Automation is more than a path to lowering costs. It can improve both your employee and customer experience by speeding up interactions and reducing friction, whether for agents searching for information or customers switching channels.
Customer service and IT help desks stand to benefit the most, not because automation will replace people or even reduce staff. Quite the opposite. It enables agents to perform their jobs better and customers to get the right answer faster. Today, the majority of consumers and even your own employees expect a near real-time response to issues. Here’s how taking advantage of automation in knowledge management can help you.
Much is said about personalization and it’s a goal one can make as complicated and indeed costly as you want. Yet, from the customer perspective, most of us are happy if the agent has quick and complete access to our records. This means immediately knowing who the customer is, what they’ve ordered, and any outstanding or past issues.
Customer data is often scattered in different systems such as a CRM or eCommerce backend with order history. By integrating your knowledge management system into your CRM for example, agents can access both customer and support data from a single interface. This reduces handling time, frustration for both parties and leads to a more frictionless and successful interaction.
Automation in knowledge management can deliver information faster and often before the agent even answers the phone. For Volkswagen’s Global Roadside Assistance program for example, by integrating Salesforce and knowledge management, a ticket is automatically created, combined with CRM data, and fed into a series of automated decision trees in the knowledge management system. This provides the agent with the customer data, problem, and the solution all before picking up the phone, significantly shortening time to resolution and making the experience much easier and satisfying for both agent and customer.
Whether on a global or local scale, simple steps like these which combine multiple sources into a single interface and assist the agent via automating repetitive tasks go a long way to both customer and employee retention.
Updating and publishing content is a consistent bottleneck that leads to agent frustration and customers getting incorrect answers. Without digital workflows and automation, your content is always at risk of falling through the cracks with multiple Word files, lost emails, messages, and lack of review.
After mapping out all the steps in your content process from creation, to editing, review, and publication, use the editorial environment of your KM system to model the process. This will ensure every task is automatically assigned and moved forward through the process and is both published in a timely fashion, but also only published when accurate.
Finding good people is a challenge for any organization, not to mention keeping them, and nowadays more than ever. While most agents will eventually move elsewhere or into different roles, daily frustration with issues like outdated software, juggling too many desktop tools and especially high volume can lead to premature staff loss.
When frustration or organizational inefficiency makes it difficult to do your job well, we all lose motivation and consider changing jobs. This leads to loss of experience and institutional knowledge not to mention has a demoralizing effect on others. Using automation and integrations to provide agent assistance can make daily work not just easier, but more successful for your employees and customers.
While the idea of some Jetsons-esque robot workers replacing humans continues to pervade the news and our imaginations, customer and IT service is not the manufacturing industry. Humans are and forever will be central to service. Automation is a must-have tool to enable employees to succeed by focusing on delivering the value that only people can and to spend less time on repetitive work that detracts from employee and customer experience.