Organisations who have delivered successful Knowledge Management (KM) strategies have been realising significant benefits across multiple areas of their business, including significant increases in customer satisfaction. In contact centres, average handle times have been known to drop by as much as 25% along with substantial drops in call volumes when solutions incorporate customer facing components. Combined with significant reductions in staff training costs, attrition rates and increased staff satisfaction, the case for investment in a KM strategy compelling.

Knowledge Management is about providing employees with the right information at the right time to allow them to do their job efficiently and effectively. It is also increasingly about providing your customers with the right information at the right time, meaning they don’t need to visit your store or you’re your contact centre leading to improved customer experience. Getting what you want in fewer interactions is a key contributor to higher customer satisfaction.   

For organisations to achieve this, a knowledge management (KM) strategy should be developed which covers all the core elements of a KM solution:

It is the volume of content available to employees rather than a lack of content, which is the problem many organisations are facing. Employees have too much information available to them from multiple sources (intranet sites, document stores, training manuals…etc). As a result they can’t find what they actually need or simply don’t bother looking. It is often quicker and easier to ask the person sitting beside you or your local ‘expert’ than to waste time searching in vain, though this creates issues when the expert’s knowledge is out of date or simply wrong. Those that do go searching for answers and manage to find them, will often find inconsistent or out of date information.

These symptoms lead to multiple issues throughout an organisation but particularly in the front line. In contact centres, stores or branches inconsistent and incorrect information supplied to customers leads to poor customer experience and potentially costly mistakes or rework. It also creates an inefficient working environment where staff lack confidence and require long induction periods before they can serve customers. Employees relying on word of mouth and local sources of information make change difficult, especially where a workforce is distributed across multiple locations (you can’t visit 500 branches and update every cheat sheet each time you role out a new product).

Organisations will often begin KM initiatives looking for a silver bullet in the form of a technology solution. There are some excellent KM tools in the market place, which can certainly form part of a solution but they won’t solve the issues alone. In fact without the other elements they can often compound the problem.

The key to a successful KM initiative is to build a culture where people feel ownership of the content they use. They contribute to the knowledge base through feedback and feel confident that they know not only where to find answers but also that they’re correct. This culture will be built up over time through the successful implementation of the other elements, but as this culture grows it will become the foundation for the whole solution and ensure its ongoing success.

Contact us to discuss your holistic Knowledge Mangement needs.