Knowledge management tools can improve employees' capabilities, contribution, and efficiency provided they have access to the appropriate information at the right time. Your employees may develop and unleash new prospects within your organization when you have valuable internal data. Better performance also can be achieved with the use of knowledge-sharing technologies. 

With a knowledge-sharing solution in place, you'll be able to provide your employees with all essentials they need to achieve their professional goals while also maximizing their contribution to your bottom line.

A robust knowledge management system will simplify locating and reusing essential data and resources throughout your organization. A knowledge management platform helps you: 

- Develop better products and services

- Develop better strategies

- Increase profitability

-Repurpose existing skills and expertise

-Improve operational efficiency and staff productivity

- Identify market trends early and gain a competitive advantage

-Set a benchmark against your competitors 

- Maximize your collective intellectual capital.

Following are 5 ways in which the right km tools empower your customer service teams: 

As mentioned above, knowledge management tools help around several areas in the organization as a whole. Below are listed ways in which knowledge management tools help customer service teams exclusively. 

• Aids the customer service team with reasoning and understanding:

Knowledge sharing technologies provide your staff with access to and visibility into company-wide data, which in many cases gives context to the decisions they make. 

This is crucial at times because management decisions might make certain employees' jobs more complex. It makes sense to assist them in understanding why a decision was taken to minimize problems. 

Employees can understand how the organization runs and use that information to inform their decision-making in the future by looking at the bigger picture. 

This is crucial for comprehending how the business operates and why specific procedures perform the way they do. The customer care team is more effective when they have access to the proper information.

• Helps create and understand opportunities:

Your staff will be able to take control of their personal growth if they have the correct knowledge-sharing tools at their disposal. Your employees will be able to pick and choose what they wish to learn and pursue their own development goals utilizing your internal knowledge if you provide them access to vital information. 

This implies that they improve their understanding of the company's operations. They aren't acquiring material from an unaffiliated third party; therefore, they learn how to grasp the theory and apply it in your company.

Employees can increase their value and contribution to the organization by expanding their skill sets. Learning new abilities can sometimes lead to new opportunities and efficiencies.

Furthermore, your staff becomes more adaptable with a broader skillset, allowing you to relocate resources between business units as needed. Sometimes all it takes is a little more visibility to give employees more authority. A knowledge base can help you take advantage of this potential.

Helps fill the gap between Teams and Business Units:

Knowledge-sharing solutions aid in the dispersal of information across the typical knowledge gaps that most businesses face. Increased sharing can help decrease barriers to collaboration by allowing all employees access to critical information.

This will enable individuals to understand and empathize with the internal issues that others in the business experience. This is crucial for establishing a positive working relationship that maximizes production and efficiency. 

Information can be aggregated into a single centralized area using a knowledge base, allowing employees from around the company to access the same data. 

This helps to bridge the inherent gaps that exist across teams, allowing for even more collaboration chances. Teamwork, communication, and coordination become easier to achieve when everyone is working from the same information.

• Improves the decision-making process:

Every day, your employees make decisions. These are based on their personal experiences and knowledge. While this is usually sufficient, there is likely additional information in the industry that could assist them in making the best selections.

You can help your employees make the best decisions for the company and their coworkers by implementing the correct knowledge-sharing tools in the workplace. 

Employees can further defend their actions and ideas by using information from various knowledge-sharing systems, such as content repositories and knowledge bases. This allows them to go above and beyond their degree of ownership and open up new business prospects.

• Helps the team members understand their role: 

You may encourage your staff and help them appreciate their contributions by giving them a better understanding of what they do, how it affects and benefits the firm and its position in the systems that offer value to your consumers. 

This is especially crucial when things go tough; if your employees understand why and what their hard work contributes, they'll be even more inspired to work hard. 

A knowledge base software can help with this by providing insight into the company's overall operations. Employees will appreciate what is going on around them as documentation is written and preserved, and they will be able to change accordingly. This is significant because it allows them to see processes and infrastructures that would otherwise be hidden

With the proper information sharing technologies in place, you can boost your employees' productivity, empower them to grow and diversify at their own speed, and guarantee they have everything they need to learn what they want when they want it. This is critical for keeping your employees happy, allowing for professional development, and fostering continued growth.

Conclusion 

Knowledge management tools have shown their value throughout time. They provide a new way of doing things and a better experience for both customers and staff. Choosing the right knowledge management platform for your firm streamlines the process, saves time, and increases team efficiency.

One of the major aspects of customer service is agent productivity that as a result helps the company in improving its customer experience (CX). Agents (users, employees) should be given access to all the necessary information and documents that are stored in an organized manner. In the training duration, it might happen that agents do not know what the next exact step should be taken while solving a customer’s query. 

This can be prevented with the help of knowledge management tools like decision trees, picture guides, augmented reality, learning management systems (LMS), and more. Hence, it is important to boost agent productivity and thus, increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) and this can be done with the assistance of knowledge management software. 

What is knowledge management? 

Knowledge management is a platform that helps in managing the company’s information and helps in creating and sharing information. It helps the company with various aspects like improving customer experience, increasing customer satisfaction, boosting agent productivity, and more. 

If all the information is not easily accessible to the employees then it might bring great loss to the organization along with a lot of valuable time spent in finding the required information. A knowledge management system (KMS) collects all the information of that organization and stores them in an organized way which makes it easier for the employees to find what they are looking for instantly. 

Why is it necessary for business?

Training the customer agents can be a tough and time-consuming activity. But with the advancement in technology and the significant increase in customer expectations, it is very much important that the agents are well-trained with the right skills. This is where the knowledge management system (KMS) comes to the rescue. The KMS helps the agents in learning the right skills, keeping a track of their training progress, and also helps in self-learning. 

Agents can be trained with KMS tools like knowledge base, augmented reality, and learning management system (LMS), etc., with much more ease. There can come up situations where the customer agent is under the training process and is unaware of the next step to be taken while resolving customer queries. In these situations, the knowledge management system becomes useful by guiding the agents with tools like decision trees, picture guides, etc., that provide a step-by-step guide. 

How to boost agent productivity? 

As discussed earlier, how the knowledge management system (KMS) helps the agents with tools like augmented reality, learning management systems, decision trees, FAQs, knowledge base, and more, also helps to boost agent productivity. 

There are other points as well such as ensuring that the agents are well-trained and that agents have access to well-organized information, their workload is reduced with the assistance of automated support and feedback from the agents are collected. Now let us look into these points more briefly. 

Make them well-trained 

With the help of decision trees, customer agents would know the exact next step to be taken while solving customer queries during their training process or even after that. Also, call centre heads have to make sure of the fact that the agents are well-trained with the knowledge of the company's services to their customers. Trainers, with the help of picture guides, make the agents familiar with the company’s services. 

Agents can have the access to all the information stored in an organised manner with the help of a knowledge base. This helps the agents to quickly resolve customer queries. It is also essential to track the agents' training progress which can be done with the help of a learning management system (LMS). 

Organize all the cluttered information 

All the information in an unorganized way might bring great loss to the company. Information, when needed by the agents and cannot be found quickly, increases the average handling time (AHT) and also decreases customer satisfaction (CSAT) as the customers will have to wait for more for getting their issues resolved. 

Hence, it is crucial that all the information and documents of the company must be collected and stored in an organized manner through which agents can easily find any particular information when needed while solving customer queries. Thus, boosting agent productivity and increasing customer satisfaction. 

Automate support 

Leaving all the customer queries to be resolved, at the hands of the customer agents might not only take a lot of their time but also decrease their work efficiency. This issue can also be prevented with the deployment of self-service systems with the assistance of a knowledge management system. 

Customers can solve their problems with self-service easily and thus, the agents do not have to spend their time on some common or the same repeated questions. They can focus on more complex queries. Implementation of a self-service system would be a win-win for the company as this helps in increasing their work efficiency and boosts their productivity and also helps in increasing customer satisfaction. 

Gather feedback

Feedback must be collected not only from the customers about how well the company’s services are but also from the customer agents about their work. They might have some creative suggestions in their mind that can help the company to improve their services. This will increase agents' work efficiency and also help in increasing customer satisfaction. 

Conclusion 

This can be said that for the betterment of the company it is important to boost agent productivity. The knowledge management system (KMS) along with the learning management system (LMS) has many key benefits for the company which improves training, enhances operations and overall ROI.