Better Customer Service Training, Better CX
You’ve done it. In your search for information, you’ve stumbled upon the homepage of the internet. The one stop for all the information in the world on one solid page. Everything mankind has ever known, learned, or wondered is all here in this repository of information. Surely, your long search is at an end. Hours slip by and the sun takes its leave, the darkness of night bringing with it no light but the soft glare of your PC. Wearily, you click and scroll down pages positively bursting with information. Somewhere in this comprehensive virtual library lies buried the data you seek‚ but where? Every fact in the world, but nothing useful to you, and the website offers no extra help. Your clicking slows and your eyes close. You slump, and the soft rhythm of your snoring is the only noise to close out the night. You thought you had found all the answers, but all you truly found was a questionable UI and a truly frustrating Customer Experience. It isn’t your fault, you simply fell victim to bad knowledge management.
A dramatic introduction for sure, but let the terror of a bad CX not be understated. Studies show organizations have but a few avenues for building customer relationships. A bad CX will nullify this instantly, no matter how good looking your UI is. No customer wants to navigate through a maze of data to satisfy their requirements, and if you haven’t intrinsically made their lives easier by understanding their needs, you’ll lose them to someone who has.
But, as in the example above, if every fact in the world isn’t enough to hold a customer, what is? Information targeted specifically to them to begin with, or a tool to find this information.
How To Target A Customer
So how do you target a customer specifically as opposed to the masses? How do you ensure your brand caters to the crowd but pays attention to the individual? How do you build an intuitive, scalable Customer Experience? The answer is with an effective knowledge management system (KMS).
Put simply, great knowledge management is the difference between a dictionary and a Google search. While both are libraries of information, a dictionary requires a user to navigate hundreds of thousands of words to find the information they want while a search brings you the data you need instantly.
While both do the job, the word Google is a household name for a reason. It is the epitome of the perfect knowledge management service (KMS). There’s nothing customers love more than quick, efficient service; and this is only possible when your knowledge management is at the top of its game.
What Is Knowledge Management?
Before we get into optimizing your knowledge management service, it’s vital to understand what it is. Knowledge management is a base of information that helps determine how you interact with your customers online or on-call. For example, for customers of an online fashion retail site, knowledge management might determine that returns or alterations are a common email complaint that customers have. Based on this information, the client would institute a Returns and an Alterations section on their site, thus solving one of their biggest customer grievances, expanding their services and improving user and Customer Experience (and therefore retention) all with one well-placed piece of knowledge. This is knowledge management done right.
Using A Knowledge Management Service
The better your knowledge management service, the better the engagement is for your customer. And the better their engagement, the better the overall Customer Experience in dealing with your brand. Simple enough. But is optimizing your knowledge management service easy, and if it was, wouldn’t everyone be doing it? The answer is yes, it is easy and everyone is doing it. Here’s how people are dominating the world of CX, through use of a knowledge management service.
1. Understanding Consumers Beyond Their Need For A Product
So you sell vacuum cleaners and you identified a target audience in a dusty part of town, setting up an eCommerce webpage to target them. But a few months in, orders are no longer selling, and a competitor has taken over your market.
The problem? High dust volumes have clogged the cleaners and your competitor has set up a response channel to deliver replacement parts for the same.
You both identified the right audience but their superior knowledge management service (KMS) gave them the information they needed (high dust clogging cleaners) to provide a remedial service. In the CX game, they just won big. You must understand not just the primary need of your consumer but also their problems, curiosities, and lifestyle, and then use this information to serve them better.
2. Identify Problems Before They’re Problems
The longer you let a potential problem sit, the more likely it is to grow in stature. Good knowledge management services (KMS) will allow you to identify problems early and resolve them instantly. This involves building a database of potential problems, identifying a structural response to each of them, and implementing these fixes as soon as the problem arises. Picture a servicing call, narrowing the problem down through a series of well-worded questions. Maximum information, minimum time lost, efficient resolution all the by-product of a fabulous knowledge management service.
3. SEO Domination
No one trusts anyone as much as the first search result on Google. Being up there in the search results is a sign of trustworthiness, and God forbid you ever end up on page two. But while the top spots might be locked behind insurmountable paywalls, the rest of the playing field is up for grabs and that’s where your knowledge management service comes into play. Identifying the types of keywords and terms most searched by your target customers, this service will allow you to deliver the information they need, making you their one stop shop for all topics related to your product. Conversion from there is just a step away.
4. Everybody Loves A Know-It-All
No, seriously. This might be the one place where that statement rings true. Customers could come to your representatives with a range of questions, each one with their unique take that matches their life. These situations make it impossible to have one-size-fits-all answers unless you’ve optimized your knowledge management. A KMS takes great care to cover questions of all relevance and complexities with a view to giving you scalable solutions no matter the problem. Fully understanding a customer’s problem makes them feel understood and not like they are communicating with an alien, as is often reported by frustrated callers.
This covers an overview of the benefits a successful knowledge management service can reap, but it remains an overview. Knowledge management is an intensive service handling substantial levels of data but with even larger rewards. And while the pay off is attractive, the services enabled by a good knowledge management service are, simply put, vital.
And should that deter you or appear to be more time consuming than you can afford, worry not. Just look into hiring a professional knowledge management service or software for your brand and leave the rest to them because with a service like knowledge management, there’s always a way to make everyone’s life a little easier.
