| Sharing customer knowledge |
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Nobody knows more about how to serve your customers than the people who talk to and listen to them every day – your front line staff. But are they talking to each other, and are you listening to them? We explore how technology can help.
Sharing is caring Nobody knows more about how to serve your customers than the people who talk to and listen to them every day – your front line staff. But are they talking to each other, and are you listening to them? We explore how technology can help. Every day, every organisation gets customer feedback. It can be explicit or implicit. Customers can tell you explicitly how unhappy they are with the service you have provided, or they can simply stop being your customers. They can also tell you how happy they are and (if you’re lucky) how to make them even more happy in future. Also, your customers give you implicit feedback – by asking questions about your products or services, by asking questions about certain features, by wondering aloud about how something might work better…of which is raw material for improving your customer care and service. What does your organisation do with this customer information? Does it make it beyond the ear of the front-line staff member? If so, how is it gathered? Where is it gathered? Who sees it? Most importantly – how is it being used to improve your customer care and benefit your business? Technology can help Think of every member of your customer facing team as a subject matter expert in their customers. Your success rests in no small part on how much they share their expertise, anecdotes and ideas with their colleagues, especially inexperienced ones. Technology makes it possible for every one of your customer-facing team to share their expertise. This is a classic example of informal learning at work. You don’t want everyone to go on a course, e-learning or otherwise, every time there is a new piece of information about someone in your Edinburgh office addressed a customer’s question. You want that information to be
So here are three ways in which you could use technology to enable your customer-facing teams to share their knowledge, informally but effectively: Start a customer care wiki In previous months we’ve talked about the power of online communities of practice, and how a wiki can power that community. Your customer-facing team is a community of practice -- their practice being customer care. Start a wiki with some attempts to define how to answer key customer questions, or build customer profiles. Ask your team leaders to add their thoughts. Ask everyone to work together towards the best definitions and responses to customer questions – especially the tough questions. Watch your information base grow. Start a discussion forum Online discussion forums are a great way to promote discussion and elicit best practice in responding to customer needs. One financial institution in the UK does this particularly well with their new products. A branch staff member in one location shares a point about how to cross-sell one product with another. A contact centre agent makes a suggestion of how to extend that cross-sell with an additional open question to the customer, and so on. Discussion forums need moderation, and can be more difficult to search than a wiki, but it may be worth trying both to determine what suits your teams. You can also have a customer-facing version – many organizations are now doing this with success. Use audio Some of your staff may not have the time or energy to type up every good customer feedback, interaction or anecdote. A quick alternative is audio. Set up a voicemail number with options for recording customer care stories, questions, comments and suggestions. Make it as easy as leaving a message. Then take the best of them and disseminate them – either remaining as audio and turning it into a weekly podcast (if that would work for your customer care teams) or transcribing them and making them wiki or forum entries (not forgetting good old email and newsletter lists too, of course). Finally -- don’t forget motivation… For all of this to work, the motivation to share must be there. Your front-line staff, be they customer service agents in a contact centre, project teams working on long-term engagements, or retail staff on the shop floor, must care about gathering customer feedback and sharing their experiences for the benefit of others. You need to
We at Kineo have experience designing knowledge sharing and management tools like the ones described above. If you’d like to know more, contact us. |
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