The Impact of Knowledge Management Software for Self Service

• By Sowmya Juttukonda
• 19-01-2022
• Software

Self-service has become the first choice among consumers. Approx 90% of customers expect a brand to have a self-service portal and multiple touchpoints of their choice. And they conveniently prefer knowledge bases such as FAQs, device guides for easy troubleshooting, and intelligent bots to provide a human-like experience overall self-service channels.

Knowledge management is a critical system for self-service success & effective call deflection, but it’s challenging to get it right according to the requirement.

What is Customer Self-Service?
Self-service simply means that when customers face any problems, they must resolve them efficiently on their own without assistance from the company’s interventions. Global companies are adopting omnichannel customer service, and the customer is happier because of getting accurate and timely responses.

How Can You Deflect Calls With An Omnichannel Strategy?
Omnichannel support provides contact centers with a cost-effective and scalable self-service solution that can help reduce call abandonment rates and support costs.

Sudden spikes in customer service tickets don’t have to result in a high-pressure environment for contact center agents. Instead, analyze what other all-customer contact channels you can add to your customer journey to help face call volume at peak seasons. This will help you deflect calls effectively and drive the benefits of being available for your customers 24/7.

Further, AI-powered conversational chatbots and assistants, also called virtual agents, can deliver faster & accurate answers over multiple channels while shifting to contact center support staff to handle more complex issues, delivering an exceptional customer experience.

More Benefits of Customer Self-Service
A customer self-service portal is one of knowledge management’s most powerful applications. Customers quickly get the resolutions they need and free up your contact center agents to focus on more complex queries and support tickets. When agents can focus on complex issues, your business grows, and so do your revenues. It’s a win-win situation for customers, agents, and companies.

Those days are gone when a customer’s only way to get support was by picking up the phone. Today, when they encounter problems with a product or service, or process, their first thought is to head online and find their answers themselves using FAQs, articles, manuals, videos, chatbots, and virtual assistants.

Effective self-service capabilities offer many benefits, including:
Delivery of quicker answers to desired queries
Providing personalized user experience
Decreases number of trouble tickets at customer helpdesk
Reduce the number of time agents spend on simple tickets

Approximately 67% of people are more inclined to self-service than speak to agents. And this, It is essential to have an internal knowledge base that can be customized as per the needs of the customers. By simply having a good knowledge base to support your self-service, you’ll quickly notice the direct impact it can have on agents’ happiness, customer satisfaction, and your bottom line.

Making Customer Self-Service Intuitive
How can you give your consumers what they expect from self-service? A customer self-service portal is an efficient way to build customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, over half the customers find self-service portals challenging to use. Making your self-help channels easy to use, seamless and intuitive should be prioritized.

Today your customers can solve their problems, but only if they know where to look for the desired information. A knowledge base that provides simple, easy-to-understand information in an intuitive step-by-step workflow offers an exceptional customer experience that gen X demands.

Despite this, if your workforce is hybrid & operating a remote employee monitoring software you can integrate the knowledge base tool with the monitoring software to improve the experience of your agents as well as customers.

However, as mentioned earlier, it is crucial to choose a perfect knowledge base system that fosters your self-service capabilities and makes customers’ and agents’ lives much more accessible. Ideally, you want a solution that:

Have a self-service knowledge base with all the contextual information customers need
It helps customers resolve typical queries your live agents usually handle.
Provides 24*7 accessibility to information at the channel of their choice
Easy to use but comprehensive enough to solve complex needs.

By having these capabilities, you’ll not only meet your customers’ expectations anytime, anywhere but also reduce your customer support costs.

How to Measure Effectiveness of Self-Service?

There are many metrics you can use to measure your self-service portal’s performance.
You can calculate the average number of resolutions provided by support staff vs. self-service options.
CSAT and NPS results are considered the most important metric of all, and a feedback mechanism can measure them
If the number of calls drops at the helpdesk, your self-service deployment is effective, and customers find what they need.

Conclusion

Finally, you should not forget to measure the savings of your business. And while the monetary savings alone offer plenty of value, you should see additional value in agent satisfaction, customer & agent retention, and more which drives extra savings.