Customer experience has overtaken price and product as the key brand differentiator. This means that the first criteria your customers use to make decisions about you versus your competitors is the ease of doing business with you.

We are in a connected world and today’s customers, when seeking support, expect the same ease of finding information as they would get from looking something up on Google, and the same personalized recommendations they would get while shopping on Amazon.

Here are 3 things you can do to deliver smarter customer support:

  1.   Think like your customer

Are your customers calling your contact centers because they have tried but failed to find information they need – and is available – on your support portal?

If so, the best thing to do is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Visit your support portal and try to look for information that a new customer might need. You may be surprised at the experience you’re giving them.

Go through the same process with your customer support agents. Learn about their workflow and identify knowledge gaps that are preventing them from solving cases quickly.

  1.      Make information easily accessible

Now you’d have a good idea of the steps your customers and support agents take to solve an issue. And more often than not, your customers and support agents are constantly looking in multiple places to find the answers they need.

The key to making the information easily accessible is to have it all in one place. You can do this two ways. One is to centralize the data, either by migrating all your content into a single repository or creating a centralized knowledge base. The other is to “virtually integrate” the content with intelligent search, so the content resides in their original repositories and is available from a single search page. With intelligent search, there’s no costly data migration and your content developers can continue to use the systems they are comfortable with. It is also easily scalable.

One company that is using intelligent search to make information easily accessible is Ribbon Communications (formerly Sonus Networks – Read case study here.)

  1.   Be relevant

While giving your customers and support agents easy access to more information is a plus, it can potentially be overwhelming. Your customers don’t want to know about all the products you have; they want to know about all the products they need. Similarly, the information your support agent needs can be quite different for each case. Beyond unifying information, intelligent search technology allows you to deliver the most relevant information to each person, every time. (Learn more about self-learning search here.)

You could also use the data from search analytics to learn what content people are searching for, what content is most relevant or not useful to different audiences, and what is missing, to produce new content and archive outdated ones.

Watch this webinar to hear directly from Sonus Networks’ CIO and Senior Engineer to learn how they use  intelligent search to give customers rapid access to information and help their organization to scale.  

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