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IR KNOWLEDGE SERIES
The Top Three Myths of Knowledge
Management for Customer Service
(Why KM is Hurting Your Customers,
and What You Can Do About It)
“The definition of insanity is doing the same
thing over and over again and expecting
different results”
– Albert Einstein
The Top Three Myths of Knowledge Management for Customer Service
(Why KM is Hurting Your Customers, and What You Can Do About It)
For years now, the Knowledge Management
industry has been laboring under the
misguided notion that when it comes to
customer and self-service, content (often
in the form of documents) is king. The more
you have, (and the more efficiently you can
index what you have by keyword), the better.
This rather insular notion is at the heart of why
KM is hurting the customer experience for many
organizations. The bottom line is that Customer
Relationship Management (CRM), Content
Management (CMS & ECM) and intelligent search
solutions all get a failing grade when evaluated
against today’s customer and eService challenges.
As a result, many corporate efforts designed to
enhance self and e-Service options often fail the
very people they were designed to help: the end
customers.
Further compounding the problem is the fact
that most of the solutions in the marketplace
apply similarly flawed approaches to the
management and delivery of content for
customer service (usually in the form of
indexed key words sprinkled across multiple
documents). Unfortunately, this often leads to
dissatisfied customers being forced to engage the
organization through higher cost channels, or
worse yet, engage the competition.
How we as an industry came to be where we
are is not surprising really. In a typical fortune
500 company there are hundreds of thousands
of “digital artefacts” representing the internal
“knowledge” of the organization. In addition,
many of these same organizations host thousands
of web pages on both private and public facing
company sites.
A consumer from our perspective is anyone who consumes
or utilizes the information internally or externally
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Typically, this collection of “artefacts” is what is
captured by CRM and ECM solutions, indexed
with search tools and delivered under the guise of
knowledge management. Unfortunately, many of
these artefacts have little benefit to the individual
who is attempting to answer a question. It’s likely
not a surprise for those in the industry to hear that
when in inquiry mode, customers want answers, not
documents to search through, or lists of possible
answers that may or may not help them.
Customers want answers, not
documents to search through,
or lists of possible answers that
may or may not help
The use of most CRM, ECM or CMS technologies
to deliver customer self-service or eService delivers
results from a content-centric, versus consumer
centric1 point-of-view. Under this paradigm, the
delivery of information ceases to be all about the
customer, and becomes all about the content.
The reality is that at the moment, the KM industry
is boiling the proverbial ocean, and approaching
the problem from the wrong vantage point. In
a customer service or self-service scenario, most
requisite knowledge can be effectively encapsulated
into a much smaller digital footprint by focusing on the
nature of the question, not the nature of the answer.
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The Top Three Myths of Knowledge Management for Customer Service
(Why KM is Hurting Your Customers, and What You Can Do About It)
Customers Want Answers, Not Documents
By approaching the problem from the consumer
perspective (i.e. I want short, succinct answers to
my questions, not documents to search through),
we drive up engagement and satisfaction, drive
down delivery costs and satisfy the customer in
the channel they chose to engage us in – thereby
building trust.
Here are the Top Three Myths of Knowledge
Management as they relate to customer service.
1. Existing content captured in ECM and CMS systems is valuable to customers
2. Content can be applied readily to growing external and internal customer channels
3. Search-based paradigms are the best ways to connect customers to answers
In the end this does not mean that your knowledge
management initiatives are dead, or that you need
to toss out existing products. It does however mean
that you need to relieve the customer from the
complexity of your underlying content and deliver
a single answer to their question. This capability
underscores the key requirement of customer
centric service, particularly in today’s rapidly
expanding SCRM environment.
The KM industry is boiling
the proverbial ocean,
approaching the problem
from the wrong vantage point
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The Top Three Myths of Knowledge Management for Customer Service
(Why KM is Hurting Your Customers, and What You Can Do About It)
Myth #1:
The “Value” of Existing Content
As Freek Vermeulen noted in a recent blog
entry, “What we sort of forgot in the torrent of
“knowledge euphoria” was that this stuff can also
come at a cost. The cost of actually finding it in t
he jungle of corporate databases.”2
In a typical fortune 500 environment, the
combination of electronic documents plus
web site pages adds up to a staggering, largely
unmanageable amount of content. Consider, for
example, that the average number of customerfacing web pages managed by companies in the
financial services sector averages at more than
11,000 and in telecommunications, that number
climbs to 64,000! Typically, this is only a portion
of the content managed, indexed and provided to
customers as a means of answering their questions.
Frustrating Experience
This is why, as a customer, a quick attempt to find
information for “cancelling a check” on leading
financial services sites brings back 72 results in
one, 48 in another and 40 from another without
an appropriate relevant answer in the first several
pages of results – not exactly an ideal customer
experience. This approach to customer self- service
drives down consumer productivity and is
counterproductive to everything self-service
should stand for.
Many major corporations can
satisfy the needs of both their
customers and agents with
between 300-700 pieces of
content, not 30,000-70,000
The problem becomes even more vexing when
we add this enormous pile of content to internal
facing electronic repositories that are typically used
to augment content for internal teams. Professors
Martine Haas from The Wharton School and
Morten Hansen from INSEAD recently posted an
article entitled “Does Knowledge Deliver on its
Promises”.3 In this article they outlined a study on
teams in a consulting firm that were using expert
knowledge repositories to compete on bids for new
business contracts (interestingly, many internal
customer service professionals, including call
center, chat and email agents depend on similar
internal knowledge content to educate and deliver
answers). The advice provided from this use
case research?
“Shut down your expensive document databases;
they tend to do more harm than good. They are
a nuisance, impossible to navigate, and you can’t
really store anything meaningful in them anyway.”
Most organizations currently have tens, if not
hundreds of thousands of pieces of information,
comprised of both relevant and irrelevant
electronic content. These same organizations are
struggling to leverage these expansive content
repositories as a means of supporting customer
and service agent productivity.
One of the key issues is that the answers to common
customer and service agent questions are also
buried in the content (where multiple answers to
key questions arise but force the content consumer
to select and scan to uncover it). In working with
our customers, we often find that many major
corporations can satisfy the needs of both their
customers and agents with between 300 to 700
pieces of content at the most, not 30,000 to 70,000.
Many organizations applying solutions to this
problem turn to components of their CRM,
CMS/ECM or Intelligent Search products to
fundamentally categorize and index this growing
content. These hundreds of thousands of
documents are not effective in delivering the
right answer through customer service channels.
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3
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/vermeulen/2009/03/when-knowledge-management-hurt.html
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1841
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The Top Three Myths of Knowledge Management for Customer Service
(Why KM is Hurting Your Customers, and What You Can Do About It)
Myth #2:
Content can be Applied Readily
to Growing Channels
In many cases, the content being captured and
delivered to an inquiring customer has little to no
relevance to that consumer, or to the channel they
choose to utilize. The challenge with the everexpanding communication landscape is that each
channel has unique needs for content delivery.
Is it effective, or even practical, to deliver
information via mobile phone, or social media
forums in the same way you would in a call center,
or email platform? Although the latest “business
process document for policy cancellation” is
fascinating reading, a customer asking “How do I
cancel a policy” likely does not want to read your
five page PDF outlining the business processes on
their cell phone.
Let’s further examine the “cancel a policy” example
from a multi-channel viewpoint:
• In a call center agent’s hands, this knowledge
might include the “answer” that also offers
procedures for client retention (including
special offers) which would not be included
in the self-service area, and certainly not in the
original document.
• For the same customer asking this question on
a web site, the “answer” may be an escalation to a specialty group to retain the customer (see item 1 above) using click-to-call or chat.
• For the same customer asking this question via
Mobile or SMS, the answer may be an
immediate call back to the customer, or an
abridged answer with external links to
additional content.
In our analysis the answers to customer questions
all may share a core message; however each should
be effectively purposed for the channel into which
it is delivered. If you are intent on delivering a truly
customer-centric self-service and eService strategy,
the requirement is to extract the “answers” (and
not the content).
It is not about the 10,000 electronic documents that
might have relevancy, but the 300 specific answers
within the content that actually do. Re-purposing
these answers for the selected channel they are
delivered through can be a quick and effective
method of handling over 90% of all incoming
questions – whether through web self-service,
contact center (voice, email and chat) or newer
mobile and social media channels.
A customer does not likely
want to read your 5-page PDF
on business processes while
on their cell phone
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The Top Three Myths of Knowledge Management for Customer Service
(Why KM is Hurting Your Customers, and What You Can Do About It)
Myth #3:
Search is the Best Way to
Connect Customers to Answers
What is it that the consumer is looking for at the
end of the day? Simply put, they want answers
to their questions. In most cases by the time a
consumer reaches your web site or call center
they are goal-oriented, not research-oriented.
In a recent Jupiter study related to the web, a lack
of accuracy and relevancy in search results continue
to be the main issue for users in a self-service
environment. In fact, 44% stated that search could
not understand their real questions and 35% said
the results were unrelated to the question.4
Most consumers are doing a
lot more “searching” than
“finding” when trying to self-serve
What should be most concerning is that 87% of
site visitors have left a web site when they could
not find the information they sought. Four of the
five top reasons for exiting a site prematurely are
related to an inability to find information. Clearly,
most consumers are doing a lot more “searching”
than “finding”, particularly when trying to self-serve
online. When this happens there are two negative
outcomes, assuming in the best case that this is a
captive consumer (one who cannot actively switch
their service);
1. They escalate immediately to the most expensive channels (voice, chat, email), and
2. They will not willingly return to lower cost channels, the trust is lost.
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Jupiter (Forrester) 2008 study on web self-service
The result is similar for internal contact center
agents who have even less freedom. If knowledge
tools fail to deliver the required information, the
results are:
1. Increases in average handling time (AHT)
2. Decreases in first contact resolution (FCR)
3. Increases in the volume of escalation
4. Decreases in overall customer satisfaction
It’s about the Questions, NOT the Content
The challenge therefore for CRM, ECM and
Intelligent Search solutions is that they focus on
the content, not the questions asked. All of the
content made available is fundamentally indexed
based on the way the author developed the content,
not specifically the way the consumer was trying to
access the content.
For example, an author may develop content on
how a payment is stopped. A customer may simply
want to know how to cancel a pre-authorized debit
or cancel a check. In this scenario, the customer
asking these questions is not going to be presented
with the correct answer. This is a fundamental gap
that even the best content-focused, search-based
solution cannot overcome.
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The Top Three Myths of Knowledge Management for Customer Service
(Why KM is Hurting Your Customers, and What You Can Do About It)
So What is the “Answer”?
The answer lies in understanding the question.
The challenges that we see when deploying
traditional solutions to deliver knowledge-based
customer service lies squarely with their focus on
the content. Such an approach invariably results in
knowledge that:
• Contains a depth that includes many possible answers (compound or complex content)
• Requires the consumer to scan and select the appropriate content (tedious self-discovery)
• Is not purposed for any particular delivery channel (broad context)
• Provides accessibility based on search terms in content, not the nature of the questions
Tools applied for CRM, KM, CMS/ECM and
intelligent search do not need to be replaced
necessarily, they obviously have purpose and
value across the enterprise. But when it comes to
delivering “answers to questions” in a self-service or
e-Service environment, they simply approach the
problem in an ineffective manner. As such, these
technologies must be augmented with solutions
that address the problem from a customer centric
point of view. The appropriate solution:
• Provides an answer to the question asked
• Delivers a single approved answer
• Is purposed for the channel it is requested within (Web, Voice Agent, Mobile, SCRM)
• Understands the many ways the question can
be asked and relate this to the correct answer
The bottom line is that consumer questions
can be answered quickly and effectively when
the premise for information delivery is based
on the way customers ask questions.
In the end it’s about the questions,
not the answers.
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The Top Three Myths of Knowledge Management for Customer Service
(Why KM is Hurting Your Customers, and What You Can Do About It)
For More Information
For more information on cost effective ways to enhance
the customer experience at your organization contact:
Mike Hennessy
IntelliResponse
[email protected]
About IntelliResponse
IntelliResponse enhances the multi-channel customer experience for
businesses and educational institutions via its Instant Answer Agent,
a question-and-answer software platform that allows web site visitors
and service agents to ask questions in natural language, and get the
“One Right Answer”, regardless of the hundreds of ways the question
may be asked.
This industry leading On Demand software platform is used by both
consumers and contact center agents. With more than 200 live,
customer- facing implementations answering 50 million+ questions
with one right answer, IntelliResponse is the gold standard in first line
customer experience management.
Some of the world’s most recognized corporate brands and higher
education institutions trust their customer experience management needs
to IntelliResponse - including ING Direct, TD Canada Trust, Scotiabank,
Penn State University, The Ohio State University, University of British
Columbia and Harvard University Extension School.
Copyright © 2010, IntelliResponse Systems Inc. All rights reserved.
The trademarks identified herein are the trademarks or registered
trademarks of IntelliResponse Systems Inc. or other third party.
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