Contact Center Rescue Series: Knowledge Management
The current knowledge management system in the contact center is ineffective and is causing a number of issues for both customers and agents. Customers are frequently receiving incorrect or incomplete information, which is leading to a high number of escalations and customer dissatisfaction. Agents are also struggling to access the relevant information they need to assist customers, which is leading to longer call times and increased frustration. This is causing a negative impact on the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the contact center.
There are several factors contributing to the ineffectiveness of the knowledge management system. Firstly, the system is not intuitive and it is difficult for agents to navigate and find the information they need. Secondly, the information contained in the system is often out of date or incomplete, which means that agents are unable to provide accurate and up-to-date information to customers. Finally, there is a lack of training and support for agents in using the knowledge management system, which is causing further issues.
It is important that a solution is implemented to address these issues and improve the effectiveness of the knowledge management system in the contact center. This will help to improve the customer experience, increase agent productivity, and overall enhance the efficiency of the contact center.
Knowledge management is important in the contact center because it helps to ensure that agents have access to the information and resources they need to effectively handle customer inquiries and requests. By organizing and storing information in a central repository, knowledge management can help to make it easy for agents to find the answers to common customer questions or issues. This can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the contact center, as agents will be able to resolve customer inquiries more quickly and accurately. Additionally, knowledge management can help to reduce the need for agents to transfer customer calls or inquiries to other departments or teams, as they will be able to access the information they need to handle the customer's request directly. Overall, knowledge management is essential for the success and sustainability of a contact center.
Are you looking for ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your contact center? If so, then you should consider implementing a knowledge management strategy. Knowledge management is important in the contact center because it helps to ensure that agents have access to the information and resources they need to effectively handle customer inquiries and requests. By organizing and storing information in a central repository, knowledge management can help make it easy for agents to find answers to common customer questions or issues. This can lead to faster resolution times and improved accuracy rates, both of which can contribute to a better overall customer experience. Additionally, knowledge management can help reduce the need for agent transfers by making it possible for agents to access the information they need directly. This can free up time and improve call flow by preventing customers from being transferred unnecessarily. Implementing a knowledge management strategy is essential in ensuring your contact center's success and sustainability.
In this blog, we will discuss the following:
1. Introduce the concept of knowledge management and its importance in the contact center
2. Describe how knowledge management can help to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the contact center
3. Discuss how knowledge management can help to reduce the need for call transfers or inquiries to other departments
4. Summarize why knowledge management is essential for the success and sustainability of a contact center
Introduce the concept of knowledge management and its importance in the contact center
Knowledge management is an important but often overlooked aspect of contact centers. It basically refers to techniques and processes used for capturing, organizing, and disseminating knowledge across a business. In the context of a contact center, it involves leveraging all the cumulative and collective data from customer interactions to drive intelligent decision-making. For example, this could include product expertise gathered from customer interactions that helps agents answer tough product questions with more accuracy or suggestions for personalizing customer service based on their demographic or order history. Knowledge management enables contact centers to utilize every customer conversation as a learning opportunity that paves the way for organizational evolution and better customer experiences overall.
Describe how knowledge management can help to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the contact center
By utilizing knowledge management in the contact center, teams can work more efficiently and effectively. First and foremost, having a repository of support information that agents can access when on calls with customers enables them to easily collect data and quickly resolve issues. This allows them to spend less time searching for answers and more time concentrating on customer needs. In addition, when agents gain greater insights related to customer trends and problems, it will improve their ability to identify underlying issues within customer contacts; this encourages employees to become problem solvers who are focused on innovative solutions for customer success. Finally, through knowledge sharing among team members via a centralized platform, contact centers can empower agents with the most up-to-date information, improving call resolution time and bringing clarity where confusion existed.
Discuss how knowledge management can help to reduce the need for call transfers or inquiries to other departments
Knowledge management is a powerful tool for streamlining customer interactions and helping businesses provide an excellent customer experience. A well-constructed knowledge base with articles, faqs and multi-channel assistance can help to reduce the need for call transfers or inquiries to other departments by making information more readily available to customers. This is especially true for larger organizations, where having in-depth knowledge about all departments’ tasks, functions and processes can help deflect inquiries rather than entertain them. By implementing global standards within a set of structured data points, organizations can provide consistent and precise answers regardless of the channel from which customers request it. Through comprehensive knowledge management solutions, companies are better able to prioritize customer service requests and reduce overall workloads while ensuring customers have access to timely resolution solutions.
Summarize why knowledge management is essential for the success and sustainability of a contact center
Knowledge management is a critical factor for the success and sustainability of contact centers. In order to keep up with customer demands, it's important that contact center employees have access to the most up-to-date and accurate information. Having an organized and accessible source of knowledge allows agents to quickly find the best solutions and provide customers with high-quality responses in a timely manner. Additionally, capturing transactions using key metrics such as speed, effectiveness, and quality helps assess and compare performance trends so changes can be implemented on time - thus maximizing sales opportunities while minimizing cost. Therefore, knowledge management is a powerful tool that can help contact centers optimize processes by sharply improving efficiency while providing customer service excellence.
In order for a contact center to be successful and sustainable, it is essential that they have a knowledge management system in place. A KM system can help improve the contact center's efficiency and effectiveness by reducing the need for call transfers or inquiries to other departments. By subscribing to our blog, you will learn more about how knowledge management can benefit your organization’s contact center.
The Knowledge Management process focuses on ensuring all employees have adequate resources available to them to understand and resolve the issues they are encountering. It ensures that a centralized tool is available with appropriate workflow, approval process, validation process and access by both the IT and business teams. The Focus on how information is identified, created, captured, acquired, shared and leveraged within an organization. Systemic processes are defined to support the above activities.
Process Objective:
The Knowledge Management Process will define the criteria for the knowledge management role, the objectives of the role and the expected outcome. The process will also define how the knowledge tool will be maintained, how new documents are built, how old documents are updated, how skill-gap analysis will be used.
- Assuring that knowledge requests are handled within committed knowledge request handling guidelines
- Assuring that the responsibility for handling knowledge requests is included in the roles of support personnel job responsibilities
- Effectively capturing and reusing support-related information
Sample List of Benefits:
- Increase productivity and efficiency
- Improve Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)
- Improve Customer Satisfaction
- Distribute knowledge across the team
- Improve skill levels
- Ensure better trained employees
- Reduce number of incidents through proactive mining of Incident Data and taking actions to prevent future occurrences.
Sample List of Observations:
- There is no Infrastructure wide knowledge management tool.
- There are no Infrastructure wide knowledge management processes. Teams are unaware of Infrastructure processes or what role they play in them.
- There is no Infrastructure wide knowledge management focal. Team is unaware of Infrastructure focal and the role they play.
- There is no department specific knowledge management focal or supporting processes. Teams are beginning to document some processes, but there does not appear to be a strategy behind it. Focus is on quantity versus quality.
Sample List of Recommendations:
- Develop Infrastructure Wide Knowledge Management System (KMS). This will consist of Knowledge Management Tool and supporting Processes.
- Tool and supporting processes need to be communicated to teams and education/marketing sessions need to take place (Roadshows).
- Establish connection between Quality, Reporting and Measurements, Analytics and Continual Improvement Program focals to share analysis and update KB accordingly.
- Establish reports for new and newly updated documents by team, by employee, etc.
- Consider requiring agents to reference the KMS article number that they used when diagnosing and resolving or referring each incident. Increase Infrastructure collaboration in Knowledge Management.
The following guiding principles ensure adherence to the organizational objectives of establishing an effective knowledge management system.
- Clearly define all Processes and Procedures related to the managing and governing of the Knowledge Management Program.
- Clearly define the Roles and Responsibilities involved in the Knowledge Management Program, specifically that of the Knowledge Management Coordinator.
- Clearly define all meetings related to the Knowledge Management Program.
- Clearly define all Reports and Measurements related to the Knowledge Management Program.
- Clearly define all Tools related to the Knowledge Management Program.
- Clearly define all Continual Improvement initiatives related to the Knowledge Management Program.
- Establish a periodic review cycle to ensure currency of the documentation.
- Identify approval process where local Management and Enterprise Manager contribute to review of local team process.
- Identify a Portal to store all Knowledge Management Documentation such as process documentation, analysis, reports, etc.
- Create Knowledge Management distribution list (e.g. KnowledgeManagement@company.com), to have a central location where anyone can send questions, ask for help and provide information to the Knowledge Management Process.
- Create Knowledge Management e-newsletter to share with the team about Root Cause Analysis, Trends and any Improvement Areas.
- Identify and connect with the Enterprise Knowledge Manager to establish a working partnership and identify Inputs and Outputs between the Enterprise process and the team process.
- Identify and attend the Enterprise Knowledge Management Meeting.
- Schedule department level Knowledge Management Meeting, if needed.
- Create Department Level Knowledge Management Executive Dashboard Report for the management team – linked to the Common ScoreCard Management System.
- Work with Department Management and Enterprise team to establish Knowledge Management metrics.
- Work with Department Management and Enterprise team to establish Knowledge Management operational reports, such as:
- KB Documents Created
- KB Documents Open and Unassigned
- KB Documents Aging Report
- KB Documents by Category
- KB Documents usage
- Etc…
- Schedule 2-3 hours every Friday to conduct analysis of Knowledge Management System.
- Contribute to updating of the Common ScoreCard Management System by EOD ever Friday. Provide volume and downtime history on all Sev 1s and 2s, root cause of Sev 1s and 2s, any observable trends and actions being taken to resolve issues more quickly or minimize/avoid the issues.
- Conduct overall trend analysis and present to management.
- Implement the role of Knowledge Coordinator in each team. This role should act as the Team’s primary interface into the Knowledge Management process and represents the Team’s interests in meeting service commitments.
- Enforce usage of Knowledgebase by forcing employees to provide Knowledge Document ID in all solutions they are using/providing.
- Create Knowledge “Request” Templates.
- Allow employees the option to submit knowledge requests to update a Knowledge article, create new articles, or delete old articles.
- Monitor unassigned and reassigned knowledge requests and take action if appropriate
- Manage invalid knowledge requests (for example, knowledge requests with insufficient information, redundant requests, requests for documentation that already exists) per local policy
- Track open requests and identify any requests that require increased focus to meet committed knowledge request handling guidelines
- Handle day-to-day knowledge request issues and escalate to the Subject Matter Expert (SME) and/or assigned team as required to bring the resolution of the problems back on schedule
- Assist in reassignment of misdirected knowledge requests
- Assure the quality and accuracy of knowledge request and solution document information, as appropriate
- Assign new knowledge requests to the appropriate SME team for authoring or reviewing.
- Close knowledge requests and notify the SME and original requester when the request is complete.
- Identify and attend Enterprise Knowledge Management Meeting
- Schedule Department Level Knowledge Management Meeting
Exercise: What elements of the Operational Management Framework do you think have an impact on Knowledge Management?
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