Nowadays, actually getting in touch with customer service might be something you do at a pretty late stage in sorting out a problem - perhaps one step before giving up altogether, on a baffling error or faulty product. Most consumers are likely to at least try to find out how to fix things themselves just so they can resolve things quickly - and IF they are able to rapidly access the information they need, of course.
Offering customers the solutions they’re seeking, in an accessible and appropriate way, means being there at the moment they start looking for answers. Smart knowledge management requires a combination of rich and timely content, intelligent optimisation, and guiding them to the answer they’re seeking from their first search - on whichever site or device this takes place.
As Aaron Rice, VP CXone Expert at NICECXone explained, it’s all about just-in-time answers. “People don’t need to know everything about a product and how to troubleshoot it. They need the right bite-sized chunks, exactly when they encounter a problem. They just need to know the right thing to do, to fix the problem that’s in front of them.”
To intercept the first search with the correct self-service solution is the optimal situation, or even embedding it into the product itself - enabling the consumer to both diagnose and fix the issue immediately, without escalating it to the contact centre. But there are so many layers and contingencies involved, that to make this look easy, is actually very complex.
Knowledge and insight - everywhere
“The middle layer, between the experts and the user who has a product problem, is huge”, Rice continued.
So creating it effectively requires approaching it from a range of different angles.
“At a very basic level, we have to be able to capture information really quickly and easily in order to get really solid units of knowledge into the system first. So we have smart editor interfaces for experts that will take and transform whenever they write, into customer-friendly content. Then we have smart interfaces for agents who, when they solve the case that has had to be escalated to them, can contribute back to the knowledge base for future use, and can detect problems in the system.
“Then there's what the AI is doing itself on the back end to discover, hey, wait a minute. That sounds like the answer to a question here and creates the links between them”
As well as curating the knowledge itself, there’s then the challenge of inserting it at the point of need, when it has to be found.