Knowledge Management is not “One-Size-Fits-All” Part 1
by Kent Heyman

For any customer-facing company, a high-level of service and support is a must. To remain competitive in today’s volatile business environment, companies must be able to meet their customer’s expectations, despite any adjustments that may arise from changes to the product line, mergers or downsizing. An effective knowledge management (KM) tool can help companies keep pace with dynamic customer service and support goals while managing, and in many cases, reducing costs.

While ServiceWare is a provider of knowledge management applications, we also know that not all companies are prime candidates for implementing knowledge management tools for service and support. Our years of experience developing, implementing, and maintaining knowledge management solutions have taught us that companies that benefit most from KM share certain characteristics. To determine whether your organization would be a good fit for KM, consider these points:

Does your company support complex products or services?
If your company requires agents to continuously deliver consistent, accurate answers for a large number of products or services, and if your call center deals mainly with problem resolution, a KM system can help your agents answer questions and solve problems quickly and cost-effectively.

Consider the case from one of our customers, a building-products supplier. This company typically grew its business through acquisition, and as a result, the number of employees and customers was dramatically multiplied with every merger. Leveraging knowledge throughout the company was no longer a simple task, and with each acquisition, it became increasingly burdensome to support the company’s more than 250,000 products. They needed a knowledge management solution to help them manage the vast amounts of knowledge scattered throughout the enterprise.

Do your agents collaborate often to resolve customer problems?
Agent collaboration is knowledge management at its most primitive level. Your support organizations should siphon the knowledge shared by agents into a formal knowledge base to improve the speed and accuracy at which your agents resolve problems. Recognizing the value behind this basic form of KM, many of today’s KM systems have integrated agent-collaboration tools, such as email or chat, into their applications.

Do you train using a master-apprentice model?
This training method relies on more seasoned agents training newer agents. It also removes trained agents from their primary job responsibility which makes it costly and often inefficient. Instead, you could set up and use a KM system to do some of the training. A working knowledge base lets agents share and reuse knowledge with all other agents.

Selecting several agents to learn the KM system early on helps to ease adoption rates by influencing peers. The building products supplier we mentioned was able to reduce their training time by 50% after implementing their KM system.

Are your agents using a CRM or call-tracking system?
A company can greatly improve agent productivity and efficiency by integrating a KM system into its existing CRM applications. The building supply company increased its first-call resolution rate to 86% and reduced escalations by 40% after setting up their KM system.

Do you track and measure agent productivity on an ongoing basis?
Many KM systems have built-in reporting methods that help measure agent productivity and efficiency. Managers can view reports that explain whether or not answers are found. Depending on the application’s capabilities and the permissions you set, the KM system can allow agents to easily add new knowledge during their usual workflow.

As you can see from these questions, not every company is a good fit for a knowledge management solution. Be wary of KM vendors who insist that all companies can benefit from KM, and insist that any vendor you’re considering conduct a knowledge audit to assess your needs and level of readiness before implementation.

Next week, we will discuss steps to take before implementation – a proven set of best practices to help ensure the success of your KM initiative.

About the author
Kent Heyman is President and CEO, ServiceWare Technologies, Inc., a provider of web-based knowledge management solutions for customer service and support. www.serviceware.com.