by twieberneit | Mar 31, 2017 | Blog |
Today’s customer service requirements are getting ever more complicated for businesses. Customers encountering problems increasingly rely on self-help. Customers may start looking for solutions by searching on Google, on community sites, or inside a mobile app. A logical starting point depends on the device and application, as well as personal preferences. The bottom line is: customers want to get to their solution as quickly and easily as possible, and they do not want to change their habits and preferences in order to reach support. Many companies run several customer service applications that support different channels, each with a separate knowledge base (KB) subsystem. These may include a support application for an ecommerce site, some general help pages on the company web site, and FAQs on a mobile application. For internal purposes, there might even be an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system with information for contact agents to use but that are not published externally. Of course the normal situation for a service agent is to work on more than one channel. This means that depending on the nature of the inquiry, agents need to use and update multiple knowledge bases. This results in additional, redundant work and information. Furthermore, information gets easily out of sync—resulting in confusion. Similarly, customers need to navigate through different knowledge bases and FAQs. Apart from being highly inefficient and ineffective, this has an impact on both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. It leads to frustration because customers who do not find their solution need to relay the same information multiple times, and they could be put on hold while the agents research different databases,...
