Knowledge Management Is the Solution II

Expertise can be shared: A knowledge management solution not only captures scarce expertise, it makes that expertise available to all support and service agents uniformly. Thus, organisations can leverage their knowledge and make it much more broadly and consistently available to their customers, partners or end- users.

Turnover and job changes do not cripple the system: A key capability of knowledge management solutions is to capture knowledge and make it accessible to all service and support agents. Thus, knowledge no longer stays with those who hold or discover it; it becomes an organisational asset available to all who need it. This addresses two essential problems: the challenge of making the job more effective and satisfying so that key people stay with the company; and it addresses the problem of how to keep the or effects. Customer queries, therefore, must be addressed within the context of the situation in which their questions occur. Automatically resolving such queries through proper KM requires that the system prioritise the substitutions, corrections or workarounds that are most likely to remedy the situation; and this knowledge can then be made available to end users or support agents.

For most organisations, training support agents can be an exercise in repetition and frustration. It takes time for individuals to learn the right set of symptoms, fixes and information that is most likely to satisfy customers’ issues. No sooner does an agent master this complex body of knowledge than he or she changes jobs or leaves the organisation, taking their knowledge with them when they go.

KM solutions attempt to make these vast, implicit bodies of knowledge as explicit as possible, and make it possible to organise, search, use, and adapt any explicit body of knowledge in response to changing customer needs, circumstances, and technologies.

Employing a knowledge management solution can make a huge difference in resolving the issues described previously, as follows:

The ratio of call agents to customers can be controlled and the interaction can be made more efficient: A knowledge management solution that enables enterprises to offer customers, partners, and end- users effective selfservice access to support knowledge permits consumers of knowledge to handle many of their own queries directly. This lets the organisation leverage its service and support staff to concentrate on more difficult calls and to provide faster escalation and resolution.

Increasing call volumes can be handled via Tier Zero: The self- service aspect of a knowledge management solution means that customers can search for answers to their questions 24 hours/ day via the web. By providing this tier zero support, live agents can devote their time and resources to answering more complex questions. According to the Gartner Group, the average call to a help desk can cost as much as $27, but it can cost as little as a quarter of that for a user to check an online knowledge base.

Robert Mirani, Research Director for CRM at the Yankee Group says that “allowing customers access to corporate knowledge assets through selfservice web- sites is a crucial component of next generation customer support — great customer service is not just about call tracking, but providing quick, accurate answers to customer inquiries”.