How a world-class Knowledge Base contributes to making Self Service portals a Success

With an insurmountable amount of digital data and fast paced  world your customers are more inclined to resolve their queries with ‘DIY’ customer service than wait 24 to 48 hours for you to reply to their emails, or pick up their phones to call you. Longer working hours and time-strapped customers are looking to ‘Google it’ and expect to find the answer or information they’re looking for immediately.

As Gartner suggests, Gen Z will make for the largest customer base through to 2030, and will obtain self-service and value from businesses by leveraging customer-directed automation technologies.

The world-wide COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the growth of Customer Self-Service owing to reduced Human Resources across enterprises.

A Customer Service knowledge base would allow your customers to self-serve, thus reducing the high costs involved in extra workload for your live customer service agents. It will reduce your bottom line and help to retain your hard-won customers.

KNOW MORE ABOUT WOLKEN’S KNOWLEDGE BASE

Creating a customer service knowledge base can be time consuming and needs a great strategy in order to manage and maintain knowledge base articles. Additionally, it can take time to create professionally written articles for your knowledge base that have a consistent tone,look and feel. As per a research published by Gartner, some of the key KPIs for Knowledge Centered customer self-service may include:

  • Customer Effort Score
  • Length of Engagement through
  • Customer Satisfaction Score
  • Self-Service Journey Completion
  • Self Service Re-engagement

The mindset of building this central repository should be to build short articles intended to answer specific questions.

3 keys to make your KB an easy to go option for the customers are:

1. Make your knowledge base easy to read

2. Make your knowledge base easy to use

3. Make your customer service knowledge base easy to find

We at Wolken follow the best KB practices defined in the KCS v6 by Consortium for Service Innovation, a non-profit alliance of service organizations. The KCS initiative consists of two components: a tactical discussion on KCS adoption and success, and a strategic discussion about the evolution of KCS and what is next.
Moving from "Knowledge-Centered Support" to "Knowledge-Centered Service".

According to the KCS Academy,

In a nutshell, KCS strives to:

1. Integrate the reuse, improvement, and (if it doesn’t exist) creation of knowledge into the problem solving process

2. Evolve content based on demand and usage

3. Develop a knowledge base of collective experience to date

4. Reward learning, collaboration, sharing, and improving

KCS has evolved into a rich methodology: a set of practices for creating and maintaining knowledge in knowledge-intensive environments. Unlike the traditional add-on process of knowledge engineering, KCS is an integral part of day-to-day operation. KCS becomes the way people solve problems and creates knowledge as a by-product of problem solving.”

By following these practices our clients are able to achieve substantial savings in operating costs while seeing improvements in service levels. They find they can:

1.Solve Cases and Incidents Faster

  • 50 - 60% improved time to resolution
  • 30 - 50% increase in first contact resolution

2.Optimize Use of Resources

  • 70% improved time to proficiency
  • 20 - 35% improved employee retention
  • 20 - 40% improvement in employee satisfaction

3.Enable Web Success

  • Improve customer success and use of self-service
  • Up to 50% case deflection

4.Build Organizational Learning

  • Provide actionable information to product development about customer issues
  • 10% issue reduction due to root cause removal

If well implemented, KCS driven self-service is a great opportunity for revenue growth, service cost reduction while driving customer experience and satisfaction. What more does an organization aspire for!

Authored by Arunkumar Patil, Associate Vice President - Product R &D, Wolken Software