Top Tips For Knowledge Management

You can reduce customer support costs by 25% when a proper KM discipline is in place
Michael Maoz- Gartner.

Knowledge Management is a fantastic tool to improve customer service. Everybody wants to deliver better customer service and improve key performance metrics like First Call Resolution and Customer Satisfaction. Unnecessary escalations and call back can often be caused by agents not having the information they need, up to date and at hand. Good knowledge management practices and systems can also help to cut down on expensive training time. If agents have current, well structured information, new hires can hit the ground running with less costly classroom time.

1. Set up a Knowledge Base

First, you need to have a knowledge base that is easily accessible to your agents. Find out what information they need to handle their calls and make sure it is all available to them in one place, where they easily find it and browse it.

2. Make it Searchable

If an agent has to scroll through content to find what they need, that will drive up your average handling time and drop your first call resolution rate. Whatever you use as a knowledge base, at a minimum it must be searchable so your agents can find information quickly. Keep Knowledgebase Articles Short and Relevant. Long documents are hard to create, search and maintain. Keep your knowledgebase articles short and focused on a single topic. Ideally, the content should fit on one screen. Make sure the text is simple and clear. Use images and bullet points to make it easy to digest at a glance.

3. Use Analytics to Track Process

Like all your other systems, your knowledgebase should generate analytics to track what is going on. What content is being used, what is current, what might be out of date? If you knowledgebase system has integrated workflows, you can use that data to understand how agents work through each call and optimise their scripts and workflows.

4. Identify Knowledge Gaps

Missing information costs time and causes errors. Your system should make it easy for users to flag missing or incorrect information so the knowledge base can be quickly brought up to date. Out of date information can cause real problems, especially for newer staff who don't know the ropes.

5. Allow Users to add Comments and Updates

Your knowledge base system should allow users to comment on the various topics so if new things come up, they can ask questions and let the others on the team know how they solved the problem. Experienced staff who are experts on a given account or subject should be able to update kbase articles and workflows quickly, so that the same issue is never escalated twice.

6. Deploy on Cloud

Increasingly, your team won't be in one place. You may have people working from home, engineers in the field or product specialists in head office, or even customers and channel partners who need access to the knowledge base. Put it on the cloud so everyone can get it. Having an effective knowledge base can also help with staff retention as you empower your best agents to take ownership and responsibility for aspects of the system. By building up that knowledge base on the go, new staff can access everything they need from the start, so training time can be cut. Effective knowledge management can help make you number 1 for customer service.

KM is becoming the Jewel in the customer service crown
Kate Leggett, Forrester Research

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