Knowledge is at the heart of every company’s service desk. A customer service agent serves as the face of your organization. It is highly possible to extract the best practices from Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) and utilize them for making a quick performance assessment.
This, in turn, will make ways to enrich a great customer experience. Let’s understand how KCS empowers everyone in the business.
Table of Content
What is Knowledge Centered Service (KCS)?
Knowledge-centered Service (KCS), formerly known as Knowledge-centered support, is a service delivery technique that aims at the knowledge as a key asset of the business employing it. The development was initiated in 1992 by the Consortium for Service Innovation, a non-profit association of service establishments. Its approach is to incorporate the usage of a knowledge base into the business workflow.
While the inheritance of Knowledge Centered Service lies in a customer support organization, the method is now being successfully implemented for all the purposes of the business, as illustrated in the latest version of the KCS v6 Practices Guide.
KCS adoption pursues to:
- Develop content based on usage and demand
- Generate content as a by-product of solving problems
- Consider and reward team collaboration, sharing, and organizational learning
- Cultivate an organizational knowledge management system of a collective customer experience to date
Some Examples of Knowledge Centered Service
Knowledge Centered Service belongs to an organization that can deliver information. Such data must be capable of solving stakeholder or client problems timely. Examples of Knowledge Centered Service procedure in action comprise:
- Healthcare businesses retain knowledge bases for clients for letting them refer to wellness, conditions advice, and treatments.
- IT service desks, where clients or employees call in for answers to technical or computer issues.
- B2B service suppliers that maintain self-service online customer portals and call centers.
- Financial organizations need customer-facing staff to stay up-to-date on always-changing and complex products and services.
- Creators that uphold a public database or customer service hotline of product information.
What are the Benefits of Knowledge Centered Support?
Organizations opt to implement KCS as they see a necessity to extend and scale their support competencies but do not contain budget resources or endless staffing. The qualitative and quantifiable benefits of KCS principles are as follows:
- Optimize Usage of Resources
- 20 – 35% improved employee retention
- 20 – 40% improvement in employee job satisfaction
- 70% enhanced time to proficiency
- Easy Incident Management
- 30 – 50% rise in the first contact resolution
- 50 – 60% enhanced time to resolve
- Construct Organizational Learning
- 10% problem decrease due to root cause elimination
- Actionable information to product development about customer problems
- Facilitate Self-service Scheme
- Support center cost evasion of up to 50%
- Uplift the usage of self-help system, gain desired customer success ratio, and make the cultural shift
Why are these advantages so enormous? Here are some of the reasons:
Constructs Continuous Improvement
KCS across the IT service environment makes it simpler to classify repetitive matters and key areas for development in support procedures and schemes. Following which fixes have more or less customer satisfaction, which fixes have the most steps, and which documentation gets the most review.
All these aspects can aid the business to recognize opportunities for not only easy fixing but also for making dramatic improvements or providing improved solutions to common problems.
Less Problem-solving Releases More Free Time
The more updated and well-documented your solutions are, the quicker and simpler they are for the end-user or service desk agent to implement. This means faster solutions to common issues and earlier replies to multifaceted issues as the service team would not be caught up with redundant and small fixes.
Apt documentation enables self-service
Many consumers choose a self-service knowledge base over any other service channel. A great self-service is what all the customers desire.
Self-service can decrease service desk charges considerably. This type of money-saving service is conceivable with a method like KCS that constructs up-to-date and good documentation into your service preparation.
Stable Customer Experiences Mean Happier Investors
Centralizing fixes and answers create more steadiness in your customer service and experience. If each agent is exercising the same processes and playbook, customers – whether external or internal – will consume a more stable collective experience no matter which customer service network they select and which IT expert they end up contacting.
Why does stability matter here? Because it is no secret that your customers love predictably positive experiences, fast fixes, and confident and knowledgeable employees who can help them. In this way, satisfied customers mean happier investors; which is better for the overall business.
Improved Insights For Sales And Marketing
By implementing KCS, an organization can avail deeper insights into what its customers are looking for and asking about. Such insights can notify the formation of dedicated sales and marketing materials, which are then added to its knowledge management process.
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How Does Knowledge Centered Support Work? The KCS Methodology
The KCS methodology functions by incorporating in-depth knowledge into customer service workflow. Problem-solving data is composed of a database. This knowledge management evolves content based on demand and use. Such a continuous upgrading loop permits an organization to share and transfer knowledge. Also, reusing knowledge in an efficient and organized manner makes the process integration smooth.
KCS assists knowledge workers in proficiently using the knowledge base through a double loop process. The KCS policy’s unceasing improvement loop notifies how knowledge is seized, organized, and managed over time. Such an improvement loop comprises the solve method and the evolve procedure, which support each other.
The steps in the ‘Solve and Evolve Loop’ or the ‘Solve Loop’ include:
Capture Knowledge
When requirements enter, the knowledge articles are produced and then modernized as a by-product of the problem-solving method. This states that the agents write relevant articles not based on priorities or internal lists, but based on the real customer perspective, making the information easily searchable and inherently relevant.
Structure Knowledge
One of the best KCS practices to write an article that is usable by the end-user or customer is to work from a form or template. Such knowledge management streamlines the same process and builds consistency in the consumer experience.
Reuse Knowledge
Whenever a new problem arises, agents respond and explore the new knowledge base article first. They can associate the incidents to applicable articles, ensuring that their team is operating from their shared collective knowledge.
Improve Knowledge
With the creation of your knowledge base, your agents become accountable for less content formation from scrape and more updates to the existing articles – making the knowledge base useful and up-to-date.
This method not only keeps the content fresh, but it segments the ownership across the entire team rather than considering knowledge base appraises as the obligation of a single individual and as a distinct duty on that individual’s worklist.
Usage of Knowledge to View the Bigger Picture
As the knowledge base propagates, your team will have more information on how operative every article is at resolving complex issues and can begin to enhance the processes, put additional resources toward high-demand and cost-reducing content.
The knowledge base and process itself are valuable KM tools for recognizing what is working and what is not, where there might be loopholes in the knowledge, and what tweaks might be needed to make future articles more effective.
Implementing Knowledge Centered Support: The 5 Step Process
Establishments that are efficacious with KCS principles employ it within small groups. This sanctions the course to be sophisticated as it gets executed. Implementing KCS has the following steps:
Step 1. Define Metrics And Goals
Decide what team, process, and customer goals must be amended once KCS practitioners put them into practice. Then, you can define accurate metrics for such goals. Metrics and goals ought to be studied at least once a year as KCS is applied and transfers into diverse phases.
Step 2. Create Content Strategies
Form a content template that makes sure that the knowledge will be built in a reliable way to make it easy to read and find that content. Such a template must guide the service representative in describing:
- The precise process or product that the problem entails
- The concern was termed by the stakeholder or real-time customer
- The fundamental cause of the problem, if it is apparent
- Metadata comprising descriptive keywords
- The actions are taken to solve problems
Step 3. Describe And Practice The Workflow
Being customer service and support organizations, build the KCS workflow and distribute it to your squad. This is the movement of how you anticipate your squads to utilize the knowledge base to resolve queries.
If the article accurately responds to the inquiry, it is utilized. But if such an article does not answer the inquiry properly, the team flags or corrects it for a subject matter professional to correct it. And if the article is not present in the database, the team produces it by using the content template.
Step 4. Set-Up The Knowledge Base Or Integrate It
If there is no knowledge base, it must be planned to set up. But if there is a prevailing knowledge base, it must be made obtainable to the customer service and support teams.
Step 5. Implement Training And Guidance
Train and guide the first level of customer support and service teams in utilizing the KCS workflow to seize, collect, store, reuse, and leverage knowledge.
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- Abundance: share more and learn more,
- Create value: work tasks and think of a bigger picture,
- Demand-driven: knowledge is a consequence of an interaction
- Trust: empower, engage, and motivate
A knowledge centered learning atmosphere presents knowledge – ideas, facts, principles, and concepts in a timely way – when the requirement to do so arises naturally or when the learners find a necessity.
Knowledge Centered Support helps you make a streamlined and organized support system that slashes down costs, resources, and time. Contact CloudTutorial and create a robust KCS that renders a happier support team, happier customers, and enhanced productivity. Sign up for FREE and maintain your knowledge as an asset.
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