2019 is the year for Knowledge-Centered Service®.

After a whirlwind few days meeting with other customer support & experience leaders at the Consortium for Service Innovation Member Summit I’m more convinced than ever that a high-performing KCS program is a key strategy to meeting your customer satisfaction, retention and growth goals in 2019.

I also spotted many key themes and trends coming out of this event that will definitely have an impact on how we develop our strategies and processes as customer service and support professionals.

Trend #1 Knowledge is now the great enabler.

Everyone is talking about digital transformation and in order for these initiatives to be successful, you need to have a defined strategy and actionable plan for managing content – no matter where it resides – across your organization. It’s time to break down the departmental barriers that keep us thinking in silos. It doesn’t matter whose team is internally responsible for building the content, because it doesn’t matter to your customers. They expect a unified, digital journey with access to the right information when they need it and where they need it.

Trend #2 Say goodbye to the tiered support model and hello to the Intelligent Swarming℠* Framework.

The tiered support model is dead for anyone delivering support to complicated or technically advanced products. Its replacement, the Intelligent Swarming Framework is the future. We’re seeing support organizations shift from escalating cases through tiers of support to what is sometimes referred to as “collaboration on steroids.”

What’s behind the shift? First, thanks to the rise in self-service, customers are doing more on their own, with some estimates going up to 80 percent of support cases being solved via self-service channels. Therefore, the support center is only seeing the 20 percent of the most difficult cases that would be very likely to be escalated in a tiered support model, but with the added complication that customers still have high expectations for resolving their issue on first contact. To meet that expectation, we need to align our resources to “swarm” and collaborate on these new and unique cases.

The Consortium for Service Innovation has a new curricula for practitioners hoping to transition from a tiered model to an intelligent swarming model. Check it out here.

Trend #3 AI is a game-changer.

Artificial intelligence is nothing short of a quantum leap opportunity for support organizations. It’s as disruptive as electricity.

In Matt Seaman’s talk, “Emerging Digital Automation in Services,” he shared a few really interesting stats that are driving the AI revolution. Our devices are generating more data from everywhere than ever before and the computing power in 2020 will be 32x what it was in 2010. Chatbot development is outpacing app development by a 2:1 ration and by 2020, 80 percent of all service interactions will start with a chatbot.

AI is here, it’s disruptive and it’s having a major impact on our industry.

Why 2019 is the Year for KCS

What will KCS training do for your organization? I’ve heard many, many success stories of how KCS catalyzed a support transformation with a real impact on customer satisfaction and support initiatives. Organizations that implement KCS successfully often see the following results:

Ability to solve cases faster

  • 50 – 60% improved time to resolution
  • 50% increase in first call resolution

Optimization of resources

  • 70% improved time to proficiency
  • 20 – 35% improved employee retention
  • 20 – 40% improvement in employee satisfaction

Enable efficient self-service

  • Improve customer success with self-help on the web
  • Customer self-service success of 25% – 66%

Increased organizational learning

  • Actionable information to development about customer issues
  • Incident reduction due to root cause removal
  • Increase in collaboration and sharing
  • Improved content

Sound like metrics you want to display to your CEO? Take the first step and join us at KCS training (at the discounted rate of $1500) at Coveo Impact 2019. Register today, then add KCS training to your cart when you go through the registration process.

KCS® and Intelligent Swarming℠ are service marks of the Consortium for Service Innovation.