Date: 23th May, 2019

When a vendor implement managed live chat services they at first analyse client’s website and ask for the details about the marketing campaigns where they are advertising their products and services. In order to train chat agents client are required to send their product/service information as much as they can. Most of the times training material includes following:

1. Product/services manuals
2. Presentation documents
3. Frequently asked questions
4. Information collected from websites
5. New blog updates
6. New features and service updates
7. Existing customer services script if they have any
8. Existing customer services rules and policies
9. Company/business values
10. Frequent scenarios/issues and their resolutions
11. Marketing campaigns (offline and online)
12. Partnership programs
13. Business affiliations and networks

Above list is not limited to some specific number rather it goes on and depends upon the nature of business and what are their customer service norms. There are several ways to manage information mentioned in above list but normally there are three methods that businesses are adopting.

1. Managing knowledge banks on an excel sheet, word or power point
2. Creating an FAQ section on business websites where customers can search there issues
3. Third part knowledge bank softwares and portals

With the passage of time businesses receive a lot of new information in terms of feedback, updates and technical issues that customers are facing on daily basis. Customer support departs are always struggling to mature their processes to train their internal teams who then support their processes. The most important thing here is the distribution of information and its continuous flow where everyone receive new updates, process changes etc in real time. Legacy systems are no more in action and even small businesses are looking for strategic processes where flow of information is in real time and their staff and customers are fully updated. Information flow s always two process.

Top management is mainly responsible for introducing new line of products, realising marketing campaigns, deciding about new affiliations, taking actions on new mergers and acquisitions. Customers are biggest stake holders in every business and they need to be informed and updated on every new bit of information about the products and services they are consuming. Imagine a business with more than 100 employees who are working directly with customers and supporting them for their issues. Suppose there was a TV ad or a billboard campaign offering some discounts to customers with a discount coupon mentioned in TV ad and billboards. Just for an example if downward flow of information is weak and late then customer support department may not be able to answer questions about discount coupons and as result business may loose thousands of customers. Similarly if any support agent is not informed or updated regarding a recent process change where they are supposed to entertain a customer with the help of a different process or they find out that legacy process is no more there and they have to use some other portal where they can activate customer or entertain their query then business will not only loose that customer but also there will be a damage to their reputation.

Information flow from bottom to top is equally important as top to bottom. For any business their end users are the forces who derive upcoming changes in products and services. From small businesses to large scale corporates every entity makes sure customer feedback is properly managed and delivered to top management. In our years of experience we have seen businesses growing with 40-45% annual increase in revenues who took customer feedback seriously and acted on it on immediate basis. There are hundreds of tools and processes that help businesses collect as much feedback as they can. Top example can be amazon using Survey Monkey to collect feedback from millions of its customers including wholesalers, retailers and end customers. Also they have installed different feedback widgets on their web pages where they collect customer feedback about their experience in real time.

Knowledge banks are mixture of information collected as a feedback from customers and top management’s decisions about new marketing campaigns and changes in exiting processes. Live Person and Live Chat Inc are two names who are considered giants in chat software industry. They both are working with businesses and understanding their changing needs in terms of customer services. In their recent updates they have rolled out Smart Knowledge Banks as a new feature. Lets discuss what is new in that.

Agents can access lates information updated on they chat console/dashboard by clicking on the Knowledge bank section. Rather creating excel sheets and word documents agents can access answers to several frequently asked questions by customers. Moreover smart knowledge banks have the capacity to store new process changes and installation guides etc that can help any type of team serving any type of customers. Its integration with blog/article section of website makes its more useable for agents and they find relevant blog posts by searching specific keywords. In legacy knowledge bank systems agents had to navigate and manually search relevant topics on some specific issues but now they can easily put a search keyword in the search bar of their internal knowledge centre and find several relevant answers quickly.

Public help centre is second part of smart knowledge bank and can be installed on business websites. Its basic functionality is like google search where customers need to put search queries regarding their specific issues and in results they may find solutions in terms of blog posts, installation procedures, FAQs and customer guides. Public help centre saves time and assists thousands of customers by suggesting answers and relevant posts within this widget.

Interesting Features
Branded Help Centre:

Businesses can build a public help centre in just few minutes with their branding and customers can start finding common answers on any device. This widget is responsive and can be accessed on desktop system, mobile and tablets.

Create an online – cloud based internal knowledge bank as per your own priorities. Add as much data as you can that can assist your agents while entertaining your customers. Create user friendly presentations, share new process diagrams, and manage its content exactly the way you want.

Customer may be putting a lot of search queries against which they may not be getting relevant answers. Artificial intelligence plays a very good role here by collecting those unattended queries and suggesting them to your support teams so that they can add more relevant topics and answers that customers are asking on daily basis. AI makes it a continuous process to update knowledge centres and makes it quite easy by aligning the flow of information.

You can easily update actionable content driven from intelligent insights. Organise your content with topics, keywords and visibility settings so that customers can easily find what they are looking for.