Step 8 of my 10-step program on how to master your service experience is to tame your knowledge problem.

A good knowledge program is one of the foundational elements of a good service experience. Many informational requests can be easily handled using a simple FAQ, which deflects calls from your contact center and keeps your customers satisfied with relevant answers. Agent knowledge that is the same across communication channels guarantees that your customers receive consistent and accurate answers.

But getting your arms around your knowledge assets and maintaining them is hard work. I use a six-step best-practice framework to get you going with knowledge management:

1. Align the organization for success. To be successful, you need an executive sponsor who will fund your knowledge program and allocate resources to the effort. You also need to put together a project team, follow proper project management practices, and define a rollout and adoption strategy.  
2. Design a framework for knowledge management. Knowledge base content must be easy to find and use. Before starting to create content, you need to determine usage roles, content sources (i.e., what content lives inside the knowledge base and what content lives outside of it but is accessible via knowledge base searches), content standards, and information architecture and localization requirements.

We all know that the gap between a customer’s expectations and the service they receive is huge. Customers are increasingly knowledgeable about products and demand value-added, personalized service. Businesses struggle with understanding which initiatives will move the needle in a positive direction and are thus worth investing in. Here is the second tip in my 10-part blog series on how to master the service experience.

Step 2: Is your customer service aligned with your company brand?

Meeting the needs of your customers are important. However, it’s just as important to stay true to your brand and design a service experience that supports your value proposition. Customers need to know what your company represents — which is especially important in the message-cluttered social media world that we live in — and have this brand reinforced every time they interact with you during the sales process, and for every interaction after the initial sale.

These companies have aligned their service offering to help reinforce their brand with their customers:

• Apple. Its products are high-style and priced at a premium. Apple’s customer service is very much in line with its brand. The firm delivers customer service on the customer’s terms — you can arrange a phone call with an Apple Expert who specializes in your exact question and can talk with them now or later at your convenience. They’ll even call you. You can email Apple or browse its extensive knowledge base.

Several weeks ago, I blogged asking for insight into the contact center costs of login recovery to help inform a project I was working on. Many companies responded — for which I thank you  — and I wanted to share some of the insights that were provided.

In the words of one eBusiness executive, “Helping customers resolve login issues is by far the largest call driver to our contact center. The costs are high — probably higher than we fully realize. But we look at it as the cost of doing business.”

Among the companies surveyed, the percentage of login issues among B2C contact center contacts ranged from  3% to 40%. Only one company was on that lower end and, while their 3% may seem small at first glance, their call center receives more than 10 million calls per year so 3% represents a hefty number of contacts. The higher end  of 30 to 40% of call center volume related to login was more common. Overall, among the companies who responded to my request for information, the operational cost of login issues ranged from $250,000/year to well over $1,000,000 per year.

These high dollar figures do not have to be the cost of doing business. Instead, eBusiness leaders should:

• Ensure their login recover adheres to best practices. My document called “Mastering Login Issues” will hopefully provide helpful insight.
• Consider social login, which lets users log in to your site with their social identities from Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites. This may be particularly useful for news, retail, media, entertainment.

We all know that companies are trying to leverage social channels for customer service. But how can they be deployed in a way that adds value to an organization? Here are my thoughts:

You can’t implement social technologies in a silo within your contact center because you have to be able to deliver a consistent experience across the communication channels you support: voice, the electronic ones, and the social ones. Read my blog post on how you can do this.

Once you get the basics right, you are ready to add social media capabilities. Best practices include:

• Start by listening to customer conversations. These conversations can surface general issues with products, services, and company processes. Make sure you create workflows to route surfaced issues to the correct organization so they can be worked on.
• Flag and address social inquiries. Understand the general sentiments expressed in these conversations, but also identify specific customer inquiries and route them to the right agent pool for resolution.
• Extend your customer service ecosystem with communities. This allows your customers to share information, best practices, and how-to tips with each other, as well as get advice without needing to interact with your agents. But don’t implement them in a technology silo; they should be well-integrated with current contact center processes.