Ensuring the Ongoing Support of your KM Initiative
by Kent Heyman

Knowledge management (KM) systems require care once they’re implemented. You must impose ongoing practices to maintain the effectiveness of the system, notably to encourage agents to use, contribute to, and refine the knowledge in the system. To ensure the ongoing success of the solution and the agents who use the system, it’s important to handle redundant questions efficiently, promote an environment where agents contribute knowledge, develop a formal quality assurance (QA) process, and to reuse the knowledge you’ve worked so hard to capture and format. Here are some techniques to maintaining your KM system.

Managing redundant questions

Many support organizations receive a number of calls about the same subjects. For example, studies have shown that password resets account for 30% of calls to IT help desks. It’s essential for a company to develop a prescribed post-call reporting process to provide a high degree of knowledge base usage. This process lets the company create a process that allows agents to answer redundant questions with minimal effort.

One way to reduce the quantity of these repetitive, low-maintenance calls is to develop a frequently-asked-questions (FAQs) feature in the knowledge base and make it available to end users through Web self-service. Often, a knowledge-driven FAQ lets users find answers on their own, freeing agents to resolve more complex issues. These knowledge-powered FAQs are dynamically updated by the knowledge base, allowing the most current and relevant issues to rise to the top of the list without manual intervention. That makes them much more effective than the static FAQs found on many Web sites.

Promote a sharing culture

To promote an effective post-implementation environment, remember the importance of understanding your corporate culture. You should not only allow agents to contribute knowledge to the system during their normal daily workflow, you should encourage it. This is an important step in the process of cultural acceptance, which is essential to the KM initiative’s success. Encouraging agents to contribute knowledge also fosters innovation and team building.

Develop a simple reward system (it doesn’t have to be monetary) to motivate agents to contribute and share knowledge. One of our customers, a leading supplier of industrial automation software, exemplifies a successful implementation of a KM system through its widespread cultural acceptance, encouraged by the company requiring its support agents to use the knowledge base to answer customer questions and by making it mandatory that agents contribute knowledge and new solutions each time they close a case.

In almost every company, employees resist change which hinders cultural acceptance. Devising and following a change management plan can help employees realize how the system makes them more productive. Your plan should specify the manner in which you expect agents to accept the knowledge management system, and discuss how the initiative benefits every group in the organization. Employees may become resentful if there are changes in their job requirements but compensation and/or benefits aren’t reviewed. As part of an overall change management plan, companies should update employees' job descriptions, and hold feedback sessions and performance reviews to reflect the new workflow.

Neglecting these issues creates friction among team members, so it’s essential to establish new performance metrics that apply to use of the knowledge system. As I mentioned, positive rewards can motivate agents to contribute knowledge and use the system. Rewards such as car washes, movie tickets, lunches or time off with pay all work if the award is appropriate for your organization.

Define a formal QA process

While today's KM systems allow agents to contribute knowledge during their workday, this is problematic if the information is added in an inconsistent or unqualified form. For that reason, companies should define and develop a formal QA process to ensure the consistency and accuracy of the knowledge being contributed by agents. QA processes must be based on your organization's unique needs; don’t make the process too difficult, or include too many steps, which discourages agents from adding any new knowledge. However, the QA must be complex enough to ensure information consistency, accuracy, and completeness. For all information that will be shared with the public, a four-step system, including Knowledge Submission, Technical Review, Style Editing, and Final Review is often successful. For information that is to be shared only with internal audiences, a two-step process of Submit and Final Review is usually adequate. To further encourage contribution success, make sure that invalid contributions are communicated back to the contributor, with an explanation as to why they are invalid. Be sure that the explanation's tone does not discourage agents from submitting knowledge in the future.

Knowledge reuse

The addition of knowledge to the system, followed by the repeated use of that knowledge by multiple agents, is what knowledge reuse is all about. A robust KM system should let agents share and reuse information stored in the system. Knowledge reuse helps reduce the amount of time agents spend on calls, which saves money and increases productivity. It increases the productivity of employees who have answered the same or similar questions for customers in the past, and simplifies the problem resolution process for new agents or customers using Web self-service. Knowledge reuse not only allows agents to share knowledge, it also enables the system to learn through successful interactions with the knowledge base.

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.