When you go to the movies, do you ever want to yell at the screen — things like “No, it’s a trap!” or “Look behind you!”? Then you’ll know how I felt when I read the Forrester and KMWorld research advocating a “customer-activated enterprise,” where every employee leverages the voice of the customer in every decision.

• Employees really want to engage customers. “That’s great!”
• Firms are constraining employees’ use of insight. “Oh, no! Why???”
• Firms don’t have the ability to analyze customer needs. “What a missed opportunity!”

My reaction probably stems from the fact that RightAnswers is a very collaborative place. And we’re doing our part in helping our customers be more collaborative as well, and enabling them to better understand the 360-degree view of the Voice of the Customer as it relates to all channels of support.

We do this by letting our customers create an Enterprise Knowledge Hub that provides constant and dynamic feedback to anyone who wants to know about issues customers are having, captured through all their channels (web, social, phone, etc.), and what new solutions and knowledge are being made available.

Our platform provides our customers with a model they use for many other areas of interaction. What often starts out as a Call Center Knowledge Hub quickly becomes an Enterprise Knowledge Hub used by Field Service, Product Management, Development, Sales and Marketing.

There’s a lot of functionality that goes along with this. Using the Enterprise Knowledge Hub, people from all departments access the knowledge used for service and support, and displays all results in a consolidated view, no matter where the knowledge resides. And everyone can add solutions to the knowledge base. So for example, if someone in R&D finds a workaround to a known issue, s/he can add it as a solution in the knowledge base. In this way, knowledge that agents will need (but don’t even know about yet!) is in the knowledge base before the customer calls, speeding the time-to-resolution.

This is in keeping with KCS principles, which advocates that everyone should be involved in the knowledge creation process, and that the knowledge article should be created as soon as the need arises.

We realized that when everyone across the organization has access to support knowledge, people can serve customers better. Support can be more proactive because you can anticipate problems based on past customer issues. Product Management can analyze the knowledge base to discover common customer issues and fix them in the development cycle, thereby eliminating the issue in the first place and improving the customer’s overall experience. Even Marketing can mine the knowledge base analytics to better understand customer needs and promote the product accordingly.

In other words, for ultimate productivity, support knowledge should be created and the knowledge base analyzed not just by the Support team, but shared across the enterprise to improve every aspect of your product and to serve your customers better.

Read more takeaways from the Forrester research on the customer-activated enterprise.

Author: Simon Yelsky