There is a big difference between answers and resolutions, especially when it comes to customer support. Is serving up pages upon pages of search results on a web page for your customer or agents to scroll through really providing an answer?
Sometimes an answer isn’t necessarily the right resolution and sometimes a yes or no answer to a question isn’t enough. Answers leave the door open for inference and interpretation, whilst resolutions take a user or issue through to completion.
Resolutions are a process and lead to action; they have explanations and include trial and error, says Ian Huntly, CEO of Rifle-Shot Performance Holdings, official representatives of Aptean in South Africa.
Writing a resolution encompasses identifying, documenting, reviewing and validating that the problem was fixed. Machines can provide answers, but people provide resolutions. Knowledge management (KM) needs the right balance of computation and human intervention. After all, resolutions are ultimately created to help people.
So what makes resolutions better than answers?
There are four main reasons resolutions beat out answers every time:
* Resolutions include the human touch;
* Resolutions engage customers;
* Resolutions lead to action; and
* Resolutions ensure a closed loop.
Resolutions include the human touch
Good resolutions include interactions with real people to validate real solutions and resolve real issues. This goes beyond data and algorithms. It requires people helping customers with their problems searched for using a customer’s language, not formal or exact keywords preferred by generic search solutions.
Resolutions require support agents to listen to a customer’s issues, search using a customer’s language and resolve in a way that the resolution can be easily found for, or by, the next user. This could mean adding a straightforward procedure or including a focused documentation excerpt that resolves the issue versus simply providing links to structured documents that contain disparate pieces of a possible solution somewhere within their voluminous pages.
Done properly, KM enables authoring in the workflow and authoring done by those directly interfacing your customers. No advanced linguists should be required and resolutions should be written in common, usable language. Most importantly, a KM tool should be simplistic enough to use so that any agent has the ability to contribute.
Resolutions engage customers
Resolutions aren’t just posted suggestions or documents made available in the hopes that customers find them useful. Resolutions often require that customers implement suggested steps successfully as validation. This customer engagement is a learning opportunity that creates a partnership between the support agent and the customer and between the customer and your company.
With customers validating resolutions, they can be constantly improved or refined based on future instances. Customer engagement enables critical mindshare and further opportunities for your company to prove its value. Engagement gives your company opportunities to further differentiate your brand and drive customer loyalty. Most importantly, it enables the customer to quickly and accurately resolve the issues it is facing in order to please its own customers and succeed. This collaboration creates a far more meaningful relationship than a simple FAQ could ever provide.
KM helps by ensuring that information stored in a database becomes usable to customers. Support agents build this bridge by connecting a customer issue, in the customer’s language, to a resolution. This makes for faster search and retrieval in the future using layman’s terms and contextual search, not perfect prose and exact keywords only.
Resolutions lead to action
Spitting out an answer and hoping for the best is not a good solution. Yet that’s what many customer service systems do for customers. Whether it’s simply unearthing documents or providing yes/no answers without context, these results are somewhat irrelevant and meaningless. Furthermore, there are no steps or processes to follow that guide a user through to resolution.
On the contrary, many resolutions include, or lead, to action. They may utilise step-by-step actions that guide a user to fixing their issue, turning up service and making a customer happy. These procedures are validated both by the agent and the user, and the most appropriate and common procedural resolutions are easily searchable for the next user. More importantly, if the procedure changes the resolution should be adapted in real time accordingly.
KM systems enable agents to easily document procedures either in writing or using multimedia, giving customers multiple ways to resolve their issues. This takes the guesswork out of what to do and in what order to do it. Furthermore, it adds value to the customer experience by effectively providing a personal coach to guide them to where they need to go.
Resolutions ensure a closed loop
Finally, resolutions ensure a closed loop by validating the action or procedures taken, resolve the issue at hand. Authored documents, accordingly, should only be authored and finalised if a valid resolution was reached.
KM systems not only provide a closed loop by validating and in some cases voting on the helpfulness of a solution, they also provide a bridge for closing the loop with other related systems. Many issues, for example, originate through a front-end tracking or CRM system.
Done properly, a KM system that provides a resolution also provides a closed loop with the corresponding ticketing or CRM system. The CRM then leverages the KM system to overcome numerous CRM weaknesses, such as a lack of advanced search or authoring, and ensures a resolution provides both issue closure and closure in the corresponding tracking system.
