How to Improve the Customer Experience with Knowledge Management

There’s a reason many of us drag ourselves to Starbucks every morning and pay over five dollars for an average cup of coffee. We’re not just paying for the beverage; we’re paying for the experience.

In that same vein, your company’s customers have high standards for their customer experience. As technology continues to advance, shaping the way consumers shop and interact with brands, those customer experience standards will continue to rise.

If you want to remain competitive in your industry, your organization needs to improve the customer experience by providing exceptional support. Customers want their problems solved and questions answered as quickly as possible. If this doesn’t happen, they will hold your organization accountable in a very public way. We don’t need to tell you twice that this response can come at a massive cost to your company’s reputation and bottom line.

Deploying an effective knowledge base is proven to help companies excel in customer service. According to a study conducted by Aberdeen, top performing companies are 38 percent more likely than others to deploy a centralized knowledge base containing product and service information.

Common Customer Service Challenges and Solutions

Most customer service teams struggle with the same challenges: lack of accessible and shareable information, poor resolution time, and so on. Your team can reduce these problems and improve the customer experience by adopting a knowledge sharing system which operates both internally and externally.

External Use

Many knowledge sharing platforms can be opened up to a company’s customers. Ever heard of the 80-20 problem? Roughly 80 percent of the calls that customer service representatives receive address FAQs which can be resolved with a stock answer. For those common, easily resolved issues, no one should have to make a phone call. It wastes both your client’s and your customer service team’s time. There’s an easier and faster way for customers to resolve their issues: self-service.

A customer-accessible platform will allow your customers to find the solutions they’re looking for immediately upon encountering the issue. Your customer support team can focus their efforts on the other 20 percent of problems that require a more nuanced response; it’s a win-win.

Internal Use

Smart internal knowledge sharing will solve your customer support team’s problem accessing the right content at the right time. When a customer does have to call support, they don’t want to spend all day on the phone. If your customer service representative spends several minutes searching for a solution in an unorganized archive of files, you may have just lost a customer.

A knowledge sharing system with high-performing search is exactly what your team needs to prevent such a loss. It will enable your representatives to immediately locate any document or information they may need to provide quality assistance in the shortest possible amount of time.

So many customer service teams fall prey to working in silos, isolated from all the valuable information and knowledge living right outside their own department. An internal knowledge sharing solution will also break down these silos and recover information that is not being utilized to its full potential because the customer service rep just didn’t know who to ask.

Knowledge Sharing Leads to a Better Customer Experience

Knowledge sharing has always been a major component of quality customer service. Smart knowledge sharing empowers customers to find answers on their own, unearths information and content faster, and allows customers to help each other find the best solutions to their problems. With these tips, your customer service reps can provide your customers with your own version of the complete coffee shop experience: the coffee (exceptional, not average), the hustle and bustle of a coffee shop, AND the cozy lights.