Knowledge Management and CRM

Best Practices Series Knowledge Management and CRM Two disciplines that truly complement each other Oracle PAGE 28 DELIVERING THE ULTIMATE CROSS-CHANNEL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE egain PAGE 30 LEVERAGE KNOWLEDGE TO EXPAND THE BUSINESS VALUE OF CRM Coveo PAGE 31 SUPER-CHARGE SALESFORCE WITH ENTERPRISE KNOWLEDGE Two sweeping trends have emerged in recent years: the proliferation of customer channels and the resulting explosion in the amount of data produced. Customer relationship management has done a great job of providing a strong framework for these multichannel interactions. Knowledge management (KM) has done an equally remarkable job by providing the brains behind the increasingly diverse network of customer contact points. With the explosion of data from many different types of sources in the past several years, the tight integration of KM and CRM systems has become even more essential to offering customers and the agents who serve them the concise and timely information they need. KM and CRM have a long history of ultimately serving the same goals of quickly and efficiently providing customers with information, whether it s through Web self-service, a call center agent, kiosk, or mobile application. This month s Best Practices installment focuses on how Knowledge Management adds an essential layer of value to customer-facing systems, which ultimately drives improved customer experiences. Bob Fernekees VP/Group Publisher, CRM Media Information Today, Inc. SILVER SPONSOR SPONSORS Bob Fernekees, Group Publisher 212-251-0608 x13 bfernekees@destinationcrm.com Adrienne Snyder, Eastern/Midwest Account Director 201-327-2773 adrienne@destinationcrm.com 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 Phone: 1-866-630-7669 www.oracle.com 1252 Borregas Ave. Sunnyvale, CA 94089 Phone: 1-800-821-4358 www.egain.com United States: 1.800.635.5476 Europe (EMEA): +31 0(20) 658 6334 Canada: +1.418.263.1111 info@coveo.com www.coveo.com Dennis Sullivan, Western Account Director 800-248-8466 x538 dennis@destinationcrm.com Produced by: CRM Media

WP28 September 2014 CRM Magazine Sponsored Content Delivering The Ultimate Cross-Channel Customer Experience As customer expectations rise, delivering personalized experiences that improve customer loyalty, increase customer acquisition and optimize efficiency is increasingly more challenging to achieve. Customer service leaders understand the importance of engaging a customer in their preferred channel, and minimizing the overall effort of that engagement. A key to minimizing the customer effort is to develop a knowledge management platform that crosses all channels, presents accurate content from multiple sources, maintains, relevance, and captures feedback for continuous improvement. Oracle Knowledge is a complete, best-in-class knowledge management solution providing personalized, seamless crosschannel service and support. KNOWLEDGE PLATFORM The Oracle Knowledge Platform is an integrated set of knowledge management capabilities including advanced natural language processing, search, flexible authoring and publishing, rich analytics and customizable self-service and agent facing knowledge applications. Oracle Knowledge is built on a highly scalable J2EE architecture, and on Oracle technologies including WebLogic, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle Business Intelligence. Semantic Search The Oracle Knowledge semantic search capabilities are built on the fundamental understanding of language. Core language dictionaries are available in 20 languages understanding everyday terminology. Additionally multilingual industry dictionaries are available for major verticals including high tech, telecommunications, insurance, finance and automotive. This core understanding of a user s language is key to finding precise answers from multiple external sources including the knowledge base, web sites, file systems and other internal knowledge repositories. The most recent release of Oracle Knowledge continues to build on this foundation with vastly expanded language and geography coverage, significantly increased performance and reduced footprint with faster search response times, faster content processing performance, and a reduced semantic iåndex size, as well as learning-based search ranking for reduced incident handling time. These improved efficiencies deliver increased productivity and lower operation costs. Information Manager: Authoring, Publishing And Workflow Oracle Knowledge is designed to help companies develop a knowledge base as an integral part of a user s job. Contact center agents and customers create content as a by-product of solving support issues using a powerful, web-based, WYSIWYG rich text editor. Product experts and contact center agents can collaborate with other users and customers to refine or expand the knowledge base. Advanced editing capability such as global find and replace and replacement tokens improves the article accuracy while lowering operation and knowledge administration costs. Oracle Knowledge comes with valuable tools to manage the lifecycle of articles. Customers can create their own article templates and meta-data. The software tracks all revisions of the articles and provides detailed history. Articles may be routed for approval through the use of workflow. Providing users with the ability to attach files to forum posts allows them to provide additional information to explain their issues. These capabilities improve self-service rates, while expanding the knowledge base and the user community. And, empower globalization with support for multi-national organizations with Knowledge creation and administration in the users native language to increase usage and deliver higher Knowledge creation productivity. The user interface of the authoring system is available in 24 languages, but content can be created in nearly any language. Oracle Knowledge allows customers to manage the relationship of an article across different locales and languages, while providing authors with the ability to develop localespecific content and meta-data allowing fine-tuning of the customer experience. Analytics Analytics Dashboards are tailored to functional roles across the service organization. They harness the optimal value of company stake-holders by providing relevant insights at a glance to reduce operational costs, increase employee productivity, and strengthen customer relationships. With the configurable custom KPI wizard for creating KPI with thresholds and triggers, organizations can increase the efficiency of authoring content, increase answer relevancy and improve the overall insight of knowledge activity.

Sponsored Content CRM Magazine September 2014 WP29 KNOWLEDGE APPLICATIONS InfoCenter: Self-Service Knowledge InfoCenter provides a Knowledge portal for customers and employees with integrated browse and search functionality via a customizable user interface and knowledge widgets. InfoCenter surfaces the power of industry-based libraries, knowledge federation abilities, and natural language processing abilities of the platform to deliver true, intent-based best possible answer to customers. It transforms the self-service experience for customers by providing contextual, and relevant answers to their questions. iconnect: Agent Knowledge iconnect provides robust and scalable answer-delivery framework aiding the agent-facing service delivery model. The context-driven user interface simplifies and enhances the user experience and is tuned for increased performance. iconnect is available as an out of the box integration into Oracle Service, and Oracle Service Cloud. Open APIs allow for integration into most industry standard CRM applications. AnswerFlow: Guided Knowledge AnswerFlow provides consistent service resolution for agents and customers with the prescriptive delivery of knowledge. AnswerFlow combines decision trees with external data that leverages and increases the strategic value of Knowledge Platform across self and assisted service customer interaction channels. AnswerFlow enables you to create and deploy automated interactive processes that guide users toward appropriate answers or solutions in cases where: Answers are conditional, and can vary based on factors such as account status, location, or specific product or model Diagnosis is complex, and identifying the best response among many possible answers involves asking detailed questions and eliminating alternatives Why Oracle? Oracle offers the most comprehensive customer service and knowledge management solutions, enabling your agents to deliver consistent, relevant answers across touchpoints, drive new efficiencies, and build stronger customer relationships. To learn more, visit oracle.com/rightnow

WP30 September 2014 CRM Magazine Sponsored Content Leverage Knowledge to Expand the Business Value of CRM THE SYNERGY BETWEEN CRM AND KM CRM applications are systems of record that manage customer data. Knowledge Management (KM) systems, in the context of customer engagement, enable businesses to systematically capture knowledge from subject matter experts within the enterprise and social knowledge from online communities, social networks, and partners for use by customer-facing organizations and end-customers. When integrated, KM helps expand the business value of CRM, delivering transformational benefits such as better customer experiences, contact center productivity, and improved customer acquisition. KM systems are also able to enhance existing content management systems by adding a layer of findability and knowhow for content-enabled process automation. HOW IT WORKS There are many use cases of how CRM and KM work in tandem to deliver business value. A common one we see in our clientele is in the customer contact center where our award-winning knowledge solution is often used in conjunction with CRM. In fact, egain Knowedge offers certified integrations with leading CRM systems. When customers call, agents open a case in the CRM application, enter the problem description, and simply click a solve button. This, in turn, invokes a resolution path (for example, a set of search paths). Agents get to the solution using the path of their choice, accept it, communicate it to the customer, and close the case. The interaction, including the path to the answer and the knowledge base (KB) article that was used to solve the problem or sell a product, is recorded end-to-end in both the CRM and KM systems. Note that this is only one of many use cases. BUSINESS VALUE Over the years, egain has worked with blue-chip clients worldwide, helping them leverage the combined power of knowledge and CRM to drive business value. Here are some examples: Premier home appliance manufacturer: $50M in savings by eliminating unwarranted truck rolls through knowledge-powered resolution processes Global knowledge and legal services solutions provider: 70% deflection of calls and emails, 30% reduction in content authoring time Leading telco provider: 42% reduction in unwarranted handset returns Global bank: 88% reduction in agent training time, 70% higher productivity through knowledge-powered account opening process in small business sector BEST PRACTICES Adopting best practices can help make the business case, implement knowledge, and sustain its business value. While there are many, here are some key ones to remember. 1. Quantify Value Assessing expected and realized ROI before and after the deployment helps you justify the initial investment as well as continuous improvement of the CRM-KM solution. Best Practice: Make sure the ROI metrics you use are aligned with business objectives. For instance, if your main business goal is to increase upsell and cross-sell, reduction in average handle time will be a conflicting metric. As you assess ROI, keep in mind that KM delivers ROI across a broad range of business problems. Some examples are: Deflection of requests for agentassisted service through effective selfservice Increase in first contact resolution and sales conversion Reduction in escalations, transfers, repeat calls, and average handle times Reduction in training time, unwarranted product returns, field visits, and staff wage premiums 2. Start With Depth Unfocused deployments almost always result in a shallow KB that is full of holes like Swiss cheese. If agents and customers can t find answers or receive inadequate or wrong information, they simply stop using the system. Best Practice: Focus first on depth rather than breadth. Start with common questions on common products or lines of business and expand out over time. 3. Implement Best Practice Frameworks Best practice frameworks have emerged over time in KM. For example, the KCS framework, advocated by the Consortium for Service Innovation (CSI), is a comprehensive methodology that helps improve speed of resolution, optimize resources, and foster organizational learning. Adopting frameworks like KCS is a win-win-win for customers, contact center agents, and the organization alike. Best Practice: Look for KCS Verified providers to implement best and next practices in knowledge-centered customer support. 4. Maximize Findability A GPS-style approach to search, where users can choose any of the multiple available paths to find information, dramatically improves knowledge base adoption. For example, new agents might fare better if they are guided through a step-by-step dialog, powered by technologies like Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), as opposed to keyword search. Best Practice: Multiple search options such as FAQ, keyword and natural language search, topic-tree browsing, and guided help enable a broad range of users to quickly and easily find information. Make sure you leverage a unified multichannel knowledge platform for consistent answers across customer touchpoints. Implementing these best practices, while making sure that the KM and CRM solutions are tightly integrated, will help you deliver transformative customer experiences as well as generate breakthrough value for the business! About egain egain customer engagement solutions power digital transformation for leading brands. Our top-rated cloud applications for social, mobile, web, and contact centers help clients deliver connected customer journeys in a multichannel world. To find out more, visit http://www.egain.com.

Sponsored Content CRM Magazine September 2014 WP31 Super-Charge Salesforce with Enterprise Knowledge Omni-channel customer service is here to stay. Unfortunately, the growing volume and diversity of customer data omni-channel service creates is causing serious knowledge access challenges at many companies. These challenges are preventing organizations from delivering the responsive, pro-active service customers deserve, and here s why: An agent typically needs to access anywhere from 5 to 20 systems to find case-resolving information. Caseresolving knowledge is always created and stored across a variety of systems. Manually tagging employee profiles to identify experts is ineffective. Expertise, like knowledge itself, is dynamic and constantly evolving and the raise your hand approach can t keep up. Because knowledge is ever-changing, knowledge curation needs to be dynamic as well. Most CRM & Service solutions offer no capabilities to enable crowd-sourced curation of knowledge across all sources and repositories. SEAMLESS KNOWLEDGE ACCESS WITH UNIFIED SEARCH To deliver exceptional customer service, organizations require a solution that can effectively overcome these knowledge access challenges by providing: Unified and secure access to caseresolving knowledge, wherever it resides Real-time, automated expert identification based on real-time analysis of the work product Agent-driven knowledge curation that empowers agents to promote and share helpful content when they find it, and associate it to the case-at-hand A search and relevance solution that utilizes unified indexing and rich text With [Coveo s Insight Console in Salesforce,] our partners see a great deal of information in a very small space, enabling at-a-glance account intelligence. Gerard Snippe, IT Manager, Rembrandt & MBO analytics is well-positioned to deliver these capabilities. A successful solution will index and normalize in near real-time all of the diverse knowledge assets of the company. Its text analytics engine will correlate this diverse data, to understand the Who, What, When, Where, Why of the content. It will then make this comprehensive knowledge easily searchable and findable by support agents; but even more, it will automatically suggest relevant content based upon the particular case or account the agent is dealing with. (i.e. Predictive Knowledge.) Similarly, the right solution will automatically identify experts for any given subject or case, based upon real-time analysis of their work and correspondence across all systems. Importantly, the right solution empowers agents to self-curate the company s knowledge, by easily flagging, sharing, and promoting high-quality content from any system and attaching it to any case or account with a single click. And finally, a successful solution will provide managers with actionable analytics and tuning capabilities, to understand and optimize how customers and agents are finding the information they need. For those organizations using Salesforce Service Cloud or Communities, Coveo for Salesforce delivers these powerful, predictive search capabilities to agent consoles and customer communities. It is a seamlessly integrated search-based app that transforms Salesforce into a unified, predictive knowledge center for customers and agents alike. Unified & Predictive Knowledge From the Service Cloud console and Salesforce1 mobile app, agents in the contact center and the field are provided a unified, 360-degree view of each customer and case, harvested in real-time from across all sales, service, marketing, CRM, messaging, social media, and enterprise systems. Integrated Insight Panels even recommend helpful content based upon the Case or Account being viewed. Real-Time Expert Finder Within the Service Cloud console, agents are recommended experts based upon real-time analysis of team members actual work and experience. On Salesforce Communities, customers are recommended other members who might be able to assist based upon their prior activity within the community. Agent-Driven Knowledge Curation & Actionable Analytics When high-value content is found residing in an external system, with a single click agents can create a new Salesforce Knowledge article, insert the content directly into the Case Feed, attach it directly to the Case itself, or promote it to colleagues. Managers are provided a rich analytics dashboard, accessible directly through the Salesforce Administrator s console, to identify content and knowledge gaps. When designed correctly, search and relevance technology can radically improve customer service KPIs like First Call Deflection, First Contact Resolution, and CSAT. For more insights, visit www.coveo.com and download our solution brief Search-driven Knowledge & Salesforce to Power Customer Service. About Coveo Coveo provides solutions that deliver actionable, personalized knowledge to every employee, support agent, customer, and website visitor. Coveo s Search & Relevance technology unlocks the full value of intranets, customer service applications, and corporate websites by securely connecting, consolidating, and analyzing in real-time an organization s diverse knowledge streams, and providing users with unified search, automated expertise recommendations, and predictive knowledge based upon their unique context and task at hand. For more information, visit www.coveo.com, info@coveo.com, North America: +1.800.635.5476, EMEA: +31 (0)20 658 6334