It’s easiest for customers when they can access the information they need, through the channel they prefer. Whether that’s a chatbot, online FAQs or a conversation with an agent over the phone or in store, it’s the quality of information available that makes all the difference to providing effortless and consistent customer experiences.

In our experience, we’ve found a few things are key to optimising the quality of information:

Embed an effective business model to achieving quality in the long term

We say knowledge is the “collective wisdom” of your organisation, and needs to be kept up to date with new understanding and best ways of doing things. Knowledge management isn’t a project – it’s an on-going business commitment that needs to be supported by the right governance and processes.

Replicate the richness of agent conversation

Agents get the benefit of direct customer feedback every day to help them have effective conversations with customers. Leveraging your best agents’ expertise will create trusted knowledge content that is easy for customers to understand, answers customer queries completely, and helps share best practice internally.

Focus on user experience

For both your customers and your agents. Whilst we find it common place to ensure web assets deliver a great customerexperience, it’s just as important for internal knowledge basesas agents are using them all day, every day. We find internal usage sky-rockets when the knowledge base is intuitive to them, looks good and is filled with photos and diagrams, and contains the information they find most valuable.

Focus on continual improvement

Projects to get knowledge up to date and complete can feel unwieldy and take too long to deliver real value. We’ve found it best to just complete enough knowledge to show internal staff and customers what’s planned and then embed continuous improvement practices to quickly add and improve knowledge as required.

Know the ROI of your investment in knowledge management

On-going investment in people and systems is required to maximise value. We’ve found it’s important to measure this value on an on-going basis (typically through avoided customer calls / store visits and reduced worktime), and ensure that future initiatives are prioritised based on their incremental ROI.

Sue is a Certified Customer Experience Practitioner (CCXP) and director of Connections Ltd. Connections work with their clients to build internal capability in knowledge management practices and customer experience delivery. They help embed best practice approaches to help teams deliver results more quickly and ensure sustainable results for the long term.