The history of knowledge management for customers

Catherine Heath | October 6, 2016

Gone are the days of frustrating, crackly phone calls to outsourced customer service departments abroad. 

Well, not quite, but the development of the web has played a key role in the rise of self-service. 

Knowledge management has also had big consequences for the development of customer support.

The user manual

This would normally have been a printed manual accompanying a product our service. For example, if you bought a program, it would come in a box (possibly from a shop!) and the manual would be included. 

It would would probably have been in black and white, and densely written with complicated diagrams. 

This was a relatively costly way of providing documentation and that also became out of date quickly.

The call centre

It used to be that only companies who could afford a dedicated call centre would be able to build a large enough customer base. 

All technical queries required a call to the support team, who would need to be trained and kept up to speed with product queries. 

Naturally this results in lots of inefficiencies, as there could be a time delay from when information has been shared. Knowledge may stand very little chance of reaching the agents who need it, especially if the call centre is outsourced. 

The remote team

With improvements in web-based technologies has come the rise of the remote team. This means that team members are not necessarily sharing the same office and certainly not the same filing cabinet. Some of the same problems of an outsourced support team come with the remote team. 

However, there are now more possibilities than ever for knowledge management. 

Using sophisticated knowledge base software, company knowledge can be easily shared between support agents, and also with customers to enable them to self-serve. 

Improvements in customer support

Rather than being a lucky dip, when customers contact a support team, they stand a higher chance of speaking to an informed rep who can help them with their query. 

Research by Gartner shows that companies can reduce the time it takes to resolve a query by 20-80% if they have a knowledge management strategy. If organizations take advantage of the available technology and maintain an effective knowledge base, the productivity of their support team will increase. 

What does the future hold? 

The future of knowledge management is a mystery, of course, but the changes in how people will work will have a significant effect. 

90% of millennials stay in their role for less than 3 years. With an increase in remote working and job hopping, knowledge will need to become more centralized than ever. Working practices must become more supportive of family life as well, with the trend towards two working parents. 

Customer-centricity is becoming even more crucial to successful business. Better technologies will create a more seamless customer experience. Knowledge bases and self-service are going to be seen more universally as a crucial arm of customer support. 

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