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How to Boost CX with Next-Gen Knowledge Management

Contributed article by Manpreet Chawla

What is the meaning of customer experience?

Customer experience is customers' overall impression of their interaction with your company or brand.

The customer experience can be defined as each customer interaction with your company, from browsing your website to contacting customer service to receiving the purchased product or service. Everything you do impacts your customers' perceptions and their decision to return or not. Thus, providing a positive customer experience is critical to your success.

Any firm must prioritize providing a positive customer experience. Customers will return and leave favorable evaluations if they have a positive experience, reducing customer complaints and returns friction.

Here are some advantages of providing excellent customer service: 

• improved customer retention
• consumer satisfaction has improved
• positive evaluations and recommendations, as well as superior word-of-mouth marketing 

Improved customer experience benefits all company models: 

• Subscription firms may enhance retention and minimize churn.
• eCommerce marketplaces can promote repeat business and decrease returns.
• Service sectors can gain recommendations and reduce complaints. 

It is a daring thing to do to conceive of a firm that does not profit from excellent customer service. Customer experience management is about how customers feel when engaging with a brand, not merely how they perceive their experience with a brand or the activities a firm does. Every time customers visit a company's website, contact customer service, or see ads online, their perception of the brand changes — preferably for the better. 

Companies can improve customer loyalty by identifying CEM (Customer Experience Management) metrics and implementing a customer experience management strategy. 

Some ways to boost CX through the use of Knowledge Management for CX

In addition to their work behind the scenes, delivering information to self-serve customers or agents who can answer complex customer questions, AI-infused knowledge management technologies for CX can bring quick, tangible results. 

They work immediately on improving the customer experience (CX) in call centers, self-service, and back-office channels.

1. Unified Knowledge base   

The corporate knowledge base is a massive pool of data for many firms that is poorly managed, difficult to update, and too complicated to help customer experience in any meaningful way. 

What if there was a method to pull just the correct data from that pool whenever consumers and staff needed it—a kind of drip irrigation system, continually watering self-service and assisted-service encounters with actionable, relevant, and up-to-date data?

2. Accurate Knowledge  

AI-enhanced knowledge management platforms for CX can get precisely the information clients and agents require from the knowledge pool. 

They are constructed with millions of contextual connections that are part of an AI-infused KM system's brain, allowing them to anticipate what customers are trying to do and offer the appropriate response, often before the client even asks the queries. Using everyday language, they can help your agents and customers find current information.

The new technologies function effectively for a global automaker that needs consistent, reliable information readily available to customers in self-service mode, as part of an advisor-assisted engagement in the contact center or retail store employees. 

In addition, the business sought to improve contact advisor training and onboarding, increase call and email diversion to self-service when customers chose it, and keep dealerships across Europe up to date with more complicated products and services. Thanks to new-age knowledge management, customers and employees may now easily find and share knowledge.

3. Natural Language Processing enables quick search  

For many businesses, the corporate knowledge base is a large pool of poorly managed data, difficult to update, and too complicated to benefit customers in any meaningful sense. What if there was a way to pull only the correct data from that pool whenever customers and employees needed it—a drip irrigation system that kept self-service and assisted-service encounters irrigated with actionable, relevant, and up-to-date data? 

Using AI, knowledge management for customer experience can extract the exact information clients and agents need from the knowledge pool. They are built with millions of contextual connections that are part of the brain of an AI-infused knowledge management system, allowing them to anticipate what clients are trying to do and respond appropriately, often before the client even asks the questions. They can use ordinary language to assist your agents and clients find current information.

The new technologies are ideal for this, new-age KMS softwares can be used as age old SharePoint alternative for this to be consistent, trustworthy information to be immediately available to customers in self-service mode, as part of an advisor-assisted engagement in a contact center, or by retail store workers.

Furthermore, the company wanted to improve contact advisor training and onboarding, increase call and email diversion to self-service when customers requested it, and keep dealerships across Europe up to date with more complex products and services.  

4. Enabling customers  

Staff employees may effortlessly generate, submit, and approve the information to the knowledge base using a simple, automated email protocol. Approvers of content can publish it in two clicks, and the Knowledge management for CX systems will automatically link it to other relevant documents and prioritize it with additional knowledge base information. 

Customers may automatically find the exact answers they need online by searching content using natural language questions.

5. Less dependency on IT staff  

Knowledge management for CX may assist organizations in combining tacit, tribal knowledge that is widely spread and scattered across the business and giving answers more quickly and clearly—improving organizational velocity to keep up with change.

Artificial intelligence is being infused into today's next-generation knowledge management solutions. This integrates cognition into the knowledge platform, eliminating the need for manual idea labeling and linkage. Without any administrative or IT effort, cognitive search recognizes what information is being searched right away. This improves usability while also increasing knowledge value. 

Customers are directed to the correct contact mode by knowledge-infused interactive decision trees incorporated in brilliant contact forms. This has been immensely helpful in relieving agents of high inbound call volumes and reducing consumer frustration caused by long call hold periods. Customers can narrow down to the specific channel by selecting what they need assistance with. As users continue to fill out the form, the experience gets more personalized to their needs, automatically and contextually providing more detailed suggestions based on their selections.

Organizations can change the flow, pathways, and consequences without involving IT using a simple graphical editor. They can adapt and alter to inbound needs or strategic business decisions on an hourly or as-needed basis.

6. Easy employee onboarding  

The cognitive engine is at the heart of next-generation knowledge management, allowing customers or agents to search for answers using their terms. This enables the changing workforce to adjust quickly to new needs, even if training time or ability is restricted.

For instance, if a customer searches for a "quicker way to mow a lawn," the system recognizes that the consumer wants to change the term, length, or ways to mow a lawn without the requirement for an administrator to teach the system or manually link or tag such phrases. It also groups related content around what the user is doing, predicts the following query, and allows the client to continue without searching again. 

This enables quick and successful cross-skill or multi-skill agent development and workers new to working in a contact center, allowing them access to a broader range of topics without requiring substantial past knowledge. One of our customers redeployed and multi-skill their agents in just two days, relying on the system to provide these freshly trained agents with the knowledge they needed to execute their tasks.

7. Ensuring employee engagement  

With remote work becoming the norm, relying on digital communication tools rather than huddles, team meetings, or stand-ups is essential, as is the ability to push changes and track uptake successfully.

Organizations can use knowledge to quickly publish change notifications and focus messaging to specific teams as needed. At the start of a shift or during their transition, agents can see how many outstanding products are and what they need to consume. Managers can measure consumption to see if something has been read and understood, or if it has been read but not comprehended, and then decide on suitable follow-up actions, such as training or guidance.

Conclusion
Change is difficult, as the adage goes. The past years have been extremely challenging for customers, agents, and supervisors. A next-generation knowledge management system guarantees that the context that informs and guides support processes and interactions is agile and fluid, allowing organizations to keep up with the changing tides while still providing excellent service. 

Comprehensive knowledge analytics help firms identify knowledge gaps and determine the detailed information they require based on agent feedback and knowledge gap reporting. This gives an organization the best of both worlds in terms of extending its knowledge base meaningfully by combining crowdsourced information and analytics.

Modern commercial communication and collaboration solutions are sometimes constrained in their ability to integrate the most up-to-date popular features, typically following consumer-driven trends.

In reality, following the success of consumer apps like Slack and WhatsApp, we also witness the emergence of "corporate chat." Organizations exploring the use of new communication and collaboration platforms must also outline their knowledge management product strategy.

Because today's dialogues are tomorrow's corporate information, a solution that fails to capture and archive these communications as they occur will result in the corporate knowledge being lost forever.