Social media use is evolving rapidly. Users include almost any group or customer segment and social media is changing the landscape of customer service at an ever increasing rate. Customers are expecting to engage with organisations through channels of their choice leaving customer service with the challenge to work through multiple channels, such as Web, Facebook and Twitter as well as traditional agent based channels.

By embracing the challenges and opportunities of Social Media and Multichannel engagement,  organisations can gain an edge in providing seamless high quality customer service. At the same time there is opportunity to improve delivery efficiency.

Timely access to relevant knowledge is key to delivering effective customer service. This apply regardless of channel. Pursuing an integrated strategy to multichannel customer service requires a solid foundation for the organisations knowledge base. The greatest opportunities for integration can be found in some specific areas:

Channel Specific Presentation of Content

Content managed within knowledge management tools can be optimised for delivery via multiple channels. Working with configurable templates allows knowledge to be defined and selected to be appropriate for each specific channel. Knowledge can then be pushed out to customers in a format that is appropriate for the channel. This approach will allow the core knowledge base to be used effectively by a wider range of users across a wider range of situations.

Sharing Knowledge Across On-line Channels

Providing access to your existing knowledge base via established social media sites such as Facebook can be easily achieved. The prospect of sharing your organisations core knowledge through social media channels may initially be daunting. By using knowledge management tools to index and filter your content, you have full control over which content can be viewed in each channel. The benefit of well managed knowledge sharing is that social media users will gain access to relevant knowledge from your organisation using a social media platform of their choice.

Accessing and Sharing Crowd Sourced Content

Much information and knowledge sharing takes place outside of organisational control. This is particularly true for consumer products and services, where specialist interest websites and forums offer well indexed access to product reviews, Q&A, analysis, user guidance, fault finding and other detailed information. Tapping into to user generated and crowd sourced information is a huge opportunity. The challenge is to manage the flow of information to merge the existing internal knowledge with external sources.

The knowledge management tool provides the ability to include external sources of information, from forums, websites or social media platforms, which can then be indexed and searched as part of the knowledge base. Automatic index processes ensures only appropriate new information is posted on these channels is included as searchable knowledge.

Invest in Social Media Ready Knowledge Management Tools

As the popularity of social media continues to rise, ensure your knowledge management investment provides the tools to ensure content is authenticated and fit for purpose for each of your customer engagement channels. Make sure tools are capable of indexing and working with knowledge from any source and format, internally and externally. Finally make sure your knowledge management tool integrates seamlessly with your customer service desk applications to push knowledge where and when it is needed.

To find out more about our social media ready knowledge management software, please contact us >>

KPS will be at the IQPC ( International Quality and Productivity Centre ) Executive Customer Contact Exchange conference. The conference focus on sharing of experiences around effective management of contact centres and and delivery of high quality customer service experiences. 

A theme of this years conference is self service which is rapidly emerging as a growing area in customer service delivery.  With the trend towards self service and increasing service expectations from customers, it is becoming essential for organisations to provide a seamless integrated service experience.

During the conference KPS will be introducing the Universal Knowledge solution and explain how knowledge management software can be used to enable and enhance self service and multi channel customer service delivery.

Universal Knowledge features will be explained in terms of how these can be used to implement improvements in service delivery short project implementation lead-times and long term benefits.

To learn more about Universal Knowledge and self service Contact KPS

Web based self-service for delivering customer service and technical support is one of the fastest growing areas in service delivery. In addition to the challenges in creating an effective self-service experience, the question often asked is:

“What do we have to do to ensure users adopt self service over the current approach?”

The underlying question is “ should we use carrot or stick? ” Can we and should we force our customer or user base towards self-service and if so, how do we implement the change without causing a customer backlash.

The Business Case?

Let’s get over the easy bit. Self-service has the potential of an 80% reduction in call centre traffic. Call centre and IT support traffic is expensive. Self-service saves money. Recent estimates of external customer support through call centres can be as high as £15 to £30 per call while web-chat may be £2 to £3 per interaction. Automated web self-service is almost exclusively setup cost with per transaction costs being insignificant.

Transaction based services such as banking, travel and delivery logistics are already forcing self-service by removing other options. Amazon is not losing sales and EasyJet is still growing despite removal of the service agent in the booking and ordering process. When users see other benefits such as low cost or convenience they are ready to switch. What is still required is focus and attention on delivering a slick and effective self-service experience to stimulate repeat business referrals and recommendations.

“If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing it well”

Self-service as a delivery channel seems an obvious choice. Well executed, the approach saves cost, time and is infinitely scalable: “If 90% of people are happy to use on-line banking, why are 90% of people not happy to self-service for internal IT support?” The answers could be summed up as:

Because people don’t like change and users don’t like being forced into a different channel unless they can see the benefit from their own perspective. The key to a successful self-service implementation is to focus on the user experience and user perspective. Which means making it simple to use and providing the information needed, when its needed.

Making the Web Self Service Experience Excellent – The Carrot

Working towards a natural conversion into self-service support channels is all about getting the user experience right and promoting the opportunity to self-serve to all users at all stages of the support interaction. Having worked with many clients across different sectors, we have gathered insights on how to create a self-service experience that encourages user adoption.

Amazon and eBay’s entire user experience is designed to be slick, user friendly and most importantly right first time. With users driving the action and suppliers being highly motivated to deliver good service (no supplier can afford poor ratings) there is little or no need for escalation to a call centre agent. This is handy, as the call centre escalation has been entirely removed from the service experience.

“So what happens when information intensive services such as IT support and customer service heads the same way?”

We have collected the user adoption insights and experiences from working with our customers across a wide range of sectors and made these available in our Web Self Service Whitepaper.  Download the white paper and find out.