I was looking at Destination CRM.com that was recommended to me by my friend and the president of the Norwich Group Anne Stanton and the first article I read floored me. It was in the Viewpoint section and titled, “Looking at Knowledge” by Kate Leggett. Not only was it a fun read, but it is a very thought provoking article too.
“However, the relevancy of knowledge customers had access to was lacking because content authoring was not being performed by those on the front lines, fielding questions from customers. As well, their linear authoring flow introduced a time delay between when solutions were written and when they were available to customers.
We recommended they take several steps to create a sense of community between their customers, agents, and knowledge authors. We felt this approach would ultimately make their customers more trusting and more loyal. As a first step, we appended a feedback form to all their solutions, asking their customers whether the solutions helped solve their question. Knowledge solutions were then reworked as needed to make them more in line with user demand.
We then opened up the knowledge base to help authors, enabling them to publish directly to it without content being routed through a review process. Information was made instantly available to the customer base. Call center agents and customers alike found this especially useful, but there were some questions for which answers did not yet exist in the knowledge base.”
Clever ways to use the knowledge and information our customers give us turn great tools into must-have systems. And listening to and remembering what your customers say will always bring more business your way. When I find a building contractor, electrician, doctor or banker that ‘just gets it’ I tend to stay with them as long as I can. That’s what most companies aspire to do, find and keep great customers. One way to do that is to not only listen to your customers but both capture and incorporate the best ideas into your service model.