Today’s Service Centers are being asked to deliver a better self-service experience. Ideally, customers will find answers in a self-serve knowledge base and offer feedback on its helpfulness. To really take full advantage of a knowledge base, customers must quickly find what they are searching for. A great search experience motivates customers to make a return visit to the self-serve knowledge base to search, explore and contribute. Over time, the customer experience continues to improve, while support costs maintain steady-state.
Every organization has the potential to create a knowledge base that keeps customers coming back to self-service. Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) provides the practices and processes to help agents understand and capture the customer experience to improve self-service success. KCS practices encourage listening, capturing, sharing and the quick update of knowledge by teams. The practice of capturing customer words, phrases and context in the knowledge article improves search results in the customer self-serve experience. Help from technology is making this even easier.
To build a truly great self-service knowledge base that’s up to date, teams need to be encouraged to share their knowledge often, and to ‘co-create’ the knowledge with the customer involved. To achieve this, leaders need to acknowledge agents, service suppliers and customers for their efforts to add and improve knowledge through feedback. KCS offers leaders an approach that recognizes team and individual contributions toward outcomes. KCS provides clear guidelines for selection, capture and review of goals and measures. Coaches help teams with setting and achieving goals on outcomes such as, ‘happy customers through quick and reliable search experience’.
Results of customer success using self-service can be a powerful motivator when indicators of success are measured and shared. Individuals and teams are encouraged by the results, and they value being recognized for their efforts. As team members become more adept with the practices and see the customer self-serve results, they appreciate a customer view of the value. They are motivated to capture the customer experience and quickly validate the knowledge article through group engagement. To reap the benefits, they publish the articles for use in self-service as soon as possible. Publishing 90% of articles in 90 minutes, or the 90/90 rule is an achievable goal through KCS.
Quest (formerly Dell) is one company that is taking this concept very seriously. They have set a goal to publish 90% of knowledge at the time of, or before the case is closed. This rapid publishing of articles is one factor that has contributed to providing timely content and increased customer success with self-service.
Read more about the Quest story here: Consortium for Service Innovation Quest Story http://www.serviceinnovation.org/quest/
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