The Challenge

Knowledge is power but in reality, enterprises are knowledge-challenged with employees spending 20% or more of their time, looking for it to do their day-to-day jobs. Nowhere is the knowledge challenge more acute than in the customer contact center.

• Customers say that the lack of agent knowledgeability is the #1 impediment to getting good service (Source: Forrester survey).
• Contact center agents point to the same knowledge challenge with their tools being the biggest barrier to delivering good service (Source: eGain survey).

Training can help but it is not cheap, with US companies spending $92.3B in 2021 (Source: Training Magazine). Here is why the agent knowledge problem has become more daunting.

• Traditional training programs have been disrupted by the pandemic and hybrid work models, with 75% of agents still working remote. These agents have no next cube to walk over to for answers.
• Humans retain only 25% of new information they learn just after two days, according to the forgetting curve theory of Hermann Ebbinghaus. In fact, research by the University of Waterloo found that it is a mere 2-3% after 30 days!
• Today’s contact center agents are millennials and Gen Z with short attention spans—12 and 8 seconds respectively (Source: Sparks and Honey). They would rather just learn on the job.
• Agent attrition continues to be very high. This compounds the training challenge since L&D organizations have to start from Ground Zero with a constantly recurring stream of new agents.
• It is hard to teach situational knowhow, i.e., understand and solve a customer problem or provide them advice, based on a specific situation. This knowhow tends to be more tacit, requiring a way to guide agents step by step on what to say and do in the course of such customer interactions. Living “guided lives,” where they use GPS devices for driving or robot advisors for financial management, today’s agents are looking for that kind of guidance in their day-to-day work.

The Solution

The answer to addressing this formidable new training challenge is a modern knowledge management (KM) system deployed as a hub that unifies and orchestrates the following building blocks:

• Content management
• Personalization
• Intent inference, powered by ML
• Search methods for findability
• AI reasoning for conversational and process guidance
• Knowledge analytics for optimization

The knowledge hub eliminates silos, while serving as a trusted source of right answers and expertise, delivering them at the point of work, customer interactions, in this case. Leading organizations are already leveraging the hub, transforming the experiences of customers and employees such as:

• Leading telco improved First-Contact Resolution (FCR) by 37%, while reducing training time by 50% across 10,000+ agents and 600 retail stores.
• Health insurance company reduced agent training time by 33% and sustained agent performance even when 2000 of them had to go remote overnight when Covid hit.

With the knowledge hub complementing training, your contact center agents will become super-agents and all your employees will become super-employees!

Knowledge management can be a powerful tool in the right hands. It has many purposes, but its main goal is to help organizations utilize their knowledge, information, and expertise in a more meaningful way.

One of the ways you can use knowledge management is to increase your company’s revenue. Without further ado, here’s what knowledge management is and how it can affect your company’s profits.

What Is Knowledge Management?

Before getting into the benefits of knowledge management, it’s worth understanding what it actually is. Essentially, knowledge management is about collecting, defining, structuring, managing, and sharing knowledge and information in an organization. Usually, this is knowledge about the experiences of your employees, but it can also be information about other things.

The main goal of knowledge management is to use the organization’s collective knowledge to improve the different aspects of the said organization. For example, the experiences of the employees from one department could inform the decisions of the employees in other departments. The older your organization is, the more knowledge you will have that can be incredibly useful to your current and future employees.

Successful knowledge management requires a culture of constant development, innovation, and learning. Knowledge management can help in all kinds of processes that range from employee transfer and promotion to staff retirement to recruit training. So how exactly can knowledge management be useful for increasing profits?

#1 Improve Decision-Making

Effective knowledge management can help you improve decision-making by informing different departments, teams, and individual employees. When employees have access to the collective knowledge of your entire organization, they will have the experiences and expertise of their colleagues right in their hands.

Informed employees will be able to speed up the decision-making process and even make better decisions by taking into account a wider variety of factors and details. You can use various collaboration tools to further encourage the sharing of opinions and experiences during the brainstorming process.

#2 Grow, Innovate, and Change Culturally

Another reason why knowledge management is so valuable is that it helps you grow, innovate, and change culturally. You will be encouraging your employees to share their own knowledge while making use of the knowledge of their co-workers. This will help you spread more advanced ideas and perspectives on certain topics.

Moreover, such sharing of knowledge is bound to stimulate the growth of your organization and the innovation that will accompany it. Your industry is ever-changing, so being ahead of your competitors will require you to be constantly improving and finding new things, new methods, etc.

#3 Make Information More Accessible

Besides all the ways information and knowledge can now be shared within your organization, you will also be making information more accessible. There is always an issue with accessibility when it comes to sharing knowledge and information, but effective management can solve this problem.

If you need help structuring and managing your information yourself, you can always hire an experienced writer from the writing service Best Essays Education who will help you. This way, you can ensure that all the knowledge of your organization is stored and shared in an efficient way and that everyone has easy access to it.

#4 Avoid Redundant Effort and Expenses

By managing your company’s knowledge effectively, you can avoid redundant effort and expenses which will increase your overall profits. Rather than avoiding redundant effort and expenses in a straightforward way, it is rather an accumulation of different practices that will give you a good result in the end.

For instance, employees will no longer have to spend time doing something over and over again. They can simply check whether this has been done before by their colleagues and learn from those experiences. Instead of reinventing the wheel, employees can streamline their working process and stay motivated consistently.

#5 Increase Customer Satisfaction

In addition to helping employees, effective knowledge management will also have a positive impact on the experiences of your customers. More specifically, you can increase customer satisfaction by using your company’s collective knowledge smartly. You can share some information with your customers, but there’s more to it than having an open knowledge base.

Essentially, because every employee will have access to your organization’s knowledge, each one of them will be able to do a better job and deliver better quality and value to customers. As a result, the overall experience of your customers will improve making them happier and more satisfied with your business.

#6 Reduce the Time of Staff Training

Knowledge management is valuable to your current employees, but it is also incredibly important for those who are joining your team because it can help you reduce the time of staff training. Onboarding and training new hires always take time (if you want to do it properly), but knowledge management can speed up and streamline the process.

By training them with the help of the accumulated knowledge of your organization, you can ensure that they become competent faster and become accustomed to your company before they start working.

#7 Accelerate Customer Delivery

One of the things that contributes to the experience and satisfaction of your customers is delivery – and knowledge management can help you accelerate it. To put it simply, customer delivery is about providing your audience with products and services faster than your competitors would.

You could have the products and services of the same quality as your competitors, but if you are able to deliver them faster to your audience, you will have an upper hand. This delivery can be the literal delivery (i.e., shipping) and the delivery in the sense of presenting the product (i.e., product launch). Moreover, your services can include customer support, advertising, etc. In other words, everything that makes up your customer’s experience with your brand.

#8 Find Information Faster

Last but not least, effective knowledge management allows your employees to find information faster. It may not seem like something particularly important, but the speed at which your team members can find useful knowledge and information could impact all of their activities.

Decision-making, customer delivery, staff training, etc. – all of these are affected by how quickly any given employee can find relevant information. This is precisely why managing your knowledge and information well is so important for a company of any size.

Conclusion

All in all, effective knowledge management can definitely be quite valuable to your organization as it will help you increase profits. Consider other benefits of knowledge management listed in this article and start managing your knowledge more effectively.

Knowledge management is an important process and corporations can take advantage of to maximize their potential. Many organizations have a well of knowledge at their disposal, but they can't readily tap into it because it's not well managed and distributed. Insights become difficult to track or gain because trends from past employees, processes, and departments are not properly stored for future use.

Having the right management structure in place will ensure that knowledge becomes easily accessible throughout the organization.

This article discusses what knowledge management entails, the importance, benefits, and more.

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management (KM) refers to the process of collecting, retaining, managing, and sharing knowledge and information within an organization. It typically involves a multidisciplinary approach to achieve company objectives by utilizing the available information within an organization.

More often than not, the knowledge and experience of employees (past and present) can help to tackle future projects. But when such information isn't kept and managed efficiently, the necessary insight will not be available to solve the problem at hand. Then, the organization will have to work on the solution from scratch instead of simply using a copy/paste approach. In short, KM can make an organization faster and more efficient in problem-solving and decision-making.

KM aims to make information and institutional knowledge readily available to staff or whoever needs it.

KM is broken down into three stages:

• Knowledge acquisition (or creation)
• Knowledge Storing
• Knowledge Sharing

By gathering and storing employees' knowledge, organizations retain what has made them successful in earlier times. In addition, sharing this information can help other staff boost performance, thereby improving the entire organization.

The importance of Knowledge Management

The importance of KM to organizations is that it makes them more efficient and aids decision-making.

Decision-making becomes faster since insights from past successes and staff knowledge are available.

Note that the use of KM is not exclusive to executives. Employees looking for information on how to execute a task will have access to the entire institutional knowledge. The result is that the overall expertise of every staff within the organization is at the disposal of each employee. The workforce becomes smarter.

In addition, innovation can grow within the organization since old practices can be identified and built upon.

In essence, KM is a way to share expertise within an organization.

Benefits of Knowledge Management

Some of the common benefits of KM include:

●      Sharing of expertise

●      Quicker problem solving

●      Quicker decision making

●      Reduced time to find information

●      Employee growth and development are fostered

●      The staff becomes more competent faster

●      Improved business processes

●      More innovation

●      Overall time savings

●      Overall organizational agility

Worthy of note is that how well the knowledge is managed plays a role in how much benefit is realized. Therefore, it becomes critical to design and implement an efficient infrastructure to make information readily accessible to every staff within the organization.

Thanks to cloud-based services, anyone can access information from their devices, right from their workstation, without moving an inch. You'd most likely need a managed IT services team to set up and maintain your network infrastructure, manage cloud configurations, and move data to the cloud. Managed service provider definition comprises many tech-related services, so you would have to make a clear agreement based on your unique needs.

Types of Organizational Knowledge

Three types of knowledge flow within an organization:

1.    Explicit knowledge

This is any information that can be easily put in systematic or mathematical form, written, taught, and shared. For example, how to set up billing/invoice, FAQs, instructions, etc. It's a formalized documentation of knowledge that can be used to make decisions, execute a job, or educate an audience.

2.    Implicit Knowledge

Implicit knowledge is gained by applying (or implying) explicit knowledge to a given situation. For instance, you can review FAQs and mathematical formulas to gain insight into the best approach to solve a new challenge. Other examples of implicit knowledge include an employee's ability to prioritize tasks and beat deadlines.

Most times, implicit knowledge has to do with the experience of implicit knowledge.

3.    Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge is intangible and difficult to explain or codify -- it is experience built over time. It usually involves things that we can understand without being said. While tacit knowledge may be challenging to capture and implement, having appropriate structures in place can facilitate sharing experiences between old/retired staff and younger/newer ones.

The Bottom Line

Employees will retire, and some will move on to other ventures. It wouldn't be best to allow their experience and expertise to go out the door with them. With KM, you can share all relevant information organization-wide. So whether staff gets promoted, retired, or transferred, their knowledge can help new replacements easily fill those roles.

At the end of the day, your organization becomes smarter, agile, and more efficient.

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Over the years, businesses of all sizes realize the value of knowledge and information. Not surprisingly, a knowledge management system is a norm for large companies and small enterprises. A KMS is a tool that helps an organization capture, organize, and analyze pertinent information. It facilitates improved collaboration, better decision-making, and time management among employees. Moreover, it empowers the team to deliver a more efficient customer experience. Typically, a KMS includes company documents, product development data, product feature breakdowns, presentation decks, case studies, and best practices. Building it seems like a humongous task, but you can build it within a budget. Let us explain how.

Define the KMS goals

Implementing a knowledge management system gets easy if you identify your unique needs and goals in the first place. Customer-facing companies require it to help support teams to solve problems, up-sell products, and enhance customer experiences. Likewise, remote teams can leverage a KMS to enable efficient and user-friendly workflows. Your employees feel empowered with information, making them better and more productive in their roles.

Choose an apt knowledge management platform

Choosing the relevant knowledge management platform is another critical factor when it comes to implementing a KMS on a budget. Evaluate the user base and pick a platform they can use comfortably. After all, the last thing you want to do is spend a fortune to train employees for accessing information from the system. Providing them with a platform with intuitive features for search, editing, and content creation helps with easy buy-in and long-term savings.

Outsource development

Outsourcing development services to create and implement your knowledge management system is the best way to stick to your budget. You can check reputed Staff Augmentation Companies with relevant expertise and experience to hire resources for the project. The model is far cheaper than onboarding an in-house team, as you may not even require them after the deployment stage. You need not retain outsourced employees for the long run but can bring them back for upgrades or maintenance in the system.

Facilitate integration

Ease of integration is another factor that makes a KMS budget-friendly. You will not want a system that requires a change in the other elements of your business ecosystem. Look for one that can capture knowledge and expertise and create a robust repository for future use. Additionally, it should integrate seamlessly with the tools and apps your teams already use. Seamless integration ensures productivity and quality outcomes without spending a fortune.

Continue to improve and update

Continuous improvement makes your KMS relevant and valuable, so do not take a set-and-forget approach after it is up and running. Your needs evolve down the line as your processes change, product lines grow, teams add up in size, and economic and other external factors alter. The information increases, and you need a bigger and better KMS to handle and manage it. Stay regular with updates in the system to ensure relevance and value.

A KMS is the most valuable investment for a business as it empowers your team, so you should not skimp on it. But you can actually spend less to get more out of the system with these simple measures.

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People say that knowledge is power, but that adage is far more than an easy axiom. It’s also a bedrock truth. Perhaps no one knows that better than business leaders and decision-makers, those who deal every day with the management of knowledge.

The simple reality is that knowledge is the grist that keeps the wheels of your business turning. Lack of knowledge can lead to devastating errors, misjudgments, and mismanagement. Conversely, the theft of sensitive information can destroy your company’s reputation and threaten its very survival.

What this means, ultimately, is that knowledge management is about far more than developing sound operating practices, promoting efficiency and productivity, or galvanizing growth and profitability. Rather, the effective control of information is also an aspect of risk reduction. Indeed, risk mitigation may well be the most important, if frequently overlooked, attribute of knowledge management.

Connecting Knowledge Management and Risk Mitigation

Ours truly is the age of information. The success of any modern enterprise, regardless of the industry, directly and inextricably links to the production and flow of knowledge. Thus, the principal form of currency in modern business isn’t money — it’s information.

Just as you would safeguard your financial assets as a function of your risk management processes, so too must you safeguard the creation and circulation of knowledge within your organization if you intend to effectively mitigate the risks to which your organization is exposed.

The Rise of 5G, the IoT, and Smart Tech

Now more than ever, much of the work people do is performed remotely, via smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices linked to the Internet of Things (IoT). These technologies give workers unprecedented power to create, access, and disseminate knowledge whenever they need it and wherever they may be.

This on-demand access to information not only helps to support efficient workflow, but it reduces the risk of work stoppages, delays, or operational errors. For example, IoT devices can be used by farmers to monitor growing conditions in real-time, shippers to track shipments worldwide, and warehouse and inventory managers to continuously assess and regulate product and supply stocks, transport, and storage. Ultimately, this reduces operational risks relating to common threats such as lower-than-expected crop yields, shipment delays, and inventory mismanagement.

Best of all, the extraordinary speed of information flow promises only to increase as technology advances and the 5G network expands worldwide. Indeed, the proliferation of 5G is expected to bridge the digital divide, connecting once inaccessible spaces to the world wide web while offering unprecedented speed and security.

This means that not only will knowledge flow faster, more freely, and more securely around the world, but also that business leaders worldwide will have more power than ever before to reduce their strategic, financial, regulatory, and operational risks. And such risk avoidance not only benefits the organization, but also employees, consumers, and local, national, and global economies in general.

Curtailing Information Flow

As critical as the dissemination of knowledge may be to productivity, efficiency, and strategy, there are, of course, a myriad of reasons why information access is a threat. Some data simply are not appropriate for public consumption, and the failure to protect such sensitive information can have profound consequences for your company.

Healthcare organizations that fail to secure patients’ medical information, for instance, may face costly lawsuits and severe damage to their reputation. Under extreme conditions, they may even be subject to compulsory shutdown by regulators.

For this reason, it is imperative that business leaders prioritize not only the production of knowledge but also the protection of it. Unfortunately, this is not always an easy proposition. For example, you likely already have a clear and rigorous policy for shredding documents containing sensitive information, such as financial or medical records.

However, information leaks can come from even the most seemingly innocuous sources. For instance, bad actors may be able to use something as simple as a birthday card to begin gathering the personally identifiable information (names, birth dates, relatives’ names, etc.) they need to hack company accounts.

This is why, when it comes to knowledge management, it’s probably not possible to be too proactive. In other words, sweat the small stuff. Install virtual private networks (VPN), firewalls, and other advanced security technologies and ensure they’re always updated. Engage in rigorous and ongoing information security training for all employees and partners and provide timely security alerts. Institute policies for destroying all potentially harmful information, no matter how seemingly innocuous.

This should also include, for example, securing all devices potentially containing work product, and ensuring that devices no longer in use are destroyed rather than simply wiped or scrubbed. Even common office equipment such as printers and scanners can retain sensitive information and, thus, should also be professionally destroyed.

The Takeaway

Knowledge management is about far more than using information to optimize operations and drive profitability. Knowledge management is also likely your best weapon against risk. With the appropriate technology, sound information production and dissemination practices, and rigorous data security, you can safeguard your company against the myriad risks that threaten it.

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