Market-leading brand reputation. Stellar customer service. Low operational costs.
The holy trinity, right?
But how do businesses tick those three most important boxes?
There was a time when a ton of people were needed.
Product experts with the technical knowledge; content specialists able to turn it into plain language; a large team of contact center agents to field customer enquiries.
Today, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the key to providing a slick, paired-down service that simultaneously delivers on all three of those super-important fronts.
Get it right, and businesses are able to create a magic 80/20 mix of automated basic customer service via chatbot, FAQs, self-service and the like, and actual human agent interaction when a more sophisticated issue needs resolving.
Knowledge Management; Natural Language Processing; Machine Learning; Sentiment Analysis: these are the clever (and surprisingly affordable) tools that support that game-changing transformation.
The commercial opportunities – for user businesses and their technology partners – are huge.
As is always the case, picking the right provider is key.
“The ever-increasing volume and complexity of products and solutions on offer means contact center staff need an ever-increasing amount of high-quality and easily-accessible information on hand if they are going to provide the best possible customer service,” says Stin Mattu, Product Marketing Manager at leading global enterprise software provider Upland, whose range of smart, AI-powered Knowledge Management solutions delivers big.
““Customers get frustrated when they are on hold whilst agents search for information. Similarly, they get frustrated when they are given incorrect and inconsistent answers across channels. Businesses need a single source of truth where everyone can go and quickly find the information they need.”
“There is no line now between what is seen as business technology and what is seen as consumer technology. In our daily lives, when we need to know something, we jump on a search engine and we find the answer fast.”
“A contact center agent, a manager, a systems integrator; all have the same expectation. The faster and easier it is for them to find those answers, the more issues they are able to quickly resolve and the more customers they are able to satisfy. That is why a business’s Knowledge Management is so important.”
Indeed, Knowledge Management tools are intrinsic to AI-powered chatbots revolutionising large-scale customer engagement.
Bots are able to process the more basic interactions, such as answering frequently asked questions, thus enabling organisations to rationalise agent headcount or for agents to spend more time on a call.
Crucially, Upland differentiates itself by taking a measured approach.
“Deploying AI in a contact center context is not risk-free,” says Mattu. “We always want to understand the limitations of the technology before we try to take something to market and we’re always thinking about how we can protect our customers from any kind of negativity, especially when it comes to knowledge management.
“The minute you give a customer the wrong piece of information, that’s the moment you have a potential loss. So, we ask our customers: ‘What’s the problem you are trying to solve?’ We seek to understand the customer’s customer and how they are likely to respond to engagement with, for example, a chatbot. Only then do we design a solution that will be most effective.”
“Customer engagement is ultimately always about brand reputation, and you simply have to get that right.”
It’s not just big brands either.
Cloud technology has, of course, empowered smaller and mid-size enterprises to leverage the power of Knowledge Management and AI too.
Also, it’s not hard to demonstrate return on investment.
“Organisations want to reduce call handling time and they want good C-SAT scores,” says Mattu. “Our Knowledge Management products with AI-powered features deliver on both of those aims for contact centers, helping to drive efficiency while improving both, customer and employee experiences”.
“Also, they reduce the need to create content from scratch with which to populate a knowledge base: a process that can be very expensive.
“Enabling all of those things obviously drives value for the business and its shareholders but, more importantly, the customer gets the experience they deserve.”
To learn more about how Upland can help your and your customers’ businesses leverage the power of Knowledge Management, visit Upland Software.
