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Knowledge Centered Support ? The New Knowledge Management Methodology

Knowledge Centered Support ? The New Knowledge Management Methodology

Knowledge centered support is the new buzz word. There is a huge paradigm shift from the way we produced or consumed knowledge. Traditionally creating content and consuming content were fundamentally different. But the new thinking is that t knowledge creators will consume, and knowledge consumers will create – and that both businesses and customers will benefit from it.  Knowledge centered service provides levels of business agility, cost savings and knowledge quality that were a distant vision when first introduced, but are now essential to dealing with the exploding inquiry volumes, skyrocketing customer expectations and complex technologies that challenge support organizations every day.

Customers are not only looking for more information but also want to express their opinion, critique and answer, or rate a product or vendor. Traditionally content was written by knowledge authors who typically do not interact directly with customers. This results in content that while technically accurate, may not best address customer needs. Customer service solutions agents are the best who know, what knowledge and content are most useful in solving customer problems, where more content is needed and how content can be adapted to become more useful to the customer with agent desktop being handy.

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Today support centers are successfully evolving to meet the demands of customers in a Web 2.0 world. At the heart of Knowledge service is the idea that insight from and language of customers and agents are incorporated in the support process.

The Knowledge management methodology provides a series of best practices which focus on knowledge as the key asset to support organizations with just-in-time authoring by agents as a core principle.

Create knowledge as a by-product of solving problems

Evolve content based on demand and usage

Develop a knowledgebase that includes a support organization’s collective experience

Foster collaboration and networking to optimize knowledgebase content

Knowledge management empowers agents to capture the context of each solution in the customer’s language and to author knowledge in real-time as they resolve customer inquiries. This links issues to the customer’s experience, and eliminates information delays due authoring bottlenecks or errors resulting from improper interpretations.

Do away with the isolated and dedicated knowledge-creation process as the only valid means to produce relevant support information. Deliver a satisfying, efficient customer service experience to your customers.

 

 

Source: ArticlesBase.com

Get the Best from Knowledge Management

Get the Best from Knowledge Management

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.

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).

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.

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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.

The knowledgebase design plan should take into account:
Guidelines and standards for content development that will aid the inquiry resolution process.
Content categorization (taxonomy) that logically organizes content and increases its “findability”.
Content lifecycle management to ensure it can be created quickly and made available while maintaining content accuracy and validity

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.

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.

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:

Enabling agent and customer contribution to the knowledgebase
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.

Source: ArticlesBase.com

Knowledge Base Software-features

Knowledge Base Software-features

 

Knowledge Base Software allows you to share information within your enterprise from your website or Intranet with an enterprise-grade knowledge base. It helps to reduce customer support, improving staff productivity and eliminating time wasted searching for information across disparate systems such as shared folders and paper documents.

Hundreds and thousands of organizations, small businesses, universities and enterprise organizations are using knowledge base software. Knowledge based software can be used to cater different needs of the organization that is using this software like:

Knowledge Base Software Features

 

 

There are number of knowledge base software are in the market and have many powerful functions. These functions may vary from one software application to other knowledge base software application. But there are some functions that are common among most of the knowledge management software. By using it staff, customers and partners can access information locally or over the Internet and Knowledge Management software’s powerful group-based permission architecture makes it easy to share knowledge with only the people or groups you choose

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Knowledge base software really helps to reduce the in-bound customer support. Mostly, there is an interactive help interface which makes it easy to find the answer of your queries. It will contribute to decrease queries of customers in form of e-mails or calling to your support department. Your knowledge base can also be integrated into your contact/support forms to provide instant answers to customer’s questions as they type, reducing support even further. Active response system in knowledge base software can be integrated into any website form. Customers can easily search knowledge items and attachments. Popular search terms make it easy to find help fast.

Knowledge based software offers you the facility to share the documents among the staff members whether they are present in one physical location or one hundred, knowledge base software makes it easy for them to share, search, rate and print company documents, procedures and more. Forget email or network fileservers – now everyone has access to the same single version of a document from the same location. Documents are accessible through any computer that is connected to intranet or web. Built in feed back loops help staff to improve their knowledge.

A company can eliminate a considerable time for training its staff by using the knowledge base management software. If a company provides its policies and procedure in its knowledge base, it will help in quicker staff training. You reduce staff training time significantly and give new staff members a “hands on” approach to learning. You can achieve this objective by uploading company’s procedures and documents which are instantly indexed and searchable. Categories can be password protected and restricted as per the privilege level of a user. All these knowledge items can be printed or exported to different formats as offered by the particular knowledge base software for saving. These knowledge items can be assigned to the new comers for reading and self training purposes.

 

Source: ArticlesBase.com