What are the most common applications for knowledge management?
While enterprise knowledge management went up and down the hype cycle in the late '90s and the first years of this decade, customer service and support organizations have quietly and practically changed their operations by capturing, reusing, and sharing knowledge, both inside service and support centers and directly to customers. For example, Tellabs has increased its ability to resolve customer issues at first contact many times over, and McAfee has demonstrated measurable return on investment by providing knowledge from around the enterprise directly to customers in a usable and intuitive way. Internal knowledge transfer and external knowledge sharing for service and support are the areas where KM has demonstrated measurable business value in high-tech, financial services, telecommunications, and beyond.
In your opinion, where and how will we be using knowledge management technology in say 5 years time and what challenges will we need to overcome to get there?
Knowledge-empowered customer service and support will continue to be on the vanguard of KM technology adoption. The biggest change will be the extent to which KM technology will integrate seamlessly with other business processes like customer relationship management.
Most KM vendors today provide standalone tools. These are a good start, but history has shown that the next level of business value and adoption comes when tools move beyond point technologies and instead become business applications that support a real business process, tunable and configurable for each organization's needs and integrated with other service and support applications at a process level. At Kanisa, we call this next generation of KM tools turned to business applications "Service Resolution Management," (SRM).
What are the common misconceptions of knowledge management solutions?
The most common misconception is that smart technology by itself will deliver business value. We hear so many vendors use so much indecipherable technology jargon--it must be very confusing to be a buyer in this space. But technology exists to support people in their business processes. It needs to do a good job of organizing and retrieving knowledge, certainly, but it also needs to fit into people's jobs, and workflows. And organizations need to be prepared to extend their processes and culture to make knowledge sharing effective, too.
The other misconception is the "Self-Service Site of Dreams:" build it and they will come. Customers need a highly usable, intuitive self-service experience that guides them through the process of resolving their issue, but they also need to know that it's there and see that it works. It helps if the self-service site can proactively deliver relevant help to the user, too. Customer outreach and marketing needs to be a part of any self-service strategy.
Technically, how advanced are we today with knowledge management technology Software engineering has come a long way in developing standard "input-process-output" applications for record-keeping and the like. But working with words, concepts, and resolution processes is a much harder class of problem. And making smart people more effective is a really high bar.
How will these technologies change the way contact centers function?
They've already changed contact and support centers significantly:
Experts aren't being driven crazy answering the same question over and over again, as customers and front line agents are getting the information directly from the knowledge base
Experts are valued not just for what they know, but the value they add to the knowledge base on an ongoing basis--they're much more leveraged.
Customers' expectations for first contact resolution, proactive resolution, and self-service are continually increasing, raising the demand for high quality service and support
Knowledge management is putting a premium on the smartest people in the contact center by helping them share what they learn while reducing redundant work. It's also reducing the value of the people who just like to answer the same question over and over again--their value is diminished.
What are the biggest mistakes contact center managers sometimes make when choosing or deploying knowledge management technology?
The biggest mistake we see is people fixating on the search and authoring functionality without looking at the overall business benefits of the application as a whole, and without seeing how it supports the business processes that happen in the contact center. We sometimes see RFPs with a checklist of ten search functions--functions that we perform, and that may be important, but which aren't the high order bit in driving customer value.
When we can have a real business discussion with contact center managers--how we'll automate redundant processes, how we'll leverage expert knowledge, how we'll make customers truly effective and avoiding and resolving their own issues--we then have the context for a very interesting conversation about how our technology can enable that business value.
Will the technology ultimately result in a complete self service solution that could replace the role of the agent?
Technically? Perhaps. Emotionally? Probably not.
Imagine that you're running a payroll operation for a Fortune 500 company, and there's something wrong with your payroll application. It doesn't matter that information that would lead to a resolution is in a knowledge base: you want to talk with someone who will take responsibility for your satisfaction Right Now.
That being said, I think that what will happen is that technology will get better at guiding customers through a resolution process, just like a good and empathetic agent. This is an area of significant focus for us right now. And as this happens, what our customers are seeing is that the line between assisted service, self-service, and other models like peer or community based service will blur: the web will be the entry point for all service and support resources provided by the company.
So the bottom line is that self-service shouldn't cut off customer conversations, but should allow the organization to invest in having the right conversations--the ones that deliver the most value.
