Saturday, January 16, 2010

Best Practices for Knowledge Management

Every company which embarks on Knowledge Management Initiatives expects wonders to happen in the area of cost saving and customer satisfaction - internal and external - but these are not guaranteed.

A poorly designed and implemented KMi can have just opposite efect - annoying customers so that they abandon self service of good, and with system user frustration with too many tools on the desktop to use while trying to successfully answer customers' querries.

KMi require a well thought-out strategy that is closely aligned to the needs of ones contact centre agents and self-service customers. In this blog we discuss a series of better practices to help one successfully design and deploy KM solutions.

Define KM for your organisation - Set realistic, precisely defined goals and objectives for the initiative. Avoid the "big-bang" implementation in favour of a more phased approach that allows knowledge management to be fine-tuned before wider application.

Less is more- Rather than bludgeoning customers with results lists containing hundreds of possible answers, provide a relevant, focused, and structured response that targets the intent of your customers' querries. The old 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of inquiries can be answered by 20% of content, is highly relevant to a KMi. The key to delivering a highly quality experience is to deploy a rich subset of relevant content, focus, and structure for the most frequent and common questions.

Mantra of Collaboration - By embracing social networking as a part of ones knowledge management strategy, you can rapidly develop useful content at lower cost. An organisation can encourage social contributions by customers by - providing a simple way to recommend content through social channels as company sponsored forums and communities or online feedback forms; allowing users to comment on the value of contributions and begin building social reputation ratings for content contributors; offering subscriptions to help communities stay up-to-date on what matters most to them; monitoring the quality of social media by actively monitoring channels and conducting regular surveys; embedding social channels into self-service search process so that customers are aware that there are discussion topics on their areas of interest.

Know what you don't know - Knowledge gaps need to be identified. By gathering intelligence on what you don't know, you can react faster to growing customer needs, continuously improve in areas you have yet to tap for efficiencies, and create a far better service experience.

Global thinking - While you may start small with your initiative, do not limit your thinking about the uses and value of KM in your business division or geographically. It can have broad advantages across the enterprise and should be treated as a corporate initiative, not just a divisional solution.

These best practices can be used for success enabling the organisations to deliver a level of service that increase customer satisfaction, cost saving, and better service efficiency.

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