How do Knowledge Management and CRM integration benefits businesses?

. TheCustomer experiences hold the key to business success today. As an organization expands its operations, more and more customer information adds up. The main challenge is to keep up with the pace with which new information enters and consolidate it with the existing one. The key, therefore, is to embrace innovative systems that empower your business to consistently leverage data to create growth opportunities.   

Before we delve into how Knowledge Management and CRM integration can benefit your business, let us first look into each one of them.

What is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a technology a company uses to manage interactions with its customers and to measure customer data throughout their journey. The aim is to retain existing customers and target potential customers to derive maximum value for the business to grow. A CRM platform improves customer experiences and strengthens brand-customer relationships by keeping track of customer information from different channels. 

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge Management is a system of creating and curating an organization’s information, managing it, and distributing it across the organization. The primary aim of a Knowledge Management system is to efficiently manage all organizational information to make knowledge readily available to the right people at the right time. 

A CRM platform collects and keeps track of customer data to improve customer relationships. It tries to gather and store customer data to enhance brand-customer relationships. However, the challenge is to organize this data in the correct format to be utilized in times of need. Knowledge Management helps organizations consolidate and manage all the relevant data and equips them with best practices for improved customer experiences. 

How Knowledge Management and CRM integration can derive benefits for your business?

We will now look into some of the top ways Knowledge Management and CRM integration can derive benefits for your business.

Increases Employee productivity

A simple customer query can be resolved by referring to a few documents on customer information available in CRM. However, complex customer queries come up quite frequently and demand agents to do more intricate work. There are also multiple steps involved in the process when customer queries are involved. 

A CRM platform provides the customer data but does not guide agents with the correct order of steps they need to follow to troubleshoot problems. It expects agents to know all the steps and the systems they need to refer to. Practically, no agent can be trained enough with all the information, given a plethora of data that needs their attention. 

Such situations leave agents with multiple screens they need to toggle between to gather the correct information. And this is not how today’s customers can be dealt with. More than 85% of consumers would switch to doing business with a competitor after one bad customer experience. 

Leveraging Knowledge Management tools for CRM functions improves the natural findability of information and empowers agents with guided workflows to provide quality support to customers. When agents follow all the proper steps for resolutions, it ensures SOP adherence and improves workforce efficiency. Another advantage of Knowledge Management and CRM integration is call deflection to self-service channels for queries that don’t necessarily require agent assistance. 

Call deflection is a great way to prevent agent burnout and empower your customers to help themselves. Since the agents have access to the information and the tools to utilize it in the right way, they get more productive at resolving customer issues faster and improving customers’ satisfaction with your brand.   

Creates team alignment 

There can be different ways to approach customer data and solve a particular customer query. When various team members encounter the same problem differently, it is a sign that your organization lacks process standardization, leaving your new agents without any direction. 

A knowledge-infused system to manage customer relationships introduces process consistency to create team alignment. It ensures that all your agents follow the same process to resolve a particular customer query instead of having an independent approach to problem-solving. With consistent knowledge throughout the organization, your team is better aligned and shares a shared understanding of your brand’s values and objectives.

The foundation of a strong Customer Experience strategy lies in employee efficiency and coordination within the team. An aligned customer support team is accountable and customer-centric. It ensures that all the processes are adequately followed to resolve customer concerns and deliver a consistent experience throughout their journey. 

A knowledge Management system for customer service improves CRM success by keeping customer data updated and relevant. It keeps your customer-facing agents updated and empowers the whole team to be proactive in their interactions with customers. 

Personalized customer experiences

Over 70% of customers expect customer support representatives to know them and their past interactions with the company. Context is key to resolving customer issues intelligently. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system tracks customer journeys and provides agents with customer context to resolve issues. CRM functions that use AI-backed knowledge management software create personalized customer experiences. This helps agents with the proper customer context from a pool of customer information stored in CRM software. 

An example of this is customer service tools like Cognitive Decision Trees, which auto traverse primary customer information. The information involves profile information and other services they have with the company from the CRM platform. This minimizes customer effort by eliminating the need to share information with agents manually and helps agents to resolve queries faster, resulting in improved CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores. 

AI Knowledge management tools constantly learn from customer interactions and help brands with valuable insights about customers’ needs and preferences. With these insights, you can customize content for your customers and improve their engagement with your brand. 

Thus, knowledge management and CRM integration will constantly help you create value from customer knowledge and improve the knowledge quality of your organization to offer personalized customer experiences.   

Valuable insights for Business growth

The key to a business’s success depends on efficient organization and management of data. Knowledge management features like micro-segmented analytics enable enterprise-wide content visibility. It also helps companies make real-time decisions. These intelligent analytics track usage of the content which can help you identify the most used knowledge pieces. 

You can build upon the most engaging content and improve its accessibility for your agents and customers. 

By tracking the search activity, Knowledge management systems can provide your organization with actionable insights for business growth. If a user searches for a particular knowledge piece not available in the organization’s knowledge base, you can fill these gaps by updating the relevant content. So, being proactive in managing your knowledge and ensuring it is appropriate for all stakeholders is crucial to building brand trust among employees and customers alike.  

Since your agents are the ultimate service providers, making your customers happy and satisfied largely depends on how comfortable your agents are. The feedback mechanism tracks agent satisfaction with the organizational knowledge, which can help you keep content updated and relevant. 

Therefore, a fast-paced service organization must follow user engagement and proper understanding. Knowledge management and CRM integration derive valuable insights from ‘knowledge of customers”. It also distribute relevant ‘knowledge for customers’ and take feedback from ‘knowledge from customers and agents’ to drive business growth.

Conclusion

Although Knowledge Management and Customer Relationship Management grew as autonomous disciplines, the rising customer expectations demand the two tools to work together to create the best customer services. CRM alone cannot organize and manage all the customer data. 

A Knowledge Management and CRM integration can help you boost your employees’ productivity. Additionally, it also aligns your teams with common brand goals. This also shares personalized experiences with your customers, and leverage data to drive business growth and development.  

Author’s Bio

Manpreet is a senior digital marketing executive at Knowmax, a SaaS-based organization that offers an enterprise knowledge base management system for various industries like telecom, banking, healthcare, insurance, e-commerce, etc. When he is not on his work desk, Manpreet loves reading novels based on historical events & sometimes watches videos that talk about the world beyond earth.