The management of knowledge as an asset in the support center is important for operating an efficient and effective organization. The development, use and improvement, and management of knowledge need to be key areas of focus for leadership.
Knowledge is important for a number of reasons. Customer satisfaction for the support center is driven in a large part by the percentage of contacts resolved by the center. For a support center that has the phone call as its primarily channel, this means the percentage of calls closed by the support center, on the call. Knowledge that is well-structured plays a key role in providing the call specialist with the answer, whether guiding the specialist through problem determination steps, or to information to answer a query, or through the steps in a fulfillment process.
Knowledge is important for another reason, reducing cost through handle time reduction. Knowledge that is properly structured guides the support specialist efficiently through their interaction with the customer, leading to a happier customer, a sense of fulfillment for the specialist, and a reduction in the cost of the interaction. Multiplied hundreds or thousands of times a week, efficient knowledge can drive significant cost savings for the enterprise.
Effective knowledge is complete knowledge. It means not only guiding the specialist to an answer, but the right answer. A significant benefit of having effective knowledge, is a reduction in costs as problems and questions are resolved with one call or contact to the support center. This ‘done in one’ also leads to a more satisfied customer.
It is clear therefore, that knowledge that is properly structured or formatted leads to greater efficiencies, lower costs, higher customer satisfactions, and greater morale.
The development of knowledge involves the planning, gathering, and structuring activities needed to create an initial knowledge base, or database of knowledge. The development of the knowledge base should be managed by the support organization as a project with a clear set of objectives and realistic plan. Project management will ensure that upfront costs and resources needed, as well as expectations and deliverables are well understood. The knowledge development project plan should include a set of tasks to gather information, and a set of tasks to structure the information into knowledge. Gathering information from existing sources involves identifying the sources of information, whether within the organization, within other support or business organizations within the company, or external to the company. Review data from the ticketing system to determine the top reasons people contact the support center. Use this to scope and prioritize your activities. Try to keep the initial set of knowledge development to a manageable level, such as the top 3-5 contact reasons.
Gathering information begins within the organization by identifying existing documentation, and then reviewing the documentation. Support organizations typically have some rudimentary base of information regarding troubleshooting, known errors and workarounds, and basic query information.
The next step is to identify subject matter experts, or SMEs. These SMEs will need to be interviewed according to the plan, and the information from the interviews documented, and added to the information already gathered. Ensure the list of subjects and subject matter experts is saved during the gathering process as these will be key resources in the continuous improvement of the knowledge.
Information gathered must be structured into knowledge. The structure is focused on efficiency, can the knowledge be easily located, and effectiveness, is the knowledge complete and accurate. A well-defined structuring, and a management system that enforces it, is crucial to achieving return on investment objectives. The knowledge structure must support the problem diagnosis process or classification to drive information search to answer how-to queries and business process questions.
Knowledge is structured for problem determination to match symptoms with one or a set of known errors or causes, while the knowledge structure for queries typically involves a classification of information into a hierarchy. For example, a keyword printer may be classified into personal printer and network printer, and personal printer may be classified into brand or type, such as dot-matrix, ink jet, and laser. This type of classification hierarchy has been augmented or replaced altogether in recent years with the advent of powerful search technology. The search engine builds the structure, saving knowledge professionals the task. Unless the information to be structured has unique characteristics that make a general search engine suboptimal, search engines are a very good approach to providing a low cost query solution.
Knowledge is a very important asset for the support center, and as such should be appropriately managed. The goal of knowledge management is to ensure knowledge is timely and accurate, in short, effective. Knowledge that has not been accessed in a predetermined amount of time should be removed from the knowledge database. Knowledge that is used most often should be examined closely to ensure it is streamlined and efficient. Knowledge management should intersect with the change management function to ensure knowledge is managed as an important organizational asset.
In conclusion, knowledge is an important asset for the support contact center. Efficient knowledge means that specialists can get to an answer quickly, effective knowledge means that the specialist gets to the correct answer most of the time. Efficient and effective knowledge, and the proper management of the knowledge, drives lower costs, higher morale, and higher customer satisfaction. Integration of the knowledge application with the ticketing application brings additional efficiencies and enforces additional effectiveness of knowledge.
Brian Flagg, © 2011
About the Author:
Brian has managed large service desk contact centers for Target Corp, and for IBM. He has a history of coming into challenging environments and orchestrating turnarounds, driving down cost/call, driving up retention and greatly improving morale, all while improving quality and the client experience.