How Cognitive Technology Catapults a Knowledge-First Approach for Customer Support

Whether you’ve been in business for fifty years or five, you must have a support team to look after customer issues — no matter how big or tiny they may be. The customer support function has fought its way to become one of the biggest differentiators, leaving behind price, brand name, and many other aspects. A majority of support teams still operate on a case-first model, where support managers spend the better part of their day curbing escalations and SLA breaches. This is a reactive way of dealing with product or service kinks and doesn’t provide the best possible customer experience.

Even worse? Agents end up duplicating efforts for the same issues over and over again. Almost 60–90% of issues support agents receive are ones they’ve seen before.

From Case-First to Knowledge-First

That’s why forward-thinking companies are now adopting a knowledge-first approach to deal with recurring issues and create a sustainable support system. Knowledge-first in its simplest form means creating, reusing, managing, and optimizing knowledge for providing better and timely support. In fact, effective knowledge management has a number of positive impacts on support culture, including:

• Supercharged Agent Productivity: A knowledge-first approach means information is available to your contact center agents or support engineers on the fly, and they don’t waste time asking colleagues what to do.
• Reduced Escalations and SLA Breaches: Escalations and SLA breaches break clients’ trust in your company. The knowledge-first model implements root cause analysis, thus ensuring similar problems don’t arise in the future.
• Minimized Repeat Customer Contact: Ideal knowledge-first support models employ emerging technology that provides rich analytics into customer behavior and knowledge usage. This helps in creating articles and self-service content that keeps the knowledge base fresh and CSAT score high.

You must be wondering, “All this is fine, but how do I implement or bring a knowledge-first culture in my support team?” The answer starts with marrying your support strategy with technology.

Reducing Effort While Gaining Buy-in

With the right technology that is easily scalable and sustainable, you can simplify the work associated with knowledge management and, dare I say, turn it into play for your agents. Contrarily, if your support agents don’t enjoy the knowledge management process or feel that it adds to their work, trust me, they will not adopt a knowledge-first culture. Even if they do once, you won’t be able to sustain it in the long run.

That is where cognitive technology saves the day. It instills a knowledge-first model without the need to rethink the entire workflow. By implementing cognitive tech across your support workflows, you can reduce customer effort, agent effort, and managerial effort.

How Cognitive Technology Helps Instill Knowledge-First Approach

Now that we know about the numerous benefits that a knowledge-first model offers, let’s take a closer look at how cognitive technology can help you reap them.

1. For Knowledge Creation

Cognitive applications like KCS Enabler automate knowledge creation — something that most support agents only carve out time for when they are not buried under high-priority tickets.

How it works: While support agents respond to a user query, AI analyzes the case data to auto-populate knowledge article fields such as title, subject, description, and resolution of the issue on a predefined template. All an agent has to do is click publish, and voila! The Knowledge Base article becomes a part of the enterprise knowledge pool, ready for reuse and review. It’s that simple! Additionally, support agents can easily check if a similar article already exists and even flag, fix, or update it.

It accelerates the whole knowledge creation process and also saves the agents from reinventing the wheel.

Pro Tip: You can gamify the process by creating leaderboards and reward agents to promote knowledge-first culture.

2. For Knowledge Findability and Reuse

There is no point in creating knowledge articles if they remain buried in portals and aren’t available to an agent when needed. Cognitive platforms unify scattered knowledge and provide a 360-degree view of enterprise information, regardless of where it resides — online customer community, documentation, or help center. Applications like Agent Helper expedite the ticket resolving process by surfacing relevant help content as soon as an agent starts working on a ticket.

How it works: Once embedded in your support ecosystem, it uses machine learning to analyze past cases and suggest top related cases, top agents who have worked on similar issues, related articles, and the customers’ journey (views, clicks, searches) on self-service websites to personalize the support experience.

3. For Knowledge Collaboration

In customer support, be it an office setting or remote team, successful collaboration can be the difference between a happy customer or a lifelong brand hater. Cognitive technology makes team collaboration a breeze and eliminates all confusion around support tickets.

How it works: It helps the organization tap into its explicit and tacit knowledge. For the latter, it leverages AI that identifies and recommends the best SMEs. It connects their digital blueprints, including publications, official records, articles, and more to share insights among agents. That helps agents to identify and reach out to the right person at the press of a button.

4. For Knowledge Optimization

When it comes to keeping your knowledge base up-to-date, you need a continuous measure-and-manage approach. The good news is that cognitive platforms come with an in-built insights engine that provides rich analytics into what’s working and what needs your attention.

How it works: Analytical reports, such as articles shared via email, case comments, attached to the case, etc., will help you keep your knowledge base in pristine condition. Additionally, reports such as Content Gap Analysis, Unsuccessful Searches, Searches with No Results, etc., help identify and bridge any knowledge gaps.

Conclusion

Instilling a knowledge-first culture can be tough. With cognitive technology, you can accomplish everything — create, reuse, find, improve, and publish — in a way that becomes a natural part of your existing workflows. Cognitive platforms like SearchUnify, available on AppExchange, can certainly help you. They leverage machine learning and natural language processing to power multiple applications that elevate support and knowledge management.

Check out SearchUnify and other AI-powered solutions on AppExchange that will act as your end-to-end knowledge management solution and catapult intelligent and personalized support.