By now, your organization has likely made the leap from telephone-centric customer service to multi- or even omnichannel service. But the job doesn’t end with deploying systems that enable your employees and customers to interact. There’s also the need to deliver smart engagement.
What exactly is “smart engagement?” Simply stated, it’s the ability to provide your customers with quick, personalized, contextual experiences seamlessly across all communications channels. Doing so depends, in large part, on your ability to provide employees with the information they need to deliver service effectively—as well as make the right information available to customers via self-service channels.
Driving Better Engagement
Although the challenge sounds simple enough, it can actually be a moving target, since products, services, and customer wants and needs—even the customer base itself—evolve continuously. How can you help ensure that everyone is getting the best information for the request or inquiry at hand—and that the information remains fresh and appropriate over time?
Many organizations are addressing this customer service imperative by leveraging knowledge management to unite information and experience in their support operations. Knowledge management solutions can enable quick access to the best information. They can also help deliver smart engagement by allowing you to track and analyze what knowledge is used, when and for whom. With this insight, you can create a core picture of where your business can improve and evolve.
Extending the Benefits of CRM
When paired with CRM systems, knowledge management can provide your organization with critical information, such as insight into key searches and topics navigated in a knowledge domain. This offers visibility into the types of questions, needs, issues and ideas that users (and customers) have—providing useful ways for your organization to be “seriously smart” and rapidly respond to opportunities and improvements.
CRM systems using knowledge management can also provide an assessment of the top content resources used by customers. This information can indicate which products and services are of the greatest interest.
In fact, some of the most effective knowledge systems can correlate the top inquiries and content resources with key service drivers, such as call types, Web sessions and escalations, to show where and how knowledge can be further enhanced and expanded to drive better future service experiences.
Delivering More Personalized, Predictive Service
Ultimately, seriously smart organizations can develop the capability to extrapolate and predict emerging trends and issues through ongoing, dynamic analysis of knowledge requests, so they can provide an ever-closer match of knowledge response to the user’s evolving context.
As a result, they can provide online customers with more predictive responses in websites and applications. They can match customer needs and show the path forward, even as customers take the first few steps in defining their interests and requests. Effective analysis and processing of the data from knowledge management tools and reporting can be essential in this predictive development.
Taking a strategic approach to the curation and consumption of knowledge yields Actionable Intelligence®—offering organizations vital insights to innovate and drive improved outcomes, and the agility to best support customer and employee needs, as well as compliance and regulatory requirements.
Empowering Employees with Information
Knowledge management can support smarter answers, improved decisions and better outcomes, not just for the customer, but for your employees as well. It helps put intelligence at your employees’ fingertips in the context of the task in hand to drive improved first-contact resolution, faster speed to answer, and more complete, accurate and contextual responses.
By analyzing how and when employees and customers use knowledge, your organization can gain the insights needed to optimize the knowledge base and the customer experience itself. This visibility can help you capitalize on every employee and every customer touch point to grow and enhance knowledge for continuous improvement in customer experience and to heighten true customer and employee engagement.
Customer service organizations are always on the lookout for solutions to help them reduce training, provide consistent service, enable customers to “self-serve” and solve their own problems, and improve the entire service process. Knowledge management, especially when paired with your CRM system, can help you do all these things simultaneously — the ultimate win-win! 
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