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The quality and efficiency of your service operations can be improved with the implementation of knowledge management in the contact center. Customers benefit from interactions with more knowledgeable agents, who are empowered to resolve issues with greater speed, accuracy and consistency. This implementation can help in reducing agent training costs, while job satisfaction increases as interactions with customers become more positive. Implementing knowledge management, however, requires careful planning. Success depends on an implementation with targeted goals and the development of knowledge that is closely aligned with service needs. The six best practices we have found are most crucial to success. They are:

1.Set Goals and Objectives
Your chosen goals and metrics will guide your knowledge management implementation. To set the goals for your knowledge management deployment, identify the areas that are most critical to your company’s service operations, and then determine the metrics against which the deployment will be measured.

2.Successful Implementation Strategy
An effective customer service implementation strategy requires a complete implementation team that ensures the development of high quality knowledgebase content and a realistic roll-out plan.

3.Design a Robust Knowledgebase
A robust knowledgebase contains content that is appropriate to customer questions and can be easily traversed to find the best possible answer in the shortest amount of time. The knowledgebase design plan should be implemented to ensure it can be created quickly and made available while maintaining content accuracy and validity.

4.Develop Useful Content
Make sure that service-related content is targeted so that it will speed up the inquiry resolution process and increase the consistency of resolution. Too little information and coverage will be inadequate. Too much information and agents will waste time looking through large numbers of search results to find the right information. The “right” size of a knowledgebase is achieved when there is a balance between the quantity and quality of information in it. The key to optimizing knowledge is to consider the most valuable knowledge to be included and content be made most effective.

5.Optimize User Experience –
Agents will benefit most from knowledge architecture that follows an interactive guidance methodology that are attuned to the agent’s level of skill, domain expertise or corporate requirements.

6.Constantly Improve 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

In combination with solutions for eservice, 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. The above techniques for continuous knowledge improvement should be combined with the use of service analytics to identify solution usage trends and determine where gaps in knowledge exist.