By Jeff Weinstein, President and CEO, RightAnswers
The customer experience is more important than ever. When a company offers a great overall experience, customers are:
- Less likely to switch brands
- More likely to buy more products from the company
- More likely to recommend the company
Even more interestingly, the better the customer experience a company provides, the higher its revenue.
Customer experience often revolves around the customer service that is provided by your company. Customer service, in turn, revolves around the knowledge that is available to your service teams and to your customers. Companies would be well-advised to create and maintain the best knowledge possible to enable these synergies.
There are several smart capabilities of knowledge management software that can ensure a superior customer support experience:
1. Knowledge Gamification Achieves Your Business Goals
Companies with an engaged workforce improve business performance by 240% (Gallup, 2014). Gamification is an effective way to motivate employees and change behavior, since personal achievement and peer recognition are strong motivators. Companies using gamification for knowledge management assign points to behaviors they want to promote, such as creating or updating knowledge articles, sharing knowledge with peers, authoring an article that was found helpful by others, participating in social forums and so on.
2. Knowledge Quality Tools Increase the Value and Adoption of Your Knowledge
To assure that all your customer service reps are providing accurate, consistent answers, you want them to use your company knowledge when handling cases. But lack of confidence in your knowledgebase can be a major obstacle to its widespread usage. Conversely, showing that your knowledgebase is filled with high-quality knowledge can go a long way toward its adoption – not to mention, to providing customers with the best possible support that resolves their issues quickly. Knowledge Quality capabilities built into the knowledge management system is an automated way to achieve a high-quality knowledgebase.
3. Knowledge Automation Produces a More Complete Knowledgebase
Not only is it important to maintain high-quality knowledge, but you also want to make sure you have knowledge to answer the questions that arrive. Keeping your knowledge current and relevant on an ongoing basis is a continuous challenge. You want knowledge management software that identifies gaps in your knowledge and alerts you to these gaps.
4. Online Contextual Help Eases Self-Service
The ideal support experience should be as easy and frictionless as possible. And increasingly, people want to quickly find answers on their own. Online contextual help is an enhanced support experience where customers don’t have to navigate out of their current application get answers. Online contextual help recognizes the users and their location, to provide support in the context of what they are doing.
5. Built-in Video Support Expands Your Support Toolkit
The use of video boosts customer service by increasing customer engagement, leading to higher customer satisfaction. What’s more, videos can be a great format to relay knowledge, especially for how-to’s and step-by-step solutions. To enable everyone in your organization to easily find video solutions and attach them to cases, it’s crucial that videos are stored in the same central knowledgebase where customer service reps find all your knowledge.
Knowledge Management Integrated with the CRM
Not only do customers want an easy way to get knowledge – but so do your customer service reps. Your CRM may be lacking in tools that can improve your knowledge and the customer’s experience. Integration with the knowledge management system can solve this problem.
RightAnswers seamlessly integrates with any CRM, enabling reps to search for knowledge and attach knowledge to cases on the same screen, with fewer clicks and less typing – expediting their post-call activities and reducing average speed to answer.
Advanced Technology Simplifies Your Work while Improving the Customer Experience
Choosing a knowledge management vendor that addresses these issues boosts your support while saving your organization time and effort. When selecting knowledge management software, look to a knowledge vendor that offers automated solutions – such as automated knowledge quality tools, out-of-the-box gamification and built-in video creation, to name a few – as well as knowledge services to ensure that you provide frictionless customer experiences through knowledge. 
About RightAnswers
RightAnswers is the #1 provider of cloud-based knowledge management, web and mobile self-service and social knowledge solutions to enhance customer service and IT support. Our 450+ clients around the globe use RightAnswers seamlessly integrated with their CRM, ITSM or other customer service software to deliver stellar support experiences while saving millions of dollars a year.
To learn more visit rightanswers.com