Resolving Customer Support Challenges With Knowledge Management

Call center agents are on the frontlines of customer support and bear the maximum brunt of customer support challenges, beginning from understanding the customer’s problem to sharing the solution and closing the ticket.

What might begin as minor hiccups may turn into considerable business loss if customer support challenges faced by customers and agents are not evaluated adequately.

Top customer support challenges faced by support teams 

1. Agents are unable to find the right answers to customer queries

• The most frustrating aspect of a customer service job and yet so common is the inability to address the customer’s concern effectively.
• The struggle to maneuver through different organizational documents to find the relevant information intensifies as the amount of active data continually grows and the time to solve the customer problem remains limited.
• Data silos are a huge customer service challenge that renders customer support agents helpless and unable to answer customer queries, resulting in late resolutions and longer average handle times (AHT).    

2. Ticket backlog

•  Ticket backlog is the number of unresolved tickets in a particular period of time. As soon as a customer call ends, the support agent has multiple active calls awaiting their attention. 
• A contact center environment is not easy on customer support teams, with over 70% of agents at the risk of burnout. 
• Burnout leads to confusion at work, stress, and low productivity. Overworked agents take a longer time to answer customer problems. They are often unable to keep up with the speed of incoming call requests, resulting in low CSAT scores for the organization.

3. Angry customers

• The moment things go awry, customers begin to lose their patience. No company, however big, is free from angry customer calls. The real challenge starts when support agents do not have strong call center scripts to rely on 
• An angry customer is already hard to deal with. Any confusion or wrong information from the agent’s side can aggravate the situation. Not only does a company lose a customer but also suffers from the poor brand image that spreads.
• Dealing with angry customer calls is a customer support challenge that cannot be eliminated entirely but how the customer call is handled makes all the difference between a positive brand recall and an unpleasant one. 

4. Handling multiple customers at once 

• It is common in the customer service world to have multiple customer conversations happening simultaneously. 
• The customer service agent has to make sure that all the customers receive quality resolutions instantly.
• In the absence of contextual knowledge, agents are prone to get confused when similar questions come from different customers at once. This can increase the average resolution times, resulting in poor customer service and declining customer satisfaction metrics. 

Overcome all customer support challenges with Knowledge Management

Customer service challenges are inevitable for every business. The key is to take proactive measures to resolve these challenges and reflect on customer journeys to improve customer experiences. Here is how an AI-powered Knowledge Management solution like Knowmax helps overcome diverse CX challenges:

1. Knowledge upkeep for faster information findability 

• The KM platform enables users to create, curate, manage and disseminate all information in a unified place. 
• With an intuitive search feature, the centralized knowledge base acts as a ready reckoner for customer support teams to organize and quickly extract relevant information from a pool of documents.

2. Micro-segmented analytics to record user engagement 

• Helps admins identify unnecessary information in the knowledge base and delete the same
• Identification of the need to add new information timely
• Maintains knowledge relevance, a prerequisite to ensuring quality customer support services & resolution of all customer service challenges

 3. Ticket deflection to self-service channels

• Not every customer query requires the same amount of attention, nor is it efficient for agents to answer repetitive questions. Ticket deflection to self-service knowledge base articles and FAQs is beneficial in a number of ways.
• Reduces customer effort
• Provides agents with instant answers without having to wait after raising a ticket
• Reduces the overall support costs
• With efficient ticket deflection to self-service portals, the amount of support tickets that go to agents reduces, which helps them focus on more critical concerns
• Modules like decision trees and picture guides can be pushed to the chatbots, making it convenient for customers to troubleshoot problems on their own with guided instructions

 4. Workflow automation in the form of Cognitive decision trees

• Quick and convenient access to contextual information makes up for good customer service. The platform can be used to create decision trees without the need for any code. 
• By linking APIs from the backend, these decision trees automatically transfer the customer information, which helps agents to move faster with the resolution process while providing accurate solutions to the customer.
• It reduces the overall time to resolution and improves the first contact resolution rates by equipping customer support executives with the right question they need to ask the customer and allows them to share snippets of additional information with them during the call itself.

5. Concurrent chat for a Chrome extension to handle multiple customer conversations 

• The platform augments an agent’s efficiency to handle multiple customer problems at once with the help of concurrent chat functionality within the chrome extension. 
• The support executives need not interchange tabs and can easily source information from the Knowmax platform by searching for relevant titles or keywords through the floating widget.
• The concurrent chat feature lets agents extract customer details like their name and ID from the CRM platform in the chat window. The agents can easily switch from one customer interaction to another while the SOPs remain intact. 
• It helps them to handle multiple customer queries simultaneously without having to toggle between screens to look for information.

Conclusion 

Having multiple customer support challenges is only natural for a fast-paced business organization. How organizations deal with these challenges marks success apart from failure. The chosen set of solutions should address the fundamental pain points of customer service representatives who shoulder the responsibility of delighting customers. 

Therefore accessing the business dynamics and implementing an efficient knowledge creation and sharing platform is critical to successfully overcoming even the nerve-wracking customer service challenges.