Make Your Customer Service Error-free By Bridging The Knowledge Gap

• By Sowmya Juttukonda
• 22-02-2022
• Misc

Customer service has become an important cog in the wheel of an organization’s success all around the world. Starting from the time in the 1960s, when contact centers were used as a tool for marketing and selling, the concept has transformed over the years to form a backbone of an organization’s customer experience.

Modern call centers leverage the latest technological tools and AI to handle business inquiries, customer grievances, bookings, and other tasks. This helps the live agents take up more complicated tasks beyond the current capabilities of technologies and focus on enhancing the customer experience.

However, humans unlike machines are susceptible to errors, and although this doesn’t undermine the importance of support agents over machines; we can always implement ways to curb errors while offering customer service.

What Are Some Common Causes Of Customer Service Errors?

1. Vague Information

Incorrect or incomplete information is one of the prime reasons for agent errors at many contact centers. Redundant or outdated information could lead to frustration for both the customer and the agent. Incorrect information could also lead to disastrous situations in information-sensitive industries like banking, e-commerce, etc.

2. Difficulty In Access To Information

Getting crucial data in time is vital for successfully resolving any customer query. No customer likes waiting on the call for hours to get their problems resolved. Slow access to data is the main cause of this delay. Agents have to go through a large amount of data before they can offer any resolutions to a consumer. Modern systems like Knowledge Management are efficient in curbing these issues.

Other issues like information that hasn’t been updated over the years, or agents without access to modern tech and tools also lead to errors. Organizations often rely on modern technologies like AI and chatbots to diminish the possibilities of these errors but they still need a platform to hold all the components of the customer service flowing freely. That’s where a good enterprise knowledge base management system comes into the picture.

How Knowledge Management Can Help?

Customer service processes have evolved over the years and as of today, contain several verticals from onboarding new customer agents, training & upskilling existing agents, offering advanced ways to customer services like self-service and chatbots to efficiently handle live calls.

Knowledge Management can become a single source of truth for all of these tasks and act as a central knowledge repository consisting of all the relevant information and data. A knowledge base forms the backbone of any knowledge management system containing all the data.

Let’s take a look at some of the most crucial benefits of a knowledge management system:

1. Making Knowledge Accessible

Knowledge base software can quickly obtain relevant information through advanced search options improving the accessibility and findability of information. Quick access to information leads to quick resolutions of customers’ issues. Knowledge management systems also ensure that the information passed is contextual, easy to understand, and concise.

2. Enhancing Productivity

The productivity of support agents increases with knowledge management features like self-service and semantic search. Self-service through knowledge management promotes call deflection for simple customer queries so that support teams focus on complex customer queries. The semantic search, on the other hand, lets agents access crucial information at the right time, eliminating long wait times during contact with customers.

3. Upskilling & Quick Onboarding

KM systems can also help in efficiently onboarding new agents, determining the skill set of existing agents, and upskilling the present workforce. Modern KM systems can generate personalized learning modules for employees and efficiently handle the training purpose. They can also seamlessly train new agents and can also offer hands-on experience with dummy calls and scenarios.

A knowledge management system helps your agents find answers to resolve customer tickets within the CRM without wasting a lot of time checking documents or interacting with supervisors. They can directly & indirectly impact metrics for Customer Experience or Contact Center leader track.

Using AI & machine learning on clouds, modern KM tools have made contact center teams super-efficient without complex deployment procedures.

Conclusion

Although eliminating errors from humans might be a tough task but knowledge management ensures that the agents have all the tools at their disposal to efficiently handle a customer’s grievance.

KM improves efficiency and instantly boosts productivity. It also paves the path to a more technology-based approach to customer service and helps companies conquer their customer service objectives.