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Customer service teams encounter significant obstacles due to knowledge silos, leading to inefficiencies and sub-par customer experiences. Providing systematic and seamless support becomes challenging when knowledge and expertise are confined to specific teams or departments.
Tearing down these silos is essential to providing outstanding customer service. You can encourage knowledge sharing, teamwork, and cross-team communication for better customer experience (CX) results.
In this blog post, we will discuss seven steps that can help customer support teams to overcome knowledge silos and maximize the collective knowledge and expertise within your organization.
Table of contents
7 Steps to Smash Knowledge Silos Between Customer Support Teams
1. Capture Knowledge
Think of it as a treasure hunt where you are looking for valuable knowledge from multiple PDFs, spreadsheets and documents spread across departments and teams. And capturing the relevant information, insights and updates into a uniform knowledge base would mean winning the hunt in time.
A uniform knowledge base could be a drive folder, project management tool or a dedicated knowledge management tool, depending on your requirements and preferences.
Capturing the knowledge from multiple sources of truth and collating it under a single roof is the crucial first step to eliminating knowledge silos, redundancies and miscommunication.
2. Declutter Knowledge
A centralized knowledge base with inordinate amounts of information is not the end goal. After capturing information from disparate sources, the next step is to declutter your knowledge.
Decluttering knowledge can be done through –
- Segregating use cases
- Categorizing information
- Assigning titles and meta tags to content
- Identifying content pieces that require interlinking
- Identifying requirement for creating new content
- Eliminating redundant and outdated information
3. Implement a Dedicated KM Tool
Depending on your organization’s requirements, you will need a tool to manage and share knowledge. While many customer support teams use google drive, SharePoint and CRM knowledge base for their knowledge management, these tools fall short of delivering actionable knowledge to agents in the nick of time.
Implementing a dedicated knowledge management system gives you an edge as these tools offer intuitive features to centralize knowledge, create versatile content, interlink content and share it with large user groups.
Dedicated knowledge management tools also integrate with CRM, chat, telephone, and self-service platforms, making it effortless to deliver consistent experiences across customer touchpoints.
4. Make Knowledge Easy to Consume
Knowledge is as good as its actionability.
Even if your knowledge is well-organized and readily available, without the ease of understanding for end users, it would be a waste.
Real effort needs to be invested into identifying the suitable content formats, language, tone and formatting guidelines to ensure content is easily consumable for end users.
Establishing a systematic content authoring workflow that clearly lays out content creation, editing and publishing guidelines goes a long way in empowering your support team with easy-to-consume knowledge.
5. Develop Methods to Retain Tacit Knowledge
As we know, tacit knowledge comes with experience and expertise, so when someone leaves, all the information goes with them. Experienced employees retain tacit knowledge inside their heads, which leads to knowledge silos.
To preserve and share knowledge in customer support teams, consider these approaches:
- Document customer experiences: Ask experienced employees to record successful and unsuccessful stories, describing the strategies they used and the results they obtained
- Create a Q&A platform: Allow employees to ask questions and get answers from senior colleagues, capturing valuable insights in an organized way
- Record video tutorials: Enhance knowledge retention by recording tips and tricks from experienced employees
6. Harness the Power of Internal Forums
Creating internal forums is a great way for customer support teams to share information and collaborate.
These forums let employees ask questions, share what they know, and work together to solve problems in a way that’s open and easy to access. When used effectively for knowledge sharing, internal forums can improve communication and problem-solving, leading to better productivity and new ideas.
7. Break Down Departmental Walls
Departmental walls are barriers that obstruct the free flow of knowledge and information between employees.
These barriers can be demolished through strategies such as:
- Establishing cross-functional teams where employees from various departments collaborate on projects
- Fostering regular communication and encouraging collaboration
- Acknowledging and rewarding employees who actively share knowledge
Declutter your Knowledge with Knowmax
Knowmax is a guided knowledge management platform for customer experience (CX) teams. It allows you to capture and upload knowledge from multiple sources, creating a single source for your enterprise knowledge.
Here’s how you can declutter your knowledge with Knowmax:
Capture and Upload: Gather knowledge from multiple sources and add it directly to Knowmax
Organize knowledge:
- Versatile content formats: Utilize formats like next best action workflows, picture guides, articles, and FAQs. Our platform also provides suggestions for suitable content formats when you upload knowledge
- Categories and Sub-Categories: Add your content into relevant categories for effortless findability
- Keywords: Add relevant keywords to the list of suggested keywords
Distribute: Identify departments for content distribution like call center, self-service and sales
Knowmax is compatible with assisted as well as digital channels so you can delight your customers with excellent support across touchpoints.
If you’re ready to declutter your CX knowledge and learn more about Knowmax, talk to one of our KM experts today.
