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Knowledge management is the hottest subject of the day.  With the advancements in technology, data and information are readily available online enabling business managers to discover and learn new measures, new technologies, and garner new opportunities. But this is not as easy as it looks, you need to have the ability to gather information in usable formats and distribute knowledge to achieve the organization’s objectives. Knowledge Management can transcend your organization to new levels of effectiveness, efficiency, and scope of operation especially in contact centers.

It can have a profound effect on the quality and efficiency of your service operations. With information readily available, customers benefit from interactions with more knowledgeable agents, who are empowered to resolve issues with greater speed, accuracy and consistency. There can be a substantial saving in Agent training cost.
Implementing Knowledge management needs to be a carefully planned exercise keeping in mind the targeted goals and the development of knowledge that is closely aligned with service needs.

Goals and Metrics
The first step towards implementing knowledge management is setting Goals and metric and for that you need to identify the areas that are most critical to your company’s service operations, and then determine the metrics against that will provide a comprehensive view of the business, akin to a balanced scorecard, such as  daily operational metrics (reduced talk time, higher first contact resolution, reduced Tier-2 escalations) and performance metrics (improved customer satisfaction, higher agent morale, lower agent turnover, or faster time to competency for new hires).

Planning for Implementation
Knowledge management is much more than a technology implementation, what it requires is strong leadership. Knowledge management must be viewed as part of optimizing the overall customer experience and empowering the support organization to achieve this vision.

Once knowledge management has been fine-tuned in the contact center, it can then be deployed for customer self-service. Because the content and guidance methodologies have been improved and expanded upon through agent desktop, self-service customers will experience a more mature and robust implementation that will lead to higher rates of adoption and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.

Create a Knowledge base
The knowledgebase design plan should take into account:

1. Guidelines and standards for content development that will aid the inquiry resolution process.
2. Content categorization (taxonomy) that logically organizes content and increases its “findability”.
3. Content lifecycle management to ensure it can be created quickly and made available while maintaining content accuracy and validity

Develop Useful Content
The goal of optimizing knowledge is to make sure that service-related content is targeted so that it will speed up the inquiry resolution process and increase the consistency of resolution

Ease of use requires that content is written to answer a specific question in as few amount of words as possible. Content usability should also take into consideration the user’s level of knowledge and experience. The more intimately you understand who will be using published knowledge, the more likely you will be able to produce content that delivers maximum benefit.

Optimize the User Experience
The user experience focuses on how agents find appropriate solutions most efficiently. This requires more than just standard search. Agents will benefit most from knowledge architecture that structures access to content through interactive guidance methodologies that are attuned to the agent’s level of skill, domain expertise or corporate requirements.

Continuous Improvement of Knowledge
Optimizing content is not a one-time activity. Once implemented, knowledgebase must be constantly monitored with new content added, erroneous content adjusted and obsolete content removed on a regular and timely basis. It is most important that content in the knowledgebase reflects solutions which have been proven in the real world of front-line customer support. This can be achieved in two ways:

1. Enabling agent and customer contribution to the knowledgebase
2. Analyzing service data to determine content usage trends

The most effective method for developing meaningful content is to fully integrate support agents in the knowledge creation and maintenance process. They can contribute their expertise when demand requires it, particularly those infrequent or low-value questions that you have deliberately chosen not to address in the initial implementation because they do not heavily impact customer satisfaction or costs.

With the advent of Web 2.0, customers now expect to have a voice – express an opinion, critique an answer, rate a vendor or solve another customer’s problem. Web 2.0 requires an expanded definition of knowledge management as not simply a process of providing answers from the company to the customer, but as a free flow of information in all directions – company-to-customer, customer-to-company and customer-to-customer.

The best practices discussed for email responce, web self service and call centers, these practices have helped support organizations achieve a level of service that drives higher rates of customer satisfaction and loyalty, agent productivity and operational efficiency.