Customer support requires strategic measures and proactive skills to help out customers with their problems. Often the same questions and issues are repeatedly asked by various customers. This can take up your time as you will have to go through the same data again and again. Knowledge Management Systems can help you deal with these types of issues. They can be a game-changer when it comes to customer support or even internal support. A good Knowledge Management System will:
- Decrease the cost of customer support
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Increase customer success ROI and improve their overall experience
Most users expect a company to have some type of AI system that will help them out with their queries and resolve their issues without interacting with a human. A Knowledge Management System can help you out a lot and make the customer support operation easier and more cost-effective but it should be the right option for you since there are many types of Knowledge Management Systems each with its own specification and use. Read this guide to understand all about knowledge management systems and build and plan the one best suited for your needs:
What is a Knowledge Management System?
A Knowledge Management System (KMS) is a kind of IT System that acts as a tool for storing documentation, FAQs, and other information to help out the external and internal customers of a company get easy access to this data in an organized form.
Using a KMS will help you keep your documents organized and updated and help customers in finding answers to their own questions. It can also be used to manage access to knowledge and permission of access across a group of users. These systems are beneficial for both small businesses that are just starting out and global enterprises that have huge databases. A KMS works by identifying, storing, evaluating, and sharing all of the valuable day-to-day information of an organization. You will not have to go through the documents to find a solution for a problem that has occurred before, the KMS will have entire knowledge about it and will provide you with relevant results in a short time frame.
Types of Knowledge Management Systems:
There are multiple types of KMS that exist and it is best to determine why you need one to choose one that will be perfect for you. Do you want it for helping in the customer support process or do you want it to efficiently manage your internal operations? There are three major types of Knowledge Management Systems that are:
1. Enterprise-Wide Systems:
Enterprise-Wide Systems are usually large-scale systems that support internal business processes. They gather, store and share organizational information. These systems handle many operations simultaneously for reporting and distributing knowledge across the entire business organization. Examples of enterprise wide-systems are employee portals, learning management systems, and collaboration tools. They help in streamlining the daily work and increasing the overall organizational productivity.
Enterprise-Wide systems are usually complex and best known for their speed and managing information on a large scale. They help in solving complex problems and increasing productivity, as well as in reducing the cost of IT and minimizing the duplication of data. They are used for integrating different business processes such as customer support, sales, receivable accounts, and deliveries.
2. Knowledge Work Systems:
Knowledge Work Systems are built to help professionals in finding accurate knowledge and information regarding a specific subject or topic. They make sure that proper information and technical skills are integrated into the business. It also helps promote the creation of knowledge and propagate this new information to other individuals when they require it. It keeps the information documented, easy to find, and structured.
KWS works by storing information and disseminating it when needed. It is a significant system that can assist businesses in getting external knowledge as well. It increases the productivity of the organization since every individual can share and receive knowledge from each other and use this combined knowledge to perform necessary functions.
3. Intelligent Techniques:
Artificial Intelligence is used in these systems to gather and store tacit knowledge for providing solutions for issues that are too complex for humans to solve on their own. They help deal with predictable tasks for customers, discover new information, and help the employees in finding specific data quickly from large databases by filtering it. They perform knowledge transfer, knowledge acquisition, and knowledge storing by synthesizing raw data.
They help a business in cost reduction because they automize a lot of processes such as data reporting. They are also pretty useful when it comes to making quick and better decisions since they provide you with updated, rich, and exact knowledge regarding almost anything. It provides quick solutions to everyday problems that help in time management and better response to threats and problems.
Benefits of Knowledge Management systems:
- They help in improving your customer support services by providing quick and best solutions to customers and providing the answers to frequently asked questions.
- They help in maintaining databases organized and updated, as well as finding specific information quickly and easily.
- Help in cost reduction by making a lot of daily procedures automated and reducing the cost of customer support.
- Improve the decision-making process by providing exact and updated information.
- Increase effective learning by helping people share their knowledge with others and gain knowledge from others.
- Increase overall business productivity by providing quick solutions to complex and massive problems.
Knowledge Management Systems are a must-have for every company, you should just be considerate before building them to opt for the one best suited to your needs, you can also modify some knowledge management systems to become more suitable for you and your requirements. Choosing the wrong knowledge management system can negatively affect your business financially and decrease your employee satisfaction rate, as well as impact the customer support services adversely. They stimulate innovation and help business growth by providing scalable knowledge and promoting a knowledge-sharing culture in the workplace.
