Knowledge Management: How Getting Your Employees to Become in the Know Helps Your Business
Improving customer experiences is a top-ranking priority for almost all businesses. However, many organizations haven’t found ways to accomplish this goal.
In fact, a common misconception is that simply adopting new technology or processes is enough to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Customer experiences are shaped by what organizations do—and don’t do—to help address buyer needs. For example, a business that hasn’t introduced any new products over the past 10 years shouldn’t be surprised in loss of market share when competitors are regularly introducing new products to address evolving buyer expectations.
Whether it be new product development, marketing or customer service, it is the employees who are behind executing these activities. In fact, even activities such as automation require employees to design, execute and update how certain aspects of customer conversations will be automated.
In other words, it is ultimately your employees that determine your success in creating happy customers.
Companies that survive and thrive in today’s market are the ones that understand the importance of employee empowerment. These are businesses that provide their employees with the insights and technology they need to do their jobs—serve customers. To this point, findings from Aberdeen Group’s Smart Customer Service: Four Steps to Long-Lasting Customer Bonds with Omni-Channelstudy shows that on average, employees must use three different applications to find content they need to do their jobs.
This content will vary in shape and form across the business where, for example, a contact center agent might need to find a relevant knowledge base article, whereas a marketer might need web visitation data. Ultimately, Aberdeen research shows that, on average, employees spend 11% of their time seeking information.
The unnecessary time employees spend looking for information costs businesses. This cost comes in the form of unnecessary labor costs resulting from paying employees to look for information, rather than helping customers. It also comes in the form of lost clients and sales opportunities as employees spending time to find insights lengthens handle times, frustrating customers and negatively impacting their satisfaction rates.
The good news, however, is Aberdeen research found that companies using knowledge management to help employees get in the know of vital insights minimize such challenges while maximizing their performance—see Figure 1.
The findings in the above figure validate that knowledge is power, but that power only manifests itself when employees can access the right knowledge at the right time. Knowledge management systems aim to solve this challenge for organizations that implement them well.
Specifically, this technology refers to companies using a centralized repository enabling organizations to identify, capture, access and share numerous types of content (e.g., documents, images, videos and call recordings).
Companies use knowledge management for different purposes, including R&D activities, HR management, and contact-center agent empowerment. In the case of the latter, it helps contact centers capture best practices in resolving specific client issues, provide agents with relevant articles to do their jobs, as well as enhance skills through learning articles available in the knowledge management system.
If you’re not currently using knowledge management within your business activities, you’re likely missing out on opportunities to deliver better customer experiences, reduce costs, and grow revenue. As such, we recommend evaluating if your employees are really ‘in the know’ and consider utilizing knowledge management to empower them in order to ultimately help your business accomplish its goals.
Research Director
Contact Center & Customer Experience Management, Aberdeen Group
Follow: @omerminkara
Learn more on Verint’s 4-part webinar series, “Knowledge is Power” which kicks off on Oct. 13. Register now to secure your spot for all 4 webinars.
The post Knowledge Management: How Getting Your Employees to Become in the Know Helps Your Business appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.
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