Consumers have a lot of choices these days, and with consumer spending decreasing, more companies are competing for their share of the market. With so many high-quality products and services available, one of the best ways for businesses to distinguish themselves is by providing excellent customer service. Of course, we all know that is easier said than done—customer service is one of the biggest challenges for any business. But a shift toward knowledge based management can help.

Knowledge based management is one of the hottest topics in business right now, and it is a great place to begin the conversation about how to improve customer service. Knowledge management refers to how companies organize, share, access, and create value from their organizational knowledge. It encompasses how both employees and customers interact with a company’s knowledge resources. All businesses have some sort of knowledge management strategy, even if that strategy is keeping a file folder of printed documents in the break room. But companies can greatly increase their efficiency by defining a formal knowledge management strategy, which includes adopting knowledge management system software, such as Knowledgebase from ProProfs.

Creating an organizational knowledge base using knowledge management software can improve the efficiency of your customer service center in many ways:

• Decreased call volume. Most people would rather not spend their time on the phone or on hold with customer service. You can use this to your advantage by creating an online external knowledge base where customers can find answers to their own questions. You can review the most common questions routed to your call center ask and, using knowledge base software, build a comprehensive, highly searchable public knowledge base for your customers to use.

• Decreased call time. It is estimated that nearly 80 percent of customer service agents’ phone time is spent looking for answers. Adopting a knowledge management strategy allows agents to spend less time searching and more time helping. Decreasing the average call time also means that customer service agents can handle more calls in the same time frame, with the result that customers will spend less time on hold.

• Increased accuracy and consistency. There is nothing more frustrating than asking two customer service agents the same question and getting two different answers. Organizing your information resources using knowledge base software will help ensure that your customers get the right answer the first time. Improving the percentage of problems that are resolved on the first call has been shown to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Decreased number of escalations. If your customers and service agents can find the information they are looking for quickly and easily, fewer calls will be sent up the line to be handled by supervisors.

• Decreased training time. Companies spend a lot of money on customer service training. Aggregating all of your information resources into one system using a single application means that new hires need to spend less time learning the software. For the best training results, choose knowledge management software with an intuitive, easy-to-learn user interface.

• More professional impression. For many businesses, especially Internet ventures, customer service agents are the only point of contact with customers. A knowledge management system that facilitates fast and accurate problem resolution presents a courteous, professional image to customers—who may go on to review the company on Yelp or one of the many other popular review sites.

Using knowledge management software to organize your company’s information resources can greatly increase customer satisfaction by improving customer service. In addition, by tracking how your customers access the system and the types of questions they ask, you can gain insight into how to improve your products and processes in the future. It may seem like a small step, but it can have a large impact on your business.