The following is a guest blog by Mandeep Singh Kwatra, VP, Solutions and Capabilities at Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS). For more information about HGS, visit their website. 

As companies gain a deeper understanding of customers through research and predictive analytics, they will use that information to develop more individualized customer experiences. Today, it’s not enough to have a knowledge base. The best, most insightful business intelligence is developed from a contextual knowledge base that can be used by both agents and customers to predict the right answer based on that particular customer’s data, situation, location, and needs. The end result is faster responses, increased issue resolution, reduced customer effort, and happier customers.

Internet and digital channels have shrunk the world of customer information, and now everything is available at the click of a button. Customer loyalty is as fragile as that button click. Customers want brands to understand what they really need. They want everything personalized for them, at every step of the customer journey—from prepurchase research to complaints or when they are contemplating whether to jump ship. Today’s customers want personalized sales cycle, service queues, and complaints management. This means a knowledge base that employs two key elements:

– First, brand knowledge cannot be dated. It cannot be robotic or a copy paste of a manual or process. Knowledge has to be contextual. It has to be natural and language driven. It has to be how customers like to talk.

– Second, today’s predictive analytics answer to contemporary customer expectations, which are: to get the right answer fast, while also meeting sophisticated personalization criteria.

Contextualized Knowledge Bases

This shift from “content” to “context” requires companies to understand and categorize customers in personalized slots. According to a recent survey by Adobe, more than 60% of online users wanted to know why, what, and how web sites select content personalized for them. Companies need to have their personalization strategies backed by solid, accurate customer data. This is made easy by customers leaving a virtual bread crumb trail on their online journeys for brands to follow. But, the first order of business is to build a contextual knowledge base template that can support personalized customer data. Because customer behavior changes from one situation to another, a contextual database should include customer reactions across a broad spectrum of situations to be comprehensive and accurate. A recent study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of EverString found that marketers most often face the two challenges of ensuring data quality and managing data from a variety of sources (both 47%) in attempting to gain greater insights about customers and prospects.

In terms of reducing customer effort, contextual knowledge base helps with predicting the right answer based on that customer’s data, situation, location, and needs. Customer service can provide faster responses, increased rate of issue resolution, reduced customer effort, and happier customers.

Role of Contextualized Knowledge Bases in Personalization

Contextual knowledge bases support brand efforts for personalization by supplying crucial individual customer data for ad and campaign targeting. The same survey by Adobe found that for 33% of marketers, personalization is the one capability that will be most important to marketing in the future.

When implementing personalization, possessing the right kind of customer data is the most important necessity. You need to know the customer’s:

– Preferred communication platform

– Best time to contact

– Spending patterns

– Purchase plans

– Significant life situations (that can affect spending and purchasing patterns)

– Product preferences

Regular customers expect companies to know their preferences and even new ones think that companies should have some idea of what they’re interested in. Keeping up with these expectations means that companies need to build contextual knowledge bases that are capable of recording and linking intricate customer preferences to their contact database. Knowing the advances in technology, customers have come to expect personalized treatment and customer service by their favored brands, and rightly so. Customers expect brands to understand their need or issue and provide personalized solutions for them. However, data given to them in trust by customers, companies have to ensure it is used responsibly and in a transparent manner.

Contextualized Knowledge Bases and Predictive Analytics

According to the same EverString study, predictive marketers are 2.9x more likely to report revenue growth at rates higher than the industry average and 2.1x more likely to occupy a commanding leadership position in the product/service markets they serve. Predictive analytics is a crucial requirement to ensure that you get the best out of your contextual knowledge base and your personalization efforts are optimized for best results. Use of predictive analytics needs accurate data to plot patterns and predict customer behavior to tell you when a customer will indulge in a certain purchase or when they will begin to research products. Your contextual knowledge base should consist of sufficient customer data from different scenarios for analytics to be fairly accurate in predicting customer shopping patterns.

Also, ensure that your predictive analytics software is processing all available and relevant customer data from all sources. In today’s multi-channel environment, customer data is sourced from multiple contact platforms and so counting in every source is important.

The post Disrupter 5: Contextualized Knowledge Bases for Personalization and Prediction appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Author: Cyndy Edwards, Senior Consultant, COPC Inc. Learn more about COPC Inc. at http://www.copc.com.

Today’s customer fully embraces technology and expects companies to do the same. This is especially true when it comes to providing customer service. Customers are still calling into the contact center to resolve many issues. However, two-thirds of consumers surveyed by Execs In The Know and COPC Inc. utilize multiple channels, including self-service options.

The use of multiple channels is not the whole story. Customers expect an effortless and seamless experience throughout their journey with your organization, with a convenient path to issue resolution. This means that customer engagement must be connected and relevant between your assisted and unassisted (or self-service) channels.

A key component of your self-service channel is having an effective knowledgebase, or the online library that stores and delivers your customer care content. Yes, your self-service program relies on technology to deliver information to your customers. But it is the content, organization, and search functionality within your knowledgebase that will make your self-service program a useful and reliable part of your omnichannel engagement.

Here are seven ways to design, build and maintain a knowledgebase that will meet expectations during any part of the customer journey:

1) Start by establishing a knowledgebase strategy.

If the goal of your knowledgebase is to answer customer questions and help resolve their issues, then you need to make sure you understand your customers’ needs. You can get this information by documenting questions that customers are asking when you are monitoring calls, emails or chats. Make sure to capture questions that customers escalate to Tier 2.

Also, structure your knowledgebase with “simple” in mind. Stick to fewer generalized categories so customers are not confused. Over time as more content is added, there may be opportunities to add section headings or categories. These will become clear as they are needed, so be prepared to grow your knowledgebase organically.

2) Identify and build your knowledgebase team.

While this may seem obvious, an established team with well-defined roles is key to providing relevant content to the knowledgebase, in a timely manner. This team usually includes a content and/or project leader, agents, and content authors. The leader decides how the knowledgebase will be designed and organized, which topics will be covered, and to what extent. Agents can provide suggestions for content development, while authors are those who are both technically competent and in touch with day-to-day customer contact inquiries. Usually a knowledgebase solution takes about three months to implement, after planning is completed, and includes three to four full-time staff.

3) Create an internal and external knowledgebase

Build an external version of your knowledgebase with customer-facing instructions. At the same time, build an internal version with more technical details for use by support staff only. Having two different versions of your knowledgebase allows you to use the internal version to teach new agents how to use the knowledgebase. This training gives them experience with both the detailed internal version, as well as knowing where all the content is located in the external version that the customer is using. In turn, agents can more easily advise customers where to find information in the external version of the knowledgebase.

4) Customers want quick access to information, so provide a robust search capability.

Your knowledgebase should be the fastest customer service channel you manage. Customers want to be in and out and have their solution. Do not require them to register, sign in, or enter a product or case number, as this will slow them down and cause dissatisfaction. Also, your search algorithm should be extremely accurate and automatically provide a few possible answers to each inquiry. Be sure to test your search functionality to ensure key phrases return the correct content. Confusion is one of the major reasons customers abandon and are dissatisfied with a self-service channel, so your top priority is to ensure customers get the right answers to their inquiries.

5) Consider offering a chat option in your knowledgebase.

Chat is a great way to offer on-demand help to your customers. It also provides you an excellent source of valuable feedback regarding both the customer issue and the content they are reading. You should also set up a feedback button on each piece of content for customers to respond whether they found the content useful and/or solved their issue. This information will alert the content owners which articles are helpful and which need to be improved.

6) To increase efficiency, the knowledgebase should be able to learn new questions and answers from the other customer service channels.

To allow customers to ask and suggest new questions, consider connecting your knowledgebase to your multi-channel ticketing software and customer service widgets. Then, once a question is answered by a human, automatically add that question and answer to the knowledgebase. This allows your knowledgebase to provide the same answer automatically to future customers.

7) Analyze usage of the knowledgebase.

This will help identify what customers are using, what they perceive to be the most valuable content, and what content is missing. You can do this by tracking both the most popular pages in the knowledgebase, along with trends in overall usage. You also can review search engine usage. Log all uses of the search engine and generate summary reports that show the most common searches, along with failed search terms. This will tell you both what terms people are using and how your content matches up to their searches.

Not all customer issues can be resolved through a self-service program, but having a robust self-serve system that is continually improving is both cost effective and beneficial to your customer. However, it is essential to have a clear path to issue resolution within your self-service offering and a quick way for a customer to contact a live person if their inquiry is not resolved.

If you would like more information about how to improve the operational performance of both your assisted and self-service channels, go to www.copc.com.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

The post Seven Ways To Ensure Your Customers Actually Use Your Self-Service System appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Today, our customers have everything they need to communicate in the palm of their hand. Mobile brings about a unique and powerful convergence of communication channels — voice, email, chat, social, SMS — in one very portable device. This has a profound impact on how our customers communicate with each other, with the world, and with brands. It creates new challenges for brands to adjust to the protocols, cadence and sheer scale for customer support.

We’ve learned, in the digital age, that it’s no longer enough to publish a toll free number and staff a call center during business hours to provide for the needs of our customers. There are many new communication channels we’ve had to embrace and new skills we’ve had to learn to provide for the needs of our customers, in a social, mobile, 24×7 global marketplace.

At Freshdesk, we look at customer engagement through the lens of what we call The Great Pyramid of Customer Support.

This framework, based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, provides a structure to help organizations assess their support capabilities and determine what to prioritize. It can be particularly useful for determining how to address a new channel. Here we will apply it to mobile support and engagement:

Chaos to Control — When you enter a new channel it’s usually chaos. There is a learning curve on how to best communicate within a channel and how to engage.  The first order of business is usually controlling the chaos: tracking and managing tickets, and delivering a consistent and effective customer experience in the channel. The reality is though that mobile is not really a new channel. It’s a new environment, but it encompasses most of the channels you’re already using. So the key for starting to support mobile is to not treat it as a separate engagement environment. You can start out by continuing to use the channels you support today. Just be present and listen. More important than adding new channels and capabilities is to maintain a single system of record across mobile and any other channels you support, to ensure you have a single view of the customer.

Reactive to Proactive — The newest channels for support have changed the paradigm. For a long time customer support has been a one-to-one interaction. With social media, conversations have moved from one-to-one– email, phone, chat – to many-to-many. On social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook your customers are announcing their desires or problems to the world. Support is no longer about reacting – waiting for the phone to ring. Your customers are taking to social, whether you want to be there or not. Similarly, being proactive in mobile means being there, delivering a native experience. It’s not just about providing access to existing tools like your knowledge base or email. You need to consider the unique qualities of mobile platforms and the habits of mobile users, to make it easy for them to get what they need, at the time and place they need it. This is also where you can insert proactive messaging in your apps to avert issues you know are likely.

Scale — As you learn the rules and idiosyncrasies of a new channel the next challenge is scale. You need to be able to extend the level of support you have on your best channels to the new channels. And, of course, you want to do this without having to hire a large new team. Technology can help here. The caveat is to leverage technology to enhance the experience rather than put more layers between you and your customer. Knowledge bases will enable your customers to find answers themselves, if you make them easy to access. Channels like in-app messaging that feel native to mobile and allow agents to handle multiple tickets at once work well here. And automations can help those agents manage that workload.

Aligning With Business — Once you’ve gotten your tools and processes in place and your mobile support is humming, then you can begin to think more broadly about making an impact across your company. Is your support organization aligned with the goals of your customers and your business? Great customer service has the ability to do much more than solve customer problems. If done right, it can extend the value of the brand and create brand advocates. It can also be your best channel to provide feedback and insights to help guide your company’s plans. Be sure to collect data and setup a feedback loop in line with other support channels, and ensure the connections with other critical parts of your organization. This is also where you should be making sure that the systems and tools in place are working for your team and that they are engaged and happy.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

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