% range. This makes meaningful and actionable root cause analysis difficult to accomplish. Retail environments tend to be even more challenging with very limited transparency of interactions that do not directly result in a sale or any other transaction captured by systems. Using dynamic process guidance can help give more granular insights into what is actually happening at your touchpoints.
Knowledge management delivers impact by improving the agent experience as well as the customer experience.
One central knowledge system serving all channels with the same knowledge article database providing a single source of truth
Dynamic process guidance enables new agents to get up to speed significantly faster than with traditional training methods and allows them to start handling complex topics with confidence. Time to competency is halved in many cases. Additionally, it fosters best practice sharing across all experience levels.
Using an intuitive knowledge management interface helps agents, especially millennials, interact with customers more seamlessly, thus lowering turnover by boosting agent experience.
Making the full range of knowledge topics available to all agents solves the biggest issue of resource allocation. Additionally, the most effective sales techniques and even specific sentences being built into the guided help flows can significantly increase the efficiency of sales. Make every agent your best agent.
The agent advisor desktop highlights the relevant updates for all agents to help them stay up to date at all times
Knowledge management systems fundamentally allow you to manage static articles and dynamic processes across digital (e.g. FAQ) and traditional channels (e.g. contact centers).
One solution that has worked especially well for us in both telecommunications and banking is eGain’s customer engagement cloud, which is why we have partnered with eGain to be able to deliver a best-in-class knowledge management and artificial intelligence platform. Looking at the capabilities of the eGain customer engagement cloud provides a good understanding of the typical features offered by knowledge management solutions.
All this capability is delivered in a solution that’s easy to deploy, manage, and optimize.
Built to work with the award-winning eGain Customer Engagement Hub™, as well as leading Call Center technologies such as Cisco UCCE and Avaya CMS, eGain Analytics provides true Omni-channel management.
Get in touchFor more details on the capabilities offered by eGain’s platform, visit www.egain.com.
eGain Virtual Assistant is a lifelike, conversational virtual agent providing a unique, interactive, and personal way for users to get answers and assistance on your website or intranet, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It provides the frontline support and triage so your customer service staff can concentrate on more complex tasks.
reduction in training time for global bank's customer service advisors with ai guidance
reduction in training time for global bank's customer service advisors with ai guidance
reduction in training time for global bank's customer service advisors with ai guidance
reduction in training time for global bank’s customer service advisors, with AI guidance
improvement in telecom company’s contact center agent time to competency
annual saving by a utility firm due to better knowledge access and diagnosis by agents
eGain SelfService+AI enables organizations to provide distinctive, productive, and brand-aligned self-service experiences that enable breakthrough improvements in customer self-service effectiveness and adoption, while allowing seamless, context-aware escalations to live customer service or sales agents.
deflection of customer emails through successful self-service for a wholesale club operator
customers of a telecom company find answers to their issues on the company website
inquiries from students and staff of an exam board are resolved on the website
eGain Analytics makes it easy to measure, analyze and refine your contact center operations, knowledge and web customer experience. Create informative reports, charts and dashboards effortlessly. Slice-&-dice the data in any number of ways and use it to manage the business effectively.
eGain Analytics includes:
Taking your business’ knowledge management to the next level is a complex cross-company effort, but the benefits position you well to better serve your customers going forward. Our knowledge management professional services modules are designed to support you along the entire transformation journey from planning to implementation.
We assess the maturity of your current knowledge management processes and benchmark against best practices before drawing up scenarios for maximizing the impact delivered by knowledge.
Using dynamic guided processes and transitioning to tool-supported customer engagement management requires a cultural shift within your sales and service organization. Seeing the unique needs of your business and the impact the shift can have on your operation is best demonstrated through a live pilot. The effort invested into this will be rewarded with the knowledge that any decision you make on long term deployment is based on learnings gleaned from your own business.
Knowledge management system rollouts are done in sprints and can thus start generating ROI after 8-12 weeks on select user groups and topics. The time it takes to migrate all relevant processes to the new way of working strongly depends on the size and complexity of the business. However, it always needs to be followed up with robust knowledge lifecycle management to make sure keeping knowledge up to date is ingrained in your organization.
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