The Solution

To support the creation of a taxonomy for the healthcare organization’s call center, EK facilitated a taxonomy design workshop with key stakeholders from the call center, consisting of several succinct sessions with dozens of participants from across the organization. In order to gain a better understanding of the healthcare organization’s current user needs, EK facilitated five different activities: a Personas Activity, a User Stories Activity, a Content Types Activity, a Metadata Fields Activity, and a Taxonomy Governance Activity, using the online whiteboard tools Mural and RetroTool. EK also facilitated guided discussions on Taxonomy, Core Workflows, and Content Governance. EK compiled these findings into a Taxonomy Workshop Report which contained our recommendations surrounding baseline taxonomy design, content types, and information architecture, as well as suggestions for content management and taxonomy governance, including a proposed taxonomy governance model. 

Following the delivery of the Taxonomy Workshop Report, EK held additional sessions with the company stakeholders to better understand their current content management and governance processes. To summarize these findings and analyses, EK delivered a Content Governance Plan which provided detailed recommendations on how the healthcare organization could effectively store and manage their content in the short- and long-term. More specifically, the Content Governance Report included a Content Governance Model with associated roles and responsibilities that aligned to governance and KM best practices; governance processes and workflows for adding, updating, and archiving content; a structure for content governance team meetings; preliminary content management best practices for formatting and tagging content; and recommended next steps for the healthcare company to ensure optimal value was being derived from their call center content.

The EK Difference

To garner buy-in from users, EK facilitated multiple sessions following the delivery of the Taxonomy Workshop Report to answer both technical and non-technical questions about the report itself, as well as how the taxonomy would actually function within the knowledge management platform. By engaging in conversation with call center stakeholders, EK was able to answer pointed questions about specific aspects of the taxonomy report that otherwise would not have been addressed, further streamlining acceptance and adoption and allowing us to communicate the value of the taxonomy in business terms to a wide and diverse user group. EK also incorporated this direct stakeholder feedback into the Content Governance Report, highlighting and providing strong evidence for the most important and meaningful components based on what was learned during the additional sessions. 

Additionally, EK leveraged our years of experience and subject matter expertise in taxonomies and content management consulting to tailor our workshop agenda and materials to the specific challenges being faced by the call center, ultimately delivering more applicable and actionable plans that align with both industry best practices and the strategic goals of the overarching organization.

The Results

During this 2-month effort, EK identified and defined the high-level, prioritized metadata fields for the taxonomy design, as well as the foundational structure for the information architecture and governance model necessary to support the KM platform implementation. Following the taxonomy work, EK also defined high-level content governance roles and responsibilities, as well as policies and procedures, to help the multinational healthcare organization maintain its content going forward. EK delivered all of this in a Taxonomy Workshop Report and Content Governance Report, and maintains a positive relationship with both the knowledge management platform and the healthcare organization to date. 

The post Taxonomy Workshop and Content Governance for a Multinational Healthcare Company appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

As investment consultants, my parents were contacted by a variety of people looking for advice on how to handle their finances, from a small savings account to million dollar inheritances. These conversations with customers were usually over the phone, and it was my parents’ job to turn those quick calls into actual client leads. In order to answer difficult questions and sound like experts in the financial world, they depended on Charles Schwab’s intranet and internal help desk. This information database and direct access to human resources supplied employees with a wealth of knowledge in a time when the internet was brand new and most companies didn’t have websites to advertise their products and services.  

Knowledge Management, in its simplest terms, is about connecting the right information to the right people at the right time. This concept is especially important in organizations where contact centers and help desks are a significant business function and employees with less experience may be speaking directly with potential clients or customers. Every employee in an organization, regardless of age or experience, should be equipped with the knowledge and tools they need to become an expert in their field and successfully communicate their company’s breadth of information and services to people who call in. In addition to the KM tools that will be detailed later in this blog, company leadership should prioritize and foster a culture of knowledge sharing, where information is routinely organized and shared in the correct channels and systems for enterprise-wide use. 

Help desks are frequently the primary point of contact for customers who have questions about the company’s products or services. Given frequent turnover and a difficult hiring environment, companies struggle to hire and retain the most knowledgeable people for their help desks. This is a problem, but cannot be an excuse. If experts are not available to fill these positions, those employees who do receive the calls need direct access to use cases, platform permissions, step-by-step instructions, links, and everything else that would be required to resolve the customers’ problems. 

Contact centers often serve a much broader purpose and are essentially a customer service department that handles customer complaints, orders, inquiries, etc. In this case, callers may already be frustrated, upset, or dissatisfied, making seamless access to the right information at the right time even more critical to deliver quality customer service. 

Apart from the knowledge sharing culture and values that a strong KM foundation provides, there are several specific KM tools that we recommend for superior customer service in any of these business areas:

	Knowledge Base A knowledge base is a repository of enterprise-wide knowledge that should be the primary source for call agents to solve and respond to customer queries. Similar to the one that my parents described working with all those years ago, a functional knowledge base should have intuitive search capabilities and a user interface that allows for easy and rapid navigation. This will improve employees’ experience as well as customer satisfaction, as employees will feel confident and empowered when they have the necessary resources at their fingertips to excel in their jobs.
	Artifacts  Call agents should also have direct access to artifacts that can be sent directly to customers for more detailed information or future reference. These can be FAQs, articles, how-to guides, device instructions, videos, or any other simple visual guide that can act as a follow-up to a customer call.
	Intelligent Chatbots There is no denying that in many companies, contact centers and help desks have declined in usage as customers have more and more access to self-service channels. Tech-savvy customers expect a useful and streamlined self-service experience, especially when contacting a larger company. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools like chatbots can be extremely effective and dependable to solve customer problems and provide human-like resolutions using Natural Language Processing (NLP). When integrated with a knowledge base and visual guides, call agents can deflect calls directly to a chatbot with the confidence that those customers will get the answers they need as quickly as possible. This type of holistic support ensures that an organization provides assistance to every single customer while keeping employees from burnout and reducing support costs.

By establishing systematic and repetitive ways to deliver information to customers, an organization will possess consistent and positive customer experience as one of its key differentiators. Modern-day customers are used to digital self-service, but we all know how frustrating it can be to dial numbers over and over without ever finding a sufficient answer to a query. Until chatbots can entirely replicate human assistance, prioritizing Knowledge Management for contact centers and help desks will continue to improve customer service Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and give service organizations a competitive advantage unlike any other. 

Measuring customer service KPIs is a great way to quantify the effectiveness of KM in these parts of an organization. These KPIs can vary depending on the organization, but they include metrics like agent training time, agent errors, repeat calls, mean call time, resolution time, etc. Effective KM can help your organization lower customer service costs by reducing the time and efforts agents spend responding to customer inquiries, thereby building a strong business case for continued KM transformations. Are customer issues usually resolved during first contact? Are customers experiencing faster resolution times? Are agents prioritizing proactive development of self-service content based on common issues faced by customers? These are questions that KM stakeholders should seek answers to in order to identify service gaps in these departments and measure Return on Investment (ROI) from the implementation of the tools described above. These tools can be highly effective in improving these KPIs, and organizations should develop reporting that shows hard progress against these metrics to garner buy-in and support for KM efforts.

Once implemented, these tools can immediately begin demonstrating the benefits of KM for contact centers and help desks:

• Findability: With consistent and intuitive tagging of all content within a knowledge base, a call agent will be able to find direct answers to customer queries faster, easier, and more completely. A clear and easy user interface within a self-service portal will allow customers to quickly find answers to their questions and understand what an organization has to offer them. 
• Consistency: Information governance is a key tenant of good KM. An organization should establish governance processes for its knowledge base to ensure content remains new, accurate, and complete for call agents’ reference, varying from content reviews to ownership to workflows. Here at EK, we have seen countless knowledge bases overrun with outdated and obsolete content, and good governance practices are the best way to counteract that trend. 
• Collaboration: As mentioned before, a culture of knowledge sharing is a powerful way to ensure call agents and support staff are equipped for any customer question, even without the implementation of actual KM tools. Agents can work confidently knowing that they are surrounded by others who are willing to help and distribute knowledge in whatever way they can, adding another resource for agents who cannot immediately find what they are looking for in a knowledge base.  
• Consumability: Structured content (that with predefined formats and organization) will be easy for agents to read, quickly understand, and then act upon. Good KM will ensure content is delivered to agents in the right format, scale, and scope for the situation, maximizing readability and minimizing cognitive load. 
• Flexibility: Most of the time, an agent will need a quick and concise answer for a customer. However, in times when deeper answers are needed or desired, agents will have opportunities and resources to explore related content that is tagged similarly in the knowledge base.
• Supportability: Good KM dictates clear job roles and organizational structure. In more serious situations, agents will know when and to whom the situation should be escalated.

EK has experience with many projects of this nature, utilizing KM best practices to improve the efficiency of contact centers and help desks. One example is the work we did with the principal revenue collection agency of a national government overseas. In this engagement, the agency was having difficulty standardizing and managing content in their internal tool designed to guide service agents towards the correct information they need to support their customers. To help these service agents more easily locate content and navigate complex regulations and concepts, EK provided comprehensive Content Transformation Services which included Content Strategy and Governance Design. As a result of these efforts, the agency was positioned to standardize the way information is captured and managed across the enterprise, enabling content to become more findable, scannable, and intuitive to follow for service agents. Service agents spent less time finding applicable content within their internal tool, translating to a decrease in mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) customer inquiries. 

Overall, Knowledge Management in contact centers and help desks makes it smoother and more efficient for agents to find and use information. Customers expect and will often demand timely, personalized service; if these needs are not met, the organization will likely lose that customer. Every organization with a contact center or help desk must make sure their agents are equipped and empowered with the right knowledge and tools to correctly answer questions and provide relevant information. By investing in KM in these areas, your organization can ensure the satisfaction and longevity of both customers and employees. Here at EK, we offer many services to help organizations improve document management, content governance, search functionality, and so much more that can further the best practices detailed above. If you think your organization could benefit from Knowledge Management, contact us today to learn more about our services.

The post The Benefits of KM for Contact Centers and Help Desks appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Most critical contact center KPIs all depend on

Join Kristin McNally, Principal Consultant of Enterprise Knowledge, the world’s largest dedicated Knowledge Management consulting firm, and Jeff Stroum, Contact Center Solutions Expert at Shelf, and learn the critical components of a knowledge management solution to drive tangible ROI for contact centers.

Key Topics

• Setting up a healthy and scalable knowledge structure;
• Expanding content access to improve agent performance; and
• Setting hard and soft ROI metrics to gauge success.

Save your seat for the Live Webinar: Thursday, July 29 at 2:00 pm EST.

About the Panelists

Kristin McNally

Kristin is a Principal Consultant with Enterprise Knowledge who has led fortune 500 and federal clients to plan, design, implement, and measure the impact of knowledge management solutions. She works with organizations to shape the processes, structures, tools, and incentives that will help their people work together more effectively and collaboratively.

Jeff Stroum

Jeff has over 20 years of experience in the contact center space and has played roles as Solutions Architect, Sales Director and Alliances Partner Manager. Working with emerging technologies, he has enabled customers on how to optimize SaaS based software to meet their business goals.

The post Webinar: Driving Contact Center Cost Efficiency with Knowledge Management appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.