Scale Service with Self-Help
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®).
- Describe federated search.
- Show how Experience Cloud sites can help your organization scale.
Finding the resources to grow a knowledge base for your contact center can be a real challenge. A lot of contact centers are dealing with shrinking budgets so hiring people to write knowledge articles is out of the question. The solution is to incorporate knowledge creation within the agent workflow and build on that knowledge with help from a customer community. In this unit we use our success center as an example to show you how Knowledge, Experience Cloud, and Einstein Bots can all work together to help your organization scale.
How We Use Our Knowledge Base Philosophy
At Salesforce, our knowledge base is always growing and it’s continuously improving the experience for both customers and agents. Salesforce Knowledge makes self-service better and reduces customer effort.
Our knowledge base philosophy is to solve once, and use often. We rely on the Knowledge-Centered Service, or KCS, methodology to build up our knowledge base. KCS methodology was developed by the nonprofit Consortium for Service Innovation, and it strives to integrate the creation of knowledge articles into the problem-solving process. For example, when a customer has a new or unusual issue, the solution should be captured in the knowledge base to save time when the same issue comes up again in the future. KCS helps contact centers evolve content and reward learning and collaboration.
Using KCS methodology in the success center, our agents continuously share expertise through Knowledge. Every time a formerly unknown issue is resolved, agents convert those new insights into reusable knowledge articles. Adding to the knowledge base means agents enable their teammates around the globe to resolve cases more quickly. All this activity reduces customer effort scores, promotes a widespread culture of Knowledge, and enhances collaboration between success teams, account teams, and product teams.
Why We Use Federated Search
Sometimes the answers you need can’t be found within your organization. That’s why Knowledge features federated search that helps users find answers quickly using external sources. In our success center, agents avoid the hassle of swiveling between screens by accessing the information right from their console. Federated search makes articles easy to find and easy to use for agents and customers alike.
Not only do customers have the option to go to our portal and search, they also get Google search results from our portal, without having to open another tab in their browser. Google search traffic is our number one channel to provide knowledge articles to our customers. The solutions to issues can come from all over the Internet, and that’s why it’s so convenient to have Google search results integrated into the Service Cloud portal. Federated search allows companies to keep growing fast by filling in the gaps in your knowledge base. The answers are all right there, whether or not your team has written a knowledge article.
How Our Self-Service Site Works for Everyone
Experience Cloud sites are a great way to help your business scale. For Salesforce, the Trailblazer Site gives customers opportunities to get answers from other customers and is a critical piece of our platform. We have over two million monthly visits to our Trailblazer Site. The Trailblazer Site encourages participation by acknowledging contributions with badges for power users. Customers can find answers or respond to questions on a variety of topics and even form groups focused on specific subject areas.
The site community answers questions surprisingly fast. One hundred percent of the questions asked are answered within 24 hours, with 98% of the questions answered by other users. Because agents are responsible for answering only 2% of the questions, time and resources are freed up. Building up a community is a great way to help your company scale quickly.
Understand the Benefits of Einstein Bots
Now, let's talk about more scalability with Einstein Bots. We use Einstein Bots not only to guide the customer to the right answers, but also to learn and grow from the data that the customers input into the tool. It's really helping us build a knowledge base that deflects easier how-to questions.
For example, by looking at the data on lost login credentials, we realized that we can deflect more calls by using the bot to ask about single sign-on (SSO) login capability. So when a customer types “I'm locked out” the bot now asks, "Do you have SSO?" Or, "Do you not have SSO?" It seems like a small thing, but it made a big difference. So once the bot has that information, it can get the customer the answers they need quickly and efficiently, without having to create a ticket or get on the telephone for support. The information chatbots collect also helps us understand our customers better so we can keep improving service while we continue to scale.
Conclusion
Together, a strong community and knowledge base help companies keep call volume low so your agents stay available for more complex, urgent cases. In the next unit, you learn how you can increase agent productivity even more using our prediction builder, appointment scheduler, and a single console.