Knowledge Management

Knowledge management has been around for years disguised in many flash terms and in ‘flavour of the month’ phrases. However not until recently has this practice and approach been adapted to the contact centre environment.  Over the years organisations have paid large consulting houses hefty premiums to carry out vast studies on how to capture inherit information from within the organisation.  However on to many occasions this information is keep within the folder from which it originated.

Contact centre people’s number one grip is that they are either the last to know or are left out of any important information sharing all together.  In some cases this is not that far from the truth.  With respect to this environment and in order to have a fully integrated culture, knowledge management must always be a two way street.  The divide between the contact centre and the head office will always exist, hence the question is not ‘how to change this’ but ‘how to better managed it’.  When looking at how to integrate a Knowledge Management System that incorporates your contact centre as a partner you must be prepare to share and listen on an equal keel. Nevertheless, capturing your true brand messages in real time should be at the top of the list when building the bridge between you marketing team and your front line delivery team.
 
The management system should begin to focus and measure the success and failure of decisions and customer comments, whether made by the team, individual or even the contact centre.  The contact centre team must be encouraged with a sense of belonging to the greater good of the brand. It could even include a rewards system that encourages employees and managers to contribute what they know and learn from each other and show how this will produce better business results. In a recent survey the following failures arouse when employees were asked to rank the biggest challenges and gaps between employer and employee:

• Poor communication between management and staff
• Lack of recognition and praise
• Little if any autonomy given to employees 

If this culture exists in your contact centre then that is where you start.  Begin to close this gap and cultivate an environment that allows information to be exchanged and nurtured.

Knowledge management if implemented correctly can allow an easy transfer of vast amounts of information over intranets and other in-house devices. It can also act as a database of all the intellectual property that currently sits inside a person’s head and in every seat on the contact centre floor.  The arrogance of many senior people within organisations to think that contact centre people need their hands held on daily basis in order to do their jobs effectively is paramount. Many believe that if it were not for the training that has been implemented on their behalf they would be inept to do their job.  Many people work very independently and are often those that spearhead many new procedures by introducing their own unique style to the role.  From conveying the corporate brand to product information, their interaction with customers set a standard that can be benchmarked in many other parts of the organisation.  So how does a contact manager start to capture this information and manage the knowledge that is commonplace inside the contact centre?  The answer is through inspiration and a willingness to listen to what your people have to say and then acting on it.

It is a fact that contact centres have a high attrition rate. Without a proper knowledge management system in place, how much of the learning curve is lost daily?  With greater job satisfaction a clear knowledge management strategy may slow the attrition rate, but even if it didn’t, it can decrease the loss of key procedures and customer information.  Through the use of knowledge sharing, organisation can gain greater insight as a collective than they could as a single division or team.  Feeding the relevant brand information is a must if your brand is to be looked at in real time.

If this is new to you and your contact centre, I suggest the ‘walk before you run’ philosophy.  Start with your customer service team and the vast amounts of information that they use on a daily basis, manuals directories and various sources of documented procedures.  With reassurance and training, ensure that this tool is not looked upon as just an electronic filing cabinet but as a real source of information that can be added to and commented on.  Also ensure that the software that is chosen is adequate to service the needs of your contact centre people quickly and effectively.  The design of this information source must also give a sense of community and further, allow the sharing of cross border information.

The key is to create a path for the future that your contact centre people can benefit from whilst giving senior managers the ability to keep track on the intellectual property that exists with in each and every person.  The goal is to maintain information and get it to the right people at the right time.