Knowledge management and self-service

If you have a question about your health insurance or your gas or electricity supply, you probably look it up on the Internet, because that is where you can quickly find the answer to many questions.

At many organizations, self-service is high on the agenda from the perspective of cost reduction. But with properly organized self-service, customer satisfaction can also be increased. After all, customers can literally help themselves at a time that best suits them. What is ‘well-organized self-service’? 

- A lot of thought has been given to different types of self-service: searching for sales- and service-oriented information, changing one’s personal data and making purchases.
- The customer receives proper support in the process.
- The basis is one centralized knowledge source that is used for handling email, customer telephone contact, etc.
- High first-contact resolution is aimed for. To this end, the knowledge that is offered to employees and customers through the various channels must be uniform.

An important condition for well-organized self-service is a coordinated vision and customer contact strategy: supporting customer contacts across all channels, based on one source and one vision, guarantees a uniform projection and treatment. A second condition is a well-organized knowledge organization.