In the changing world of business, to survive, businesses must evolve toward an increasingly customer-centric model. They must listen to their customers, not only to maintain a consistently high quality of service, but to identify unmet needs that represent new revenue opportunities-before their competition does. To address the growing complexity of the value chain in a global market, companies must increasingly rely on partners, suppliers, and outsourcing to manage segments of the customer experience. This creates its own set of potential problems, including inconsistency, lower quality, and lost visibility to some customer interactions. Businesses need to extend their customer management programs to collaborate across the value chain and involve both suppliers and partners in improving the customer experience.

It is essential to foster a culture where customer experience is the top consideration of every team member. This requires not only the right tools and processes, but also recognition of the importance of collaboration and communication with customers and partners.

Knowledge Loop aim to enhance customer experience across Web Portal and Contact Center interaction experience

Customer Service Is a Collaborative Process. Traditional customer support portals are a dead end. Just putting information on the Web is not sufficient. Becoming customer-centric has never been more critical-or attainable. Customer experience is increasingly replacing the traditional differentiators such as price and product quality. How well your employees know your customers and work together with your partners to give them a rewarding experience can determine your business success.

According to Marketing Sherpa and CMP TechWeb, 44% of Decision Makers said that Online communities are the #1 interactive information source for consumers researching a technology purchase, and eBay reports that community members spend 54% more than non-members.

No one does a better job spreading the word than happy customers. They expect to hear from you and be heard. Enabling a vibrant community for customers to share their own stories, our proven and universally trusted community platform gives companies the flexibility to incorporate social software into their websites however they're comfortable. Make your website more interactive, invite your customers to participate and while your company's positive exposure quickly expands.

KnowledgeLoop's Knowledge Management and Community Building Applications are engineered to capture customer interactions in a friendly way, dramatically improving your visibility for how customers use your product and what issues they straggle with. You can gain valuable insight into customer behaviors, preferences and needs by analyzing the community's conversational data and engage with your customers for feedback and innovation like creating public (or invitation-only) online focus groups to solicit feedback around new products or ideas, and build communities of employees, customers and partners to engage a larger audience in the development process.

The robust nature of the platform itself offers many more ways to effectively engage your customers and partners, including enabling your customers to be more successful by working together.

Leaders across industries, from large to midsize organizations, are seeking to empower their customer-facing people and partners with tools that improve customer insight and simplify how these parties work together. They want Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technologies that are simple to use, adapt to their existing workflows, and are designed not just to capture a pre-selected list of transaction details but to help companies:

• Collaborate with customers and partners to resolve incidents
• Effectively Leverage online customer self-service resources
• Work with customer feedback and partners to drive innovation from concept to commercialization by enabling people to work together on the research, design, and development of new products.
• Share information, tools, and infrastructures among employees, suppliers, distributors, business partners, and the customer in a closed-loop network.
• Build communities and turn every interaction into an opportunity for building strong customer connections and revenue generation.

Knowledge Loop's Intelligent Email Response capability enable self-service for people who do not have access to Web Browser and would like to access self-service capabilities via email from hand-held devices.

Most of the companies these days provide inbound email capabilities for customer support. Typically these inbound emails create cases in CRM system and CSR attends to such cases independently of the contact channel and typically sends reply or request for additional information via email. However, cases originated via email are unframed and often luck information required by CSR to resolve the case. Hence, CSR has to email back-and-force with the customer to obtain all required information prior to resolving the case. This is lengthy, inefficient and frustrating for both CSR and Customer process. As a result, many companies shut-down their support emails instead redirected support traffic to the Web Portal.

However, what if a company would be able to automatically recognize emails that require simple answer and resolve these while pushing more complex cases to the Web or CSRs? Isn't it similar to customer's behavior on Support Portal? Customers search for information and if they cannot find the information they are looking for, they create case or call support.

At Knowledge Loop we see direct correlation between quantity and quality of accumulated knowledge documents and self-service rates. We also see correlation between the knowledge and CSR metrics such as (AHT and FCR).

The Intelligent Email Response solution utilizes patent-pending Knowledge Management technologies such as Enterprise Search and Knowledge Improvement Loop to match incoming support emails to available knowledge articles and based on the match accuracy thresholds either reply customer with a solution or direct customer to the Support Portal for case submission via Web forms. The software utilizes Active Learning Techniques to closely monitor how customers interact with the Email Response and Customer Support Portal to further improve accuracy of email responses and self-service rates.

Knowledge Loop's proven Collaborative Support solution used by leading high technology and computer software companies to differentiate their customer support services and reduce time-to-resolution by 70%.

Challenges

Most support systems in use today were designed for one support analyst working and resolving a customer issue, assuming a tiered escalation model. Companies that sell enterprise solutions are abandoning this model at a rapid clip. Simply put, this model breaks down when customer support issues require the expertise from multiple disciplines across the organization, forcing analysts to go outside the CRM system and leverage their personal network of contacts through e-mail, instant messaging and phone calls to resolve the issue. The process is ad-hoc, inefficient and fails to build knowledge that can be reused on the next call.

Does your organization face any of these challenges?

• Too many issues escalated to expensive level 2 or level 3 resources? Little to no improvement in time to resolution
• Expensive knowledge base content development
• Long authoring cycles for knowledge base content
• Declining customer service metrics for critical issues
• Unstructured team resolution process
• Inefficient ramp up for new products and releases

Our Solution

KnowledgeLoop helps you implement a knowledge-centered support strategy by augmenting your existing investments in support systems and knowledge bases by:

• Identifying and managing domain experts throughout the organization with their skills, aptitude, availability and track record of success solving similar issues
• Structuring the complex incident resolution process with available solutions, diagnostic approaches, relevant documents and online collaboration with subject matter experts
• Automatically capturing the knowledge developed - during the resolution process - and organizing it according to your unique taxonomy
• Immediately publishing new knowledge to your knowledge base, making it available for reuse on the next customer call
• Identifying the performance of your team to resolve critical issues and to highlight skills development needs
• Integrating with your existing systems with proven adaptors to leading support systems.

The Benefits

With no barriers to participation and knowledge that builds on every interaction, you will enjoy a team-based support process to:

• Realize up to 70% improvement in resolution time
• Effortlessly build knowledge base content and reduce support costs? Lower cost of support by shielding your expensive Level 2 and Level 3 analysts away from issues easily resolved by Level 1.
• Effectively train new analysts with online mentoring programs
• Easily identify costs and performance metrics by root cause

The best part of the KnowledgeLoop's solution is that is simple to implement and fits with today's budget constraints so you can quickly get started. A fully deployed system can be delivered in days and start creating value that will generate a return on your investment in a few weeks.

KnowledgeLoop is a powerful Team Selling solution that improves close rates for highly complex sales cycles that require geographically coordinated resources and close collaboration with multiple, internal groups.

Challenges

To win in today's ultra competitive market for enterprise-class product and service sales, you must effectively marshal your company's resources across multiple disciplines to deliver a solution that exceeds the expectations of your prospective customers. Many sales teams today, however, simply do not have timely access to corporate intellectual assets that can help prepare the best proposal to crush the competition to win the deal.

Does your organization face any of these challenges?

• Difficult to organize, prepare and win Request for Proposals
• Significant hits to team productivity due to false starts and recreating available information
• Discordant client interactions by not being fully prepared with the best corporate knowledge
• Long sales cycles and poor close rates

Our Solution

KnowledgeLoop empowers your team with the knowledge and tools they need to outmaneuver the competition and prepare solutions that better meet client needs. Now you can close more deals and at higher revenue by:

• Identifying key resources across the enterprise and with business partners that have insight to either the client or competition, or have the experience of developing a similar solution for your client's needs
• Structuring and delivering the proposal by building a response team, tackling the critical issues, and synchronizing efforts to deliver a differentiated proposal
• Leveraging the solution for future deals by automatically capturing information and making it immediately reusable for other opportunities
• Providing management visibility to effectively coordinate the team-based sale and control all aspects of customer interaction.

The Benefits

Arm your sales team with the most advanced team-based selling solution for complex sales to:

• Realize higher close rates with differentiated proposals that effectively build upon the knowledge of key enterprise experts and the latest product and service information
• Shorter sales cycles when you're A-team is involved early to eliminate objections up front and advance the proposal
• Focus team execution and leverage available corporate resources to improve productivity and effectively handle more pipeline opportunities
• Increase competitive barrier-to-entry by establishing multiple relationships and contacts between the account and vendor

The best part of KnowledgeLoop is that is simple to implement and fits with today's budget constraints. A fully deployed system can be delivered in days and start creating value that will generate a return on your investment in few weeks.

KnowledgeLoop's products and services give organizations the opportunity to effectively manage knowledge so employees can acquire, create, share and apply knowledge.

Effective management of documents and streamlining business processes enhance productivity. KnowledgeLoop's solutions provide organizations a strategic approach to both content and document management with powerful workflows, security and audit tracking capabilities.

Organizations can benefit from the ability to:

• Analyze knowledge utilization and identify "content gaps"
• Create additional knowledge leveraging information from multiple touch points such as CRM, Web Forums, Email, Bug Tracking Systems, etc.
• Templates and de-normalize content to produce publishable knowledge articles
• Collaborate with domain experts and perfect knowledge articles
• Leverage powerful workflow capabilities to review and approve the content.
• Restrict access rights to documents based on permissions and functional roles.
• Collect customer feedback and initiate content improvement workflow

More on Knowledge Management Solutions… (follow the link)

Knowledge Loop brings leading features of popular collaboration, community and social networking applications to the enterprise in a highly secure, flexible and scalable way. This invites collaboration, captures "know-how", increases productivity and job satisfaction of employees, and builds loyalty of customers.

We see companies leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to capture a new way of communicating and socializing with their customers and partners are being able to create new information streams and deliver breakthrough results. When company creates a community by bringing together customers, partners and employees, the collective intelligence and creativity of their social business networks drives revenues up and costs down.

Knowledge Loop provides tools for building web-based communities span across customers, partners, and employees so that people can help each other to resolve issues and evaluate ideas and opportunities. These tools also improve the quality and speed of support agent response by providing a turnkey way to access, monitor, and archive and connect the appropriate internal or external expertise with the issue at hand.

We believe that success of the support organization is not proportional to the size of the support budget. It is closely related to adopting new processes and technologies especially in the area of people collaboration and technologies turning this collaboration into reusable knowledge minimizing minimize repetitive support cycles and extending customers self-service capabilities.

Live support is the most expensive support activity companies provide. Many organizations relying on disjointed combinations of online, phone, chat, email and existing support software would see their support headcount increase exponentially, same problems being solved over and over again, while the solution not shared across common support channels.

Knowledge Loop helps bridge disjointed support channels including existing support software by allowing agents to quickly view all of a customer's interactions within external support communities, providing both context into an individual customer's issue and a consistent experience for all customers. A small support team, leveraging Knowledge Loop's solutions, methodology and tools, can connect the conversations of customers, product experts and support representatives to enable rapid, efficient and consistent issue resolution.

Knowledge Loop helps minimize these costly customer support interactions, an average 20%, by engaging customers in online conversations with peers and product experts. Knowledge Loop automatically records and indexes these discussions and resulted solutions, making them highly visible, and enabling agents to reduce call times and increase first-call resolution rate.

Knowledge Loop helps build customer trust and loyalty, providing transparency into support activities and allowing customers to see who they interact with, actions taken and a history of all previous interactions.