Within any business, the single greatest asset to building a compelling customer experience is the pooled intellect, knowledge and experiences of its people. Yet this asset is too often poorly managed: training is forgotten; manuals gather dust; and technology elevates protocol above purpose.
KM technology is gaining ground in customer services environments, but the way we measure the success of these implementations remains at fault. Simply put, the cold, mechanical elements of KM software are tested, piloted and evaluated in appropriately cold, mechanical ways. The calculation goes something like this: it costs a certain sum to acquire and operate a piece of software, so we compare this cost against whatever financial benefit we wish to achieve from doing so.

The golden objective is to make technology pay for itself, otherwise how else can you be satisfied that your investment has been a good one? Achieving a healthy return on investment (or ROI) is the accepted measure of success – or, at least, it was until now.

 

Superior customer experiences
The human elements – the users – attract significant costs of their own, of course, yet also deliver unique value to the customer experience. Technology alone is not enough, it’s the user group’s behavior that determines whether a KM solution succeeds or fails. Is it right therefore to focus efforts in purely fiscal terms at attaining and recording an ROI? Or is it more than just a matter of making the checks and balances?

New, exciting management approaches to developing a new equilibrium within customer service strategies can refresh the status quo. Instead of being forced to balance the need for more responsive and accurate customer service levels against increases in agent resourcing and training budgets, a radical alternative is proposed. Put simply, impressive gains can be achieved by harnessing existing resources more imaginatively, creatively but, above all, consistently and effectively.

The measurement criterion for evaluating and deploying KM solutions therefore needs to change. In summary, all businesses should aim for a new kind of ROI – a Return on Intellect.

By harnessing the collective intellect of your customer service agents and managing their knowledge, the unique domain specializations and hard-won “experience” of individuals can become a transferable skill rather than a quality restricted by time.

Take the recent upsurge in web-based tools for mass collaboration and networking as a starting point. Unofficially, employees are already using Skype, Facebook, wikis and their ilk to network and collaborate across restrictive information hierarchies and organizational boundaries.
Universally accessible, intuitive and egalitarian, they encourage creativity, openness and sharing.

Organizations can learn from these experiences, utilizing a set of collaborative tools that have all of the positive attributes of their social networking siblings, whilst at the same time assuring the provenance of information and dovetailing within customer service workflows.

Those that correctly harness these tools can expect to reduce the costs of providing excellent customer service; benefit from repeat and incremental revenues as a result of enhanced customer loyalty and referrals; and be more likely to win the hearts and minds of the new generation of web user when allied with web self-help systems.

 

Putting people first
Success is not predicated by cutting-edge web design or razor-sharp graphics, but by people.

It’s dependent on an emotive response to the exchange of credentials and information, completed with efficiency, openness, personality and style. Access to enhanced, relevant and accurate information – through FAQs (frequently asked questions), email and web chat – is a vital ingredient.

Businesses that meet or exceed expectations can expect to reap a dividend in the form of increased loyalty, increased referrals and increased sales via an increasingly collaborative relationship with its customers – in other words, an increased Return on Intellect.