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Featured Research
Customer
Service KM Evaluation Framework
How to Evaluate Knowledge
Management-Based Solutions
By Mitchell I. Kramer, July 10, 2008
NETTING IT OUT
Your customers want answers
to questions about your business, your policies, and your
products and services. They also want solutions to the problems
that they have with your products and services. Your agents
want those answers and solutions when your customers seek
assisted-service.
Knowledge management-based
customer service products can help you deliver answers
and solutions to your customers and agents through your
implementation of their content management and search facilities.
We’ve developed a framework
for evaluating knowledge management-based customer service
products. The framework has these top-level criteria:
• Cross-channel cross-lifecycle
support
• Knowledge management
• User interface
• Search
• Escalation
• Analytic functionality
• Architecture
• Product viability
• Company viability
In this report, we describe
these evaluation criteria in detail. In future reports, we
will offer our framework-based evaluations of specific products
and services.
CUSTOMER
SERVICE TO ANSWER
QUESTIONS AND
RESOLVE PROBLEMS
This report presents our evaluation
framework for customer service products that help customers
get answers to their questions about your organization, your
policies, and your products and services as well as to diagnose
and resolve problems with your products and services. These
customer service products are known as knowledge management
products because they combine content management and search
technologies to build customer service applications that
create “knowledge” that answers your customers’ questions.
The framework specifies and describes the criteria that we
use and that we recommend you use for evaluating, comparing,
and selecting these knowledge management-based customer service
products and services.
CUSTOMERS
WANT CROSS-CHANNEL,
CROSS-LIFECYCLE
HELP
Before we get into the details
of the evaluation framework, let’s take a step back
and put these knowledge management-based customer service
products in context—the context of cross-channel, cross-lifecycle
customer service. We’ve been writing for a while about
it. Here’s what we mean:
• Customers want your
help on every channel through which they interact with you—the
Web and email for service, your contact center, physical
locations (e.g., stores or walk-in centers), and your field
service force for assisted service.
• Customers want and need your help at every phase of their lifecycles,
through every interaction and iteration within the lifecycle phases of plan,
explore, select, buy, use, maintain, and renew.
Cross-Lifecycle
Customer Service
© 2008 Patricia
Seybold Group Inc.
Illustration 1. This illustration
shows the phases of the customer service lifecycle around
the core of (customer) support and the focus of the customer,
represented by the proxy of your customer information.
Cross-Channel Customer
Service
Your customers do business
with you through mechanisms that we call channels. Channels
link your customers to your customer service agents and your
customer service systems. Channels are the technologies and
the personnel through which your customers interact with
you—the Web, email, kiosks, and contact centers, store
personnel, field personnel, and call center personnel.
Channels support either self-service
or assisted-service interactions. Self-service interactions
occur when customers interact with your customer service
systems. Self-service channels are automated. They typically
have high implementation costs but very low costs to serve.
The Web is a key self-service channel. It can support the
broadest range of types of customer interactions.
Assisted-service interactions
occur when customers interact with your customer service
personnel, who, in turn, interact with your customer service
systems on behalf if your customers. Assisted-service channels
are manual. Contact centers, stores, and field personnel
are the key assisted-service channels. They have high implementation
costs and high costs to serve, although you can implement
some of them, such as field sales and support, quite quickly.
CONSISTENT CROSS-CHANNEL
CUSTOMER SERVICE. We’ve discussed the need
to deliver a consistent cross-channel customer experience
many times. Fundamental requirements are a consistent view
of your customers and a consistent context for the business
that they want to do with you. For customer service, consistency
is your ability to deliver the same answers to customers’ questions
and the same resolutions to customers’ problems independently
of the channel through which they choose to interact with
you.
This
report continues...
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