Customer Support Software Featured Articles

If you had to rank your customer support efforts today, would they score high or low? If you’re talking to your clients, chances are you would skew in the high range. If you’re being honest about where you might need to shore up your efforts, there’s probably room for improvement. And if you haven’t yet invested in customer support software, you’re likely due for a hard look at your current processes.

One area that may not get as much attention as others is that of knowledge. How much emphasis do you put on knowledge, especially when it comes to your agents? Sure, you want them knowledgeable about the products and services that you offer, but do you also build up their knowledge about the customer base?

A recent Customer Think article focused on this trend of knowledge management. This process of capturing, distributing and effectively using knowledge can help to create the positive customer experience when it’s blended into the customer support strategy. To reach this level, however, you have to empower your employees, as well as your customers. According to Gartner (News - Alert), doing so enables organizations to reduce the time it takes to resolve a problem by as much as 20 to 80 percent.

An internal knowledge base is a powerful tool that offers automated updates, sharing, access and more. Reps don’t have to start from scratch when they’re trying to solve a customer challenge. They can use the knowledge base to search for information that has already been discovered in a previous interaction. Wikis can also be used to share learned solutions and pertinent information regarding a product or feature. This allows customers to use their channel of choice for interaction and those with the best solution can quickly share information.

To get the most out of any knowledge base investment, however, there has to be collaboration. It’s not enough for someone to simply create a knowledge base and fill it with information. Instead, it should be an environment that evolves out of collaboration and shared information. This collaboration should also happen beyond just the customer support teams to ensure all areas of information are captured and correctly represented.

After all, the use of customer support software is a great start to engaging customers in a quality experience. But if agents and customers alike are given access to a knowledge base where they can quickly learn from others, resolution comes much faster and issues are then easily prevented in the future.