I was in London recently and strolled past a man in Hyde Park exclaiming, “You’ve got to have faith!” to a crowd of onlookers. A cheeky lad yelled back, “Faith? I already got that one. George Michael. Tower Records.” Even the preacher cracked a smile at the sarcastic quip.
I came away with something more profound: that the same word can have radically different meanings depending on the context.
I have spoken to several customer service companies and they all claim to have Knowledge Management (KM). But when I look more closely, what I discover are fragmented knowledge repositories siloed by channel—one for web FAQs, another for phone support, and so on. So customers get a different answer depending on which channel they engage.
If this describes your company, then beware. Customers expect you to know who they are and what they want so you can provide the right answer the first time. In fact, First Contact Resolution (FCR) is the most significant driver of customer satisfaction and knowledge management has the greatest ability to improve FCR. A recent CFI Group study found that 68% of customers who don’t have their issues resolved on first contact are at risk of defection.
On the upside, companies that resolve customers’ issues on first contact benefit from a greater share of wallet, with 94% of customers saying they will buy again from the company and 88% saying they will increase their spending (Harvard Business Review).
How do you get in the group that earns a greater share of the customer’s wallet? Simple: invest in an Enterprise Knowledge Management solution.
Only an Enterprise Knowledge Management solution gives you one consolidated source of knowledge for both agents and customers—and the context of customers' support requests so you can provide personalized, relevant and consistent answers across channels.
A good Enterprise Knowledge Management solution would be able to discern the different meanings of the word “Faith,” just as those onlookers did in Hyde Park. So it could determine whether you were searching for something religious or spiritual versus a British pop album.
That’s something no document or content management system can do because they have only information, not context.
Do your customers and yourself a favor. Invest in an Enterprise Knowledge Management solution like Oracle’s KM solutions to decrease Mean Time to Resolution and increase First Contact Resolution. Then watch your customer satisfaction and loyalty soar!
Please visit our website for more information on Oracle’s Knowledge Management solutions, or register for a CloudWorld near you.