Use Knowledge Management to Increase Customer Satisfaction

I recently moved to a new home, and transferred my internet and TV services. I had bundled services with one of the major providers in my area, providing a home VOIP phone for business use, cable internet, and cable TV with DVR service. I was enjoying my service and had pretty good equipment. A month into my move to the new home, my equipment began to act up and I had trouble with my DVR. Being the technically savvy person I was, I logged on to their website and checked my account to see if there were any current outages or reported issues. While the website was easy to navigate, it took way too long for me to find out what my issue was. Here were my steps:

1. I first clicked on their support page to find something related to current known issues. There were no pages or notices, or any place for adding these types of notices, available on the support pages. This type of support is pretty proactive, though it is becoming more the standard nowadays. I wasn't too terribly inconvenienced to not find this here, but I was disappointed.
2. I then checked their list of top articles for FAQs, frequently used articles, and their top 10 common issues, which did not address any of my issues at all. I had to click through each link and then through a set of more links, until I got frustrated and went directly back to the support page. I credit myself for being patient, so I decided to try another tactic.
3. I typed a search into their online knowledge base. I started general with terms such as “issue,” “common issue,” common problem,” “outages,” and “equipment failure.” The search returned no usable results, and no pages that listed common issues or current known issues reported by users.
4. I then refined my search to include more specific terms (“DVR problem,” “recording skipped,” “X1 equipment issues”) and it finally returned pages that had some promising results. These pages, however, were forum posts created by the company’s customers, not the company representatives themselves. This was concerning to me.
5. I started reading a few of the forum posts. Firstly, there were multiple posts for similar issues. Secondly, these posts were way too long. The first post I started reading through was 10 pages, and near the end a company representative posted a link directing customers to read a different thread.
6. I followed the link to the new thread, which was created by a company representative (this post didn't come up on my search list….wonder why?) a full day after the initial post I read. This thread asked customers to post their issues specific to the XI equipment to assist them with troubleshooting. This thread was well over 50 pages. 50 PAGES. Of customers reporting issues. I skipped around a bit, and found throughout the first 10-15 pages, different company representatives were responding to complaints being left in this thread by customers. Each of the responses was different (shame, shame, shame! Click here for why) but there was a common theme….all customers with the new X1 equipment were experiencing problems due to a software patch previously rolled out, and they were working on the issue but didn't know when it would be fixed.

Now I’d like to point out a few things.  The amount of time it took me to find related information to my issue was completely unacceptable. When I did find what I was looking for, the messaging was not consistent, it was not located in a highly visible area, and there was no statements addressing a time frame for when the issue would be resolved. For those of you familiar with knowledge management, you can clearly see how far they missed the mark. For those of you not familiar with knowledge management, it is a methodology for capturing, optimizing, delivering and maintaining a collection of knowledge that is of value to an organization. Below are a couple of illustrations associated with knowledge management.

What should have happened:

What really happened:

Notice the large gap on the first graphic between when the information is published and when the issue peaks out? More customers experiencing the issue are able to take advantage of that knowledge. The most important concept to understand when looking at these gaps is that they are directly tied to cost. The more time representatives spend on an issue, the more it costs. Simple as that.

Now add in additional channels that a customer can contact a company, such as phone, email, and chat; each with their own inconsistent messaging, and each with representatives communicating with customers and sending issues to the help desk for diagnosis. Talk about driving up cost!

The point I’m trying to make is simply this…the more time a customer has to spend looking for an answer to their issue, the less profitable support becomes and the lower customer satisfaction drops.