Call centers today are designed to do more than handle customer queries. They provide added value to organisations, using data to check the market pulse and provide good metrics. Therefore, it is essential to understand how these metrics can be analysed and improved as they can directly affect a business’s profit margins.
Call center metrics can be improved using knowledge management.
Knowledge management has been defined as organising, capturing, storing, preserving, and making available for re-use of an organisation’s information assets. Knowledge management focuses on improving a company’s knowledge base by improving how it uses its information assets to create value for itself, its partners, and customers.
In simple terms, Knowledge management enables an organisation to achieve success by capturing and sharing information that may lead to better customer service, staff satisfaction, and business growth.
This article lists the various aspects of how knowledge management can help improve your support agent KPIs.
Common KPI challenges that support agents face
It’s easy to get caught up in the metrics, but it’s important to remember that you’re working to create a better customer experience at the end of the day. The metrics are just a means to an end.
The metric that makes sense for one brand might not make sense for another. Therefore a lot of study goes into finding the right metrics. For brands and agencies to succeed with KPIs, it’s essential to take time before diving into any projects to think critically about which metrics make sense for their goals and requires a lot of operational costs.
How Knowledge management can help in improving support agent KPIs.
1. Single source of truth
As a single source of truth, knowledge management is a tool that helps businesses to maintain transparency and avoid extra costs, errors, and time wastage. This is a system that has been adopted by many companies to streamline their operations, capturing and delivering consistent data across departments. This ultimately reduces the chance of human error or conflicting reports, as all uploaded data will reflect the same across systems.
It also makes communication between departments easier since they all work with the same document set. This can help eliminate information gaps in the organisation and allows improvement in the support agent KPIs. There’s no need to wait for other people to get back to you with the information you need; when you have access to all the data at a single, accessible source.
2. Single sign-on access
Whether you’re using a physical or electronic filing system, there’s no denying that the most effective way to store your company’s information is to have it all in one place. But a single repository of information shouldn’t mean that all data is freely shared across people on the network – as this poses a risk to the security of the information on more sensitive documents. Most knowledge management systems work to gather as much data as possible, but it’s also important that relevant, sensitive information is only shared with the people who require access to it to begin with.
A knowledge management system solves this issue by providing data on the basis of the person signing in, restricting, or granting access as per their permission or clearance for the same. Not only does this make it easy for people to access the information they need, whether they’re employees or business partners – it also keeps a transparent record of each individual’s activity on the database for reference and compliance.
3. Aids in ticket deflection
Service, both leading up to and after-sales, is a vital part of the customer experience and is a major source of dissatisfaction when badly implemented. Introducing support tools at every phase of the customer journey can lower operating costs, improve service quality and increase sales, all while improving other customer service metrics.
While the human element cannot be replaced in customer service, there are ways to assist agents with their work and make them more efficient. For example, knowledge management systems are information repositories that store information about customers, products, services, and common issues or complaints. This information can then be disbursed via informative content, such as FAQs or chatbots on apps and websites.
The more comprehensive and detailed your knowledge management is, the better informed your FAQs and chatbots are, allowing customers to solve their problems without raising a ticket and engaging an agent. This, in turn, helps improve the faster resolution rate, which is also a support agent KPI.
This is a scalable solution that grows with time and uses, adding more data constantly and better arming your company to foresee trends, potential problem areas, and possible solutions.
4. Mistake-proof solutions
The use of knowledge management has helped many organisations achieve higher efficiency & improve the KPIs of their support agents. The Knowledge management system follows a set process that eliminates human error and provides a systematic way to transfer and approve data, with a clearly defined interactive decision tree ensuring errors are at an absolute minimum.
Picture this – a sales team closes an order and awaits confirmation from their finance team that payment has been made before shipping the product out. Due to an error or miscommunication, the invoice clearance doesn’t reach the sales team – delaying product dispatch through no fault of the customer. Knowledge management solutions eliminate errors like these, automating the flow of information between departments via decision trees, ensuring the right data reaches the right departments when it has to – giving you a mistake-proof solution.
This structured process allows for faster decision-making and efficient problem-solving because all information is already organised in one place and instantly available to departments when required.
5. CRM integration
Any business that wants to better serve its customers will find itself in need of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution to centralise customer information and data. When the business also wants to provide its employees with additional support from an internal knowledge base, it is important for the two systems to be able to communicate with each other.
Integration between customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management systems allows for efficient customer service, preventing delays in accessing solutions by bringing information together from different sources in one place.
This can be especially useful for your customer service department, which may need to answer many of the same questions repeatedly. With the ability to pull up these resources from within the CRM, employees will be able to respond more quickly, efficiently, and accurately, which translates into happier customers. The most common queries are compiled into an FAQ list and database, allowing your CRM tools to quickly access this information and communicate it with customers instantly.
Knowledge management portal and CRM integration can support you as a business by increasing overall productivity as well. By enabling your employees to access company information directly from the CRM, they will spend less time searching for solutions outside of your knowledge base, freeing up their time to pursue more important tasks instead.
Your customers are sure to appreciate receiving timely and accurate responses to their enquiries, which will help you build lasting relationships with them over time.
Conclusion
“It’s all about the customer,” right? That’s the golden rule in customer service preached by greats like Fred Reichheld and Peter Drucker.
Yet, when it comes to measuring the value of customer service—and the impact of knowledge management on those metrics—many businesses are still catching up with their peers. For example, a recent study showed that only 13 percent of brands measure their customer service contact center performance.
The problem is that many customer service contact center teams are locked into rigid operating methods & old KBs like Sharepoint knowledge base. The KPIs they use to define success reflect this rigidity: number of calls handled per hour, average hold time before a customer reaches an agent, and other numbers that can feel impersonal and even frustrating to customers. The idea is that the metrics will funnel agents into action so they can quickly address a critical need—but in reality, agents may feel like they’re just a cog in a machine.
However, advances in knowledge management software have allowed companies to view their customer service contact center as a place where employees can help customers meet their immediate needs and solve problems they might not even know yet! The rise of knowledge management is based on the idea that people are at the heart of great customer experiences—not cold statistics.