See how BMW, AGL Energy and Fidelity International made the most out of knowledge management and how it impacted them

Sharon Melamed: Ford in partnership with Verint. This event is entitled, “How big brands are transforming their customer and digital experience with knowledge management”, and we’ll run for one hour. During this time, we hope to inspire you with new opportunities to transform both your customer and employee experience with knowledge management. We’ll have three short case studies followed by Q&A. Think of your questions as we go along, and you can enter them in the chat room at any point.

Also very important. We’re giving away a bottle of bubbles to the person who asked the most interesting question during Q&A, as judged by our esteemed sponsor. I’m Sharon Melamed managing director of Matchboard. I’ll shortly introduce our first speaker, but just some quick housekeeping. Firstly, we are recording this event and secondly, if you have internet issues, just dial in with the phone number and passcode provided in the calendar invitation.

Finally, could I just ask that you stay on mute to avoid outside noise? Now I’d like to Michael Stelzer vice president Australia and New Zealand at our sponsor Verint, who’s going to say a few words of welcome, Michael.

Michael Stelzer: Thank you, Sharon. Good afternoon everyone and welcome. It’s fantastic to see such a great turnout. I would’ve like to have been doing this in-person, but I think we’re getting closer with one state out of lockdown and– well, two states out of lockdown now, but given we got representation from across Australia, this is a great turnout. Thank you again. Of course, let me start by saying thank you to Liam. We have one of our customers joining us, Liam from AGL, and we’re very grateful to have you join us to speak of some of the solutions today.

Look by way of background. I think I’ve looked through the list. A lot of you probably know Verint and just by way of introduction, Verint specialized, we’ve been in this market 25 years in Australia and we specialize in delivering optimization solutions, but with a focus on bridging EX and CX, how are we helping within employee engagement drive better customer experience?

We do that through advanced AI analytics and automation. It’s a very broad portfolio. Now, given this, the breadth we’re focusing today on knowledge management because it seems really relevant in the current climate. We’re talking to a lot of our customers right now who are faced with new challenges from the work at home and the hybrid workforce. One of the standout business requirements that we’re often asked about is, what can we do to improve the engagement with our remote team members?

How can we help them develop a faster speed to competency and ultimately drive a better CX? That really plays to contextual knowledge management. We’ve been doing this for a very long time. We’ve got some great references in Australia, some great proof points. We are going to talk about it today as a point solution but similarly, as part of a platform, the exponential benefits when you start to blend it with things like real-time speech and do all these other really interesting things.

It’s really exciting where this can ultimately go and how much empowerment you can deliver to your agents. You’re going to hear from that from our experts, we’ve got Jacob and Fred on the call and of course Liam to speak about his experiences. Enough from me. Thank you very much for joining. I’m going to hand over now back to Sharon, I think, to introduce the other speakers.

Sharon: Yes. Thanks so much, Michael. Now to our first presenter, Jacob Murray-White, who is director engagement management at Verint, and he’s going to wrap things up with a case study from BMW and a bit of an overview of knowledge management. Jacob.

Jacob Murray-White: Thank you, Sharon. Hello everybody. It’s nice to put you on a call where I’ve met a fair few of you. Thank you all. I’d like to start with just a quick overview on where knowledge is now. Knowledge has been a critical part of what we all do for a very long time, but there’s been some significant changes of late, which are really changing the importance and usefulness of knowledge management.

We’re all sitting at home today. Well, most of us in here are. Work from home is now a reality. What we’re really seing is as we have embraced work from home in our operations, in our work lives, there’s been a significant impact we’re seeing on our employee experience. There seems to be a direct correlation we’re seeing, especially as work from home matures, between organisations which have embraced new ways of leveraging knowledge and employee engagement and attrition.

We’re seeing as work from home continues, and I don’t know where we’re going to end up in 12 months time, but I think we’re all seeing significant real examples of those organisations, which have using the old ways of managing knowledge are struggling to engage their staff. Secondly, we’ve seen a massive shift of our customers to self-serve. They’re much more willing to self-serve.

Any discrepancies or disparities between our self-service digital environments and the one in the solutions and answers we provide through our contact centre engagement channels will be exacerbated through these channels as people self-serve more and more and more. We’re seeing this is becoming a critical thing we’re all facing as we look at our digital transformation. Another critical area of change is this development of real-time contextual information.

As we personally navigate the digital world, we’ve become very used to systems providing us real-time suggestions on what might be of assistance to us. There’s a real gulf between some of those experiences people are experiencing, and what’s happening for them at work. You’re quite ready to get suggestions whilst you’re navigating a website, but then you’re at work and you’re having to manually search for things.

There’s a disconnect there which shows up in your employee experience, and without the ability to deliver that real-time contextual information, people are struggling– yes, they’re getting second thoughts about the professionalism capability of their organisation. Also from a knowledge management perspective, we’re seeing this opportunity as we all digitally transform to leverage or mute these systems across the ecosystem, across our organisational ecosystem.

This idea of having a single-source, using a platform in multiple ways applies to knowledge as well. People are looking to see how they can leverage their knowledge management solutions to share this single source of truth to their digital front ends, and throughout their other systems they’re using throughout the business. Of course, all organisations and many, many boards are asking us, how do we leverage AI and automation? What are you doing to move me down the path to a more AI-enabled environment?

This leads us to the question is, what does knowledge management look like today? It’s our view that there are four critical requirements. A few of these get missed quite regularly by organisations around what knowledge management is and what it requires. The first one which I think we all understand is the ability to easily create powerful and useful content, and then make sure that this content has been subject to robust approval processes before it gets into production.

Whether that production environment be inside your contact centre, or externally on your web digital presence, so on your digital channels. Can you make sure that your content is fully-approved and it’s not being managed through some Excel spreadsheet somewhere, which we all know is happening quite regularly? The second critical requirement is the ability to search. The ability to find content and not have to be an expert in the way you find, and not be required to become an expert in that search tool to find that content. Allowing people to find knowledge using their own language, [crosstalk] or even better.

Sharon: Oh, sorry. You just got me with the mouth full of food. [laughs]

Jacob: Sorry. [laughs] The other element there is, of course, the ability to surface content contextually. If somebody is doing something or saying something, can we present relevant content to that person without them actually having to do anything? So much more than just search. Search is indefinitely important, but it’s not the only thing. The third element and the one, believe it or not, one I get probably most excited about is curation. How easy is it for you to curate your knowledge? Do you know what’s being used?

How quick are you at turning around feedback and suggestions? Every single person on this call has been involved in a program, we’ve rolled out a new content or knowledge management solution, and six months in, it’s aged potentially fatally, but because the curation and management systems associated with that tool are not up to snuff. The critical element, and Liam’s going to talk about this in bit later on, is the ability to easily capture feedback and suggestions from your user group and then action them. The other critical element is, what is your knowledge solution?

How is it being used? Who’s using the content? What non-content is popular? What is trending? What’s being searched for and delivering nothing? What content isn’t being looked at all? How easy is it for you to recreate those examples? How easy is it for you to understand how your knowledge is being used and where you need to make improvements? As you’ll hear from BMW, what business gaps do you have? What issues do you have in your organisation that you weren’t even aware of? A good knowledge management solution can actually help you identify those challenges. Finally presentation. Can you actually share your knowledge to multiple environments? Can you deliver on this idea of a single source of truth, where you’re using a single source of knowledge content and sharing it out to customers and your employees alike? Can you get this content to them in a contextually relevant and optimised manner? There’s no point sending a PDF to somebody, a long PDF to somebody, when you’re having a chat conversation.

They’re really going to struggle to consume and use that information. The use of an IVA chatbot is very different to what is a back-office refund person needs to know. The idea is you need to deliver your organisation content in an appropriate contextual manner. Finally, before I move into some case studies, now the first of our case studies, it’s probably worthwhile calling out what we see people are looking for from their knowledge solution at an organisational level. Hopefully, these resonate for you.

The first thing people are trying to do is make sure that they can deliver knowledge as a service across the enterprise. The end. How can we leverage this one single system across all of our channels and customer segments? Secondly, how can we make sure that we’re continuously improving? Every conversation Fred and I have with people, I want to talk to us about our ability to deliver continuous improvement to their organisation.

Not just by making knowledge better, but actually improving the content and the values of the organisation, making the business more effective. People are all very excited about, of course, doing clever search. It’s really about the ability to automate that search capabilities and leverage AI is, of course, important to people. People are very excited about the idea of finding a solution which can deliver flexible content. People are also looking at ability to reduce the admin associated with knowledge.

One of the other questions Fred and I often get is, “How many people will I need to have surfacing this knowledge environment?” Liam will probably talk to that. The idea of what capability does your system have in automating delivery and management of this knowledge solution, the back end. With no further ado, I’m now going to move into the BMW story. I don’t know what time it is in England at the moment in Farnborough, but can’t be with us so we have a video of pulling him from the knowledge lead for BMW UK talking.

BMW UK, I’m sure that everyone in this call is aware of BMW and its associated brands. BMW UK has got about 330 contact centre agents spread across both their financial services organisation and their automotive organisation. What’s really interesting is they’ve actually got a larger financial services contact centre than their sales and support for their car contact centre, which I think is quite interesting. They’re servicing about 6 million interactions a year across BMW cars, motorcycles, mini and rolls.

With no further ado, what I’m going to do is I’m going to present snippets of talking and I’m going to introduce each of those as we move along. I hope that’s okay. First, let’s move into BMWs knowledge journey. Now, if you can’t hear, please let me know urgently. [chuckles]

Female Speaker 4: We started working with Verint in 2015 to create our own knowledge base which we call Online Genius. Prompted by the catalogue of systems and processes highlighted during a change of supplier for our contact centre, we took a big step back to look at our wider business operations and all the smaller databases and reference points that have popped up over the years. We chose Knowledge Management Professional as an umbrella over all our systems signposting where information is held.

It is also used as a database to host topics that we previously wouldn’t have considered suitable for customer phasing. We decided to address three audiences, direct to our customer, our contact centre, and internal staff.

Jacob: The next thing we wanted to talk about, now, I would like to talk to you about is how they are using knowledge externally on their digital channels.

Female Speaker 4: BMW customers can access Online Genius on the homepage. It’s highlighted on the red marks tile here while many customers can use the search tool. It’s the small magnifying glass in the top right corner. The differences are down to the branding and CI, but most interaction, over 60%, is captured out in search engines and from hyperlinks and our customer communications. We haven’t needed to do any SEO search engine optimisation tagging or additional processes to achieve this. It’s automated within the portal.

Jacob: Now, let’s hear from BMW about some of the benefits they have experienced by using knowledge externally.

Female Speaker 4: There are other benefits of a direct journey from search engines. When the customer lands on Online Genius, if the entry isn’t exactly what the customer is looking for, the other links you see on the right side of the larger screen grab here, offer a full contextual web search off the website. This is much better than our current BMW search, which only offers a word match search. At the end of every answer, the customer can choose to feedback via the Yes, Partly, No buttons. These are the blue buttons on the middle screen grab and provide free text feedback.

This is a great barometer of how well you’re doing, areas that we’ve never considered were problem for customers, activities we felt were covered with retailer communications. No matter how buttoned-down you might have back latter or in-app message, there are always customers whose next step is to pick up their mobile and hit a search engine for more information, or in the age of misinformation, reassurance that the SMS or the email that they’ve received is credible. Our websites are great at surfacing new products. We really encourage a journey and an experience.

When you’re further down your purchasing journey or you have a query during ownership, you’re not interested in the journey, you want the answers. On the premium piece of the experience is finding that answer first time.

Jacob: Let’s hear from BMW about what they believe is the optimal approach to delivering content. I find this very interesting.

Female Speaker 4: Those topics that sit better in Online Genius are fast-moving topics or sometimes a little sensitive, but customers today expect honesty and transparency. This is the forum to do this, where the customer has a voice and can leave feedback. You have an idea of whether you’ve addressed that issue accurately.

Jacob: Of course, BMW has gone through significant challenges like the rest of us last year. Let’s see how knowledge management helped them.

Female Speaker 4: To give you an example of how Online Genius supported customers and our contact centre on one of the more difficult days in first lockdown, the day had followed multiple government and industry body announcements. The 27th of April we saw a spike. Seven and a half thousand hits just on our COVID decision tree. This is not a number that our contact centre could hope to assist with. Queries were mainly customers concerned with keeping up financial payments.

Online Genius was crucial in reassuring those customers that we understood what they were going through. We were developing a form to fast track a three month payment holiday for them. We needed that breathing space in the contact centre as well. Six weeks later, we repeated that exercise again. We changed the COVID entry most days. It was critical to provide real-time support to the contact centre, and not to raise purchase orders, not to have to book time with the digital or our IT teams.

While we manage financial services topics, we had the opportunity to look at the car care topic. There were a lot of cars sitting unused causing batteries to run low. We configured a subheading for car maintenance ourselves to group these entries. We made sure these weren’t COVID specific and would serve cars being off-road when COVID was finished. Again, Knowledge Management Professional is pushing the most popular topics to the top, ease for the customer while being proactive in those topics they might not have considered.

Jacob: Now, let’s hear about how knowledge in general and announcements, in particular, have helped BMW improve how they’re meeting their car deal requirements.

Female Speaker 4: These fulfil a number of functions. It’s an engagement channel with the contact centre, keeping them posted on hot topics that might cause a peak that day. It creates that pull factor for usage. Once you click on one of these headings, the entry pops out. It also doubles to assist with compliance. It’s critical for updates that touch on compliance and regulatory topics that we have a single source of truth. With Knowledge Management Professional, we have now embedded usage across our in-house teams of quality assurance and training. They also reference the CIC Online Genius desktop. It’s the single reference point for our in-house complaints team, and this is our final point of escalation before the industry regulator. They can see the time of day and entry changed and what version the consultant was referencing when they responded to a customer. There’s no ambiguity over what information was available to respond to the customer. You can imagine how helpful this has been for financial services company over many different lockdowns.

In this example, it was the week of the budget. This almost always impacts the automotive sector and the CIC needed to ensure everyone could see the overnight vehicle excise duty increase announcements. On announcements and the latest news, there is a box that requires ticking. If there’s a hyperlink or an attachment, you can only tick this after you’ve clicked on the link. Clearly, it’s a great way to update your team throughout the day, particularly when you deal with shifts. rest days, and when a full team standup just isn’t feasible.

A team manager can check in the admin portal at any point in the day to view activity by entry report, and narrow the report to a timeframe under heading, in this case announcements. The blue five is the number of staff who have clicked on the entry and the team manager can click on this and the staff are listed by name with exact timings. Anything that’s listed in blue can be further drilled into.

Jacob: Let’s hear about how knowledge has helped BMW adapt with this incredibly challenging situation of all the staff returning from COVID Shutdown.

Female Speaker 4: The breadth of what a consultant needs to know and pivot if they have to cover another team is immense. Refresher training is key coming back from furlough but we’ve continued to launch cars, car accessories, new offers, and Online Genius has provided a real confidence boost for those returning from furlough.

Jacob: How else has knowledge delivered value to BMW just not inside the contact centre operations group.

Female Speaker 4: Knowledge Management Professional is a tool, it signposts on hosts information, it encourages engagement, and provides reporting on everything from every angle. It’s shone a light on business gaps and helped us to join a retailer businesses with our contact centre. Our content manager’s role was created to assist with uploading content and the volume of change.

Their role has developed in the last year, and they now work with our quality assurance team, with our training team, the team managers themselves addressing customer surveys. They even liaise with our underperforming consultants to understand if entries support them correctly. They also produce weekly newsletters with all of these topics and have really driven a change in the last year. Our training team have no need anymore for traditional training of the knowledge base to the end-user.

Jacob: I think you’ll find interesting how positive impact KM’s had on speed encompassing and training times for BMW.

Female Speaker 4: The consultant can bookmark entries in order depending on the team and the strength of the individual. When they’re in grad Bay, those first couple of weeks on the floor, we’ve reduced the need to shadow a superuser. Our speed to competency has increased, our transition we trained each team for six weeks. Now we train consultants for our outbound team in just two weeks and move people around teams with much more flexibility.

Jacob: That is all from the BMW story. Sorry for the somewhat disjointed methodology for delivering it but hopefully, you found the BMW story interesting. Without further ado, I’m going to hand back to Sharon.

Sharon: Yes, thank you. That was fascinating and now to our guest speaker from the most locked-down city in the world now. Liam Pinto is content capability and communications manager at AGL Energy. Take it away Liam.

Liam Pinto: Thanks, Sharon. Yes, quite the accolade to have and I’m sure there are some other Melburnians on there who feel that as well and are also waiting for barbers and hairdressers to reopen, but I guess, be going through the journey for AGL and knowledge management. It was actually quite interesting to see the BMW journey and see some of the things which we’re wanting to do next. We’ve probably done our journey a little bit differently in the wheel coming from a different starting point, but for those who don’t know AGL, as a starting point, a bit of background.

We have a very large customer base and we have 1,300 contact centre agents who are the focus of my team and the teams around us. The retail side of our business speaks to, I think, we have around 100,000 customer contacts per week. Prior to us actually bringing in this application and having this knowledge management platform, we were using SharePoint as a means to store information around processes, policies, procedures, all of the things that our contact centre agents needed to do in order to do their jobs.

That presented challenges for us and that’s something that we’ll go through in a tick. Probably the big difference, people are probably familiar with AGL but the difference for us at the moment, and the, I guess, the big growth area for us as the moment is becoming a Multi-Product essential services retailer. You may have seen recently advertisements that AGL now sell mobile and NBN.

Again, that was probably another important piece of background information that led us to need to improve our knowledge management and go on this journey. You want to the next slide for us, Jacob, cheers.

Liam: Look, the evolution into being a Multi-Product retailer was one of the key impetuses for us to go on this journey. We’re a very heavily regulated industry when it comes to retail energy. Another key driver for us was wanting to make sure that we’re meeting our compliance obligations, and that we’re able to do that at the scale that we’re at as well. Like many other organisations, we’ve also got a call reduction or digital adoption program, that we’re really driving hard at the moment as well, and have been for the last few years.

For us, if I was to pick two of the key reasons why we’ve gone on the journey, it’s absolutely the evolution into Multi-Product retailing and the need for us to meet those compliance regulations. Then, the last thing, which is probably become one of our biggest success stories from this is around driving customer experience through employee experience. We know that we haven’t traditionally put the best tools in the hands of our agents, and I think that that’s at times been to our detriment.

We were really keen to make sure that whatever we brought into the business, that it was something that– our aspiration was that it become the tool that our agents love above all others, and the one that they go to and wanted to be their favorite application. In terms of business case, drivers, we really were coming at it from with a contact centre lens. We were wanting to look at things like AHD. Probably more importantly, we wanted to look at repeat calls and the amount of times it take or amount of calls it takes to resolve customers inquiries.

Transfer rates between groups was one of our drivers, and like I said before, a really big one for us was compliance, and just making sure that our complaint rates are low, and that we are giving our customers the right information the first time they call customer experience is really important for us, as well as it is for everybody. Closely linked to giving people the correct information, we wanted to make sure that our MPS was improved through this process also.

Why we chose the variant KM pro solution, we went through a really robust, and I can see Jacob smiling, because we busted his chops through this process. We went through a very robust RFP and looked at pretty much every knowledge management solution out there, what was really important for us was to make sure that we pick something that not just adds value now and solves those drivers that I mentioned earlier, but something that also positions us for the future, which I think the global pandemic has accelerated many elements of that future.

When we were doing this in 2019, we didn’t envisage that things like digital adoption would accelerate so quickly around the world but it does. It was an important thing for us to make sure that whatever we choose that it’s not going to be obsolete in a year or twos time and something that we look to update again. We wanted to make sure that we pick something that was going to stand the test of time and be ready for what comes next. That was some of the key requirements from a technical point of view. In terms of the actual product and what we wanted for our end users, we wanted it to be, obviously, have one of the best search capabilities out there. We wanted people to be able to easily find the information at the point that they needed it. We wanted to make it easy for our authors, the people who are actually managing the content and working with different functional areas in our business, and we wanted to also make sure that we had a really good feedback system built into the tool as well.

We identified early that feedback and having the end-user be part of our content lifecycle was going to be critical for its success. That was one of the key things that we looked for as well. Probably, the first thing on that slide as well is, it was important to us too, so making sure that we had a cutting edge tool but also had access to people that we could talk to post actually buying the application and implementing it as well. Being able to access a local team and be able to work with them on the implementation and after as well.

We went through the procurement process at the end of 2019, and our implementation date, I think it was late March 2020, so about one week into rolling this out across our contact centres in Melbourne, Adelaide, and the Philippines. We went into lockdown and went into BCP mode. We had to adjust our approach to rolling this out to our audiences, but it actually gave us a bit of time to pilot more than what we were originally planning to, which in hindsight was a really good result for us.

We were able to test the content and really make sure that our users were happy with the information that we were giving them. There’s lots of different ways in the KM pro tool that you can present information to the end-user. When you’re trying to drive compliance outcomes, things like decision trees become really important for us, but at the same time, if you put in a lot of decision trees there can be a trade-off with the end-user and their needing to be guided through a process. They don’t always love that.

We had a lot of time to be able to get that right and get the right balance between driving compliance outcomes and making it a really usable tool for the end-user as well.

Jacob: Liam, I think we both acknowledge that we probably got a little overexcited on using the decision tree to create a bit too much compliance.

Liam: Yes, definitely. Probably, the second lesson learned helped to get us to where we needed to be, which is around driving that feedback culture. I think in the last 12 months we’ve received just over 4,000 pieces of feedback through the tool, which is an enormous number. It’s something we’re really proud of because we wanted to make sure that this was something that felt like a tool that the end-user had a stake in.

Our CSRs are very good at telling us when something in there, either isn’t right or could be better, or telling us where there might be gaps in content because customers are actually asking about something different or not understanding the information that we’re presenting. Jacob, that feedback culture helped us to get that balance right, as well, but that was definitely something that worked really well for us.

In terms of other lessons learned, one of the surprise benefits that we got from it was, our 2021 engagement survey had a significant number of comments from our contact centre that we’re absolutely glowing around the implementation of KM. That was a really pleasing thing to see. We wanted to drive customer experience through employee experience and that’s definitely been successful.

Some of the other things up there, I guess, if I was going back in time to advise myself on things when rolling out KM, there were pockets of our contact centre who we probably overestimated how compliant they were to following processes. That meant that when we introduced the tool that made it very easy for them and they actually started to follow the correct process, we saw the AHT go up because they were actually doing what they were meant to be doing on those calls.

That was an interesting lesson for us and just something that was unexpected and ultimately good to find because I think there were problems that was causing us that this solved. Look, that’s probably, in a nutshell, how we went about rolling things out. What’s next for us is to absolutely look at, “How can we embed this better into our digital ecosystem?” We’ve been very focused on the contact centre and getting the operations right there, but we need to look at how we actually embed it into our website from here.

Jacob: Thank you, Liam. I think I will pass it back to Sharon.

Sharon: Yes. Thank you. That was great. Before we jump to the final case study, we’re going to run a quick poll. Please vote. I hope everyone can see that on their screen. We’re asking, which of the following business objectives are you most focused on? You can pick up to three there, and we’d just like to see where everyone’s at in terms of their priorities in their business. I’ll leave the poll open for 10, 20 seconds more, and then we’ll close off and get Jacob’s reaction to the results.

Jacob: It’s very exciting.

Sharon: Yes, they’re coming in quick and fast, their responses, so I’ll do a countdown, five, four, three, two, one, and end the poll. I will share the results with you on the screen. Jacob, what do you make of these results?

Jacob: I’m somewhat surprised, but at the same time, not. I’m going to talk about the one which came last. I think it’s really interesting that that traditional bugbear of– employee productivity fiscal resolution, actually, was the lowest-ranked. That’s fascinating. There are a few people on this call who know what I’m like, and it warms the cockles of my heart. The other interesting one is the most important one clearly, is customer experience. We’re all most focused on making our customers happy in whatever way that may be.

Hopefully, we can show to you that knowledge can help improve their customer experience through what is ranked second, the employee experience. I think this is very, very interesting. I did think compliance might do a little bit better but I think it’s a really, really interesting view on what this extremely senior group of participants have chosen, so thank you very much. It’s a really, really interesting data.

Sharon: Thank you, indeed. We’re actually going to jump to our final case study and back to Jacob to share a-

Michael: Sharon?

Sharon: Yes.

Michael: There was a question, are we’re doing them at the end or do you want–? Someone had a question for Liam in the text box. Do you want to–?

Sharon: Oh, we’re going to put them all at the end just to make it in one session. Is that okay?

Michael: Okey dokey.

Sharon: [laughs] All right, Jacob is going to share a financial services case study from the global stage, Fidelity Investments, you may have heard of. Take it away, Jacob.

Jacob: Thank you very much. Sorry, getting a bit too much Murray White today, I apologize. Let’s just quickly talk about Fidelity International. I was talking to Fidelity International and showing a version of this case study to a prospective customer, and they advised me that Fidelity is actually famous for being one the latest highest-ranked banks, financial institutions in the world, when it comes to customer satisfaction, which I didn’t know, which makes me even doubly happy.

Fidelity, significant financial organisation, that’s basically AU$1 trillion under management, well over 2 million clients providing significant financial products around the world. They’ve got a really interesting story from a knowledge perspective, and it really isn’t about contact, it is about digital transformation and employee transformation. They started with us by buying Knowledge Management as an HR tool. All the provision of HR information was delivered internally via Knowledge Management just to provide all that critical HR information across the world.

What happened though, is it grew out from an internally focusing HR tool, into a tool that we instantly started using on their partner networks. They’ve got tens of thousands of independent financial advisors who utilize their products and sell their products, and then they expose that solution and product content with regard to their financial products to their financial advisors using the platform.

From there, their digital teams said, well, let’s leverage this capability further and then they started embedding the tool inside their digital assets. They started to use their knowledge to not just deliver web information but also information to the website, but to very intelligent use cases within those digital assets. Now, I’m going to very quickly show you an example of that using their website. Here is the Fidelity International support page. I’m just showing what’s available online, if you go to fidelity.co.uk, you can find it yourself. They use the tool just like you would in any search tool. Let’s just say, we’ve got an address change, I’m just going to do this very quickly, we’ve got an address change, great. How do I update and change my address? That’s all fine so we can click on it. What we’re doing and as per that BMW example, nice, short, pithy responses. Intelligent links to another environment. Did this answer your question and then automatically created related questions. A nice benefit of the solution is that these related questions are done dynamically using the AI capability not being manually linked. If they change one of their articles, it’ll automatically be updated online.

I assume many of you think, cool, it’s a knowledge tool online. Great. What they did next we love, we found this by accident because their PS team did it themselves. What they’ve got here is an ISA is the British version of a superannuation account. You can imagine what it’s like applying for a superannuation account online. We all live in the hope that we can get our customers to self-serve a solution like this. As I like to say, not a single professional services dollar was utilized in the creation of this website, it was just done by their digital team. This is their online application form. As it comes, a complex-based, a detailed tricky environment. What their digital team is using the open API capabilities’ knowledge and KM.

They’ve embedded this knowledge widget and what they’re doing is they’re contextually passing through where a customer is on this web form through to the knowledge tool, allowing our customers to instantly access the most relevant knowledge to them at that moment of need as they get navigating this web page. We find, I love this example because we had nothing to do with it other than providing them a tool, which they were able to use themselves and their surfacing capability like this all over the place but we never know about it. It was a really cute little example of how you can use knowledge to enhance your digital self-service journey and with no further ado, that’s all I wanted to talk about on a fidelity front. I’m going to hand over, if I may, back to Sharon.

Sharon: Just before we go to Q and A from the audience and I hope you got some questions lined up there, everyone. I’m going to ask Freida who is the account executive for Verint Knowledge Management Solutions, to say a few words and let people what next steps they might want to take if they’re interested in exploring KM in their business. Over to you, Freida.

Freida: Yes, for sure. Thanks, Sharon, and nice to see everyone. I’ve got an offer for everyone at the end of my very little speech but firstly, I’d just like to summarize a few things that we– what we have seen today. As you can see from our customer examples, we have helped many clients who have had challenges improving productivity. We know that these Paradigm Legacy Systems can have an enormous impact on organizational inefficiencies. In these environments, the front line and the back office employees have spent a lot of valuable time looking into many systems to find current and up-to-date information. The frontline staff have to put customers on hold to find the right answers no wonder that AHT is high and FCR is low, normally. Not to mention that often the contact centre agents need to call the supervisor to help them answer customers’ queries.

These problems are usually followed by other issues such as high human error that leads to costly compliance issues and rework. Needless to say that the back office inefficiencies equal, they have negative impacts on the organizations. With the next one, hybrid workforce, just a quick summary, greater work flexibility is a necessity of the pandemic and post-pandemic world. As we all know, people should be able to work from any location. They need to have seamless access to organizational knowledge across channels and departments. We are seeing a trend develop of a direct link between employee attrition and the ease of information accessing and ease of information. A modern KM system is essential to empowering your people and allowing them to adapt quickly in the ever-changing environment. With the cell service which is a new goal, the standard, we are seeing the arrival of a hybrid workforce, one of which consists of live agents and digital assets ranging from websites, social channels, apps, and even bots.

This diverse omnichannel environment relies on speedy, accurate, and centralized knowledge to deliver best of breed customer experience. As we all know, getting this right keeps you in front of the competition and help you drive revenue growth. This is where Verint Knowledge Management can help make an enormous difference as you could see in the examples that we have seen today with our customer cases studies. Now, we’re coming to the end of this webinar, if this has triggered your thinking about your organization’s knowledge and you’re wondering how far you could advance with Verint’s modern knowledge solution. To determine this, if you like to get a health check on your knowledge base then we thought of offer that special offer for you here.

The offerees for the participants of this webinar, it would be our pleasure to offer a complimentary KM close-the-gap discovery. By that, we could do a quick review discovery with your nominated KM and Contact Centre Specialists, followed by submitting our review to you. We’re offering this to the first five with the deadline of 18th of October this Monday. However, if you’re interested and you’re in the position to make a decision now, you’re most welcome to put your name down in the public or the private chat here or contact me directly anytime on my email or my mobile phone. With that, I think my time is up. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much and back to you, Sharon.

Sharon: That’s a fantastic offer, Freida. I hope everyone jumps at that one. Now it’s time for questions and I can see, we have a few questions in the chat room already. Just a reminder that there is a bottle of champagne on offer for the most interesting question. We’ll try to get the answers really succinct so we can go through a few. I’d like to read out the first question from Rich. He would love to know if Verint assessed the KM capability of your CRM before looking at external solutions. Actually, sorry that was for AGL, I believe. The reason I ask is that we’re looking to significantly improve our KM at nine, which is also fifth X. No, I think is not. Our tech team would prefer to leverage existing platforms rather than a new one. I’m not sure if you would like to comment on that, Liam.

Liam: Yes, sure. Rich, we did. We looked at all of the different applications that we have that are close to knowledge management if not exactly knowledge management. We had a few different content management systems that are used internally which we assess to see whether they would meet our business requirements. Our CRM was one of those, several reasons why it wasn’t going to achieve what we wanted, one of those was the fact that not everyone who needs knowledge has access or needs the CRM. We actually have a lot of people outside of the contact centre who do need to access policy information from time to time. That was one, it also wasn’t as flexible as the KM pro tool.

We wanted to have something that we could edit really easily and that we can use as a communications platform to push messages to end-users in particular teams when need be. That’s one of many reasons why we didn’t go down that CRM path.

Sharon: Thanks. While we got you, Liam, next question from Michelle at Computershare, you mentioned you had not anticipated the digital uptake that the pandemic created. I’d love to know what level of uptake you saw if you measured it and what impacts either positive or negative you saw in your business as a result.

Liam: Good question, Michelle. I don’t have any numbers for you. It’s a different team to mind that that’s really close to that stuff. What I can say we have seen is more people using messaging and web chat than calling. Not more than calling but an uplifting that relative to the number of total customer contacts. I think for us it’s shown that we need to make sure that we’re presenting content that is actually good for people in the voice channels as well as messaging channels as well. I don’t know if that answers your question but, yes.

Sharon: Fantastic.

Georgia: Thanks, Liam.

Sharon: Interesting question from Georgia at post. Do you believe the term “knowledge management” is well-understood at CEO level? Have you thought of a new term for KM that’s more in line with data and digital transformation across more than just contact centre? I’ll hand that question to the Verint team. I don’t know if you have a comment on that.

Participant: Wow, it’s a facet. Honestly, the answer is, probably. Look at that smile. It’s a great question. I don’t think it is, but then knowledge is just chuck it in SharePoint and everyone will be fine. Give them a PDF. My greatest challenge is knowledge is content and that’s wrong, too. Now it’s not, we are definitely thinking regularly about what is the most appropriate way of providing contextually appropriate. My real focus is bringing the idea of contextually appropriate information but the question itself is absolutely– as you can see, I don’t have a perfect answer for you, which is always a wonderful place to be.

Georgia: I didn’t expect a perfect answer, but I think it’s definitely something that’s worth thinking about, especially when you’re asking people for money.

Participant: Oh, exactly, and it’s the ability to, what business impact does that money have?

Participant 2: Now with a portfolio as broad as Verint, sometimes we find ourselves playing in our own little space and that’s also lonely. If you change the terminology too much, then you’re not recognized also in the right places. At least started the term of knowledge management, we get to the companies who are looking for solutions proactively, or will put us in the mix, and then we get to differentiate substantially in the areas James was talking about but I agree. It’s a really good question. I think we will see evolution in the industry. As we have, if you go all the way back to the early days of knowledge and it’s already come a long way, we may see some more.

Sharon: We have a question from Joanne at Allianz Partners. If a company uses Verint as the KM function is it a simple add-on and used within the platform? I’m guessing this is if they already use Verint for another module.

Participant: I’m going to answer this in two ways. Verint KM is a cloud-based SaaS-based product. I’ve got a Singaporean government entity who rolled out knowledge from it, start to go be signing a contract to go live in three weeks. At a high level, it is that easy. It was very easy to deploy, no matter what your environment is, if you’re a Verint customer or not. If that makes sense. The quicker bit is there’s a contract already, which always speeds things up [laughs].

Liam: There are some investments that we make as a business to integrate it into the other solutions. We find that the differentiated value time, the investments we’re making in some IP, we call it the DaVinci, which is our intelligent virtual assistant or our artificial intelligence and machine learning that’s embedded in our platform to facilitate better integration. I think I said it at the start, if you are a customer and you have speech analytics or real-time speech analytics, and you add knowledge, the investments to bring that together, to drive exponential value. We’re doing that, if you can link knowledge to quality, you can link knowledge to the intelligent virtual assistant. Knowledge is underpinning all of our other solutions. There are advantages from a single vendor, but as Jacob said, it is a separate solution and it’s cloud-based and it’s very fast to get a rapid ROI.

Sharon: Great, thanks. Question for Liam again, the ecosystem of sourcing, approving, and publishing knowledge items is key for the KM to be successful. What were your learnings in this regard? And did you involve co-design, co-creation strategies to ensure the ecosystem would be robust enough to deliver a great employee experience, Liam?

Liam: Really good question, Chris. Yes, we did. We involved our end-users in the way that we created content from the outset. Designing how we would present information, whether it be a process, a policy, procedure, whatever other category you want to go with. We had an agreed-upon series of principles around content, which probably look a lot similar to any other content principles that you might pull together.

We also made sure that we had a clear governance process because obviously a key driver for us was compliance and wanting to make sure that walls were as responsive as possible and agile in the way that we’re responding to end-users’ feedback that we’re also still giving them the right information because sometimes they’ll take you down a path that’s not actually right. In terms of lessons, we involve the end-user from the absolute outset. I’m always a big believer in establishing principles for something like this. I think that was really important for us.

Participant: Liam. Thank you. Just a quick follow-up. The internal part of the business was also what was of interest to me in that question. An end-user might say something’s happening today in real-time, but if the internal approval organization or the internal stakeholders aren’t lined up to respond to that request, get it out and get it available for the end-user, you start to lose relevance because you’re not responsive enough. I was interested in the internal mechanism of the business, and whether you did anything to co-create, co-design, or work with them to get their buy-in so that you could be responsive and you could actually get your knowledge.

Liam: Yes, a really robust change management plan. We follow the Prosci ADKAR methodology. We spent a lot of time with people we knew would be funnels of information. People we knew that we would have to have readily available in order to make changes to content through that. Legal regs, these sorts of areas of functional areas as well. Working with them, we had to articulate why is this helpful for them, and really sort of spell out to them that if they prioritize responding to these sorts of things and getting information clarified and up-to-date for the end-user, that there’s actually a significant benefit for them.

It removes all this other work that they were doing otherwise by being more responsive upfront. A lot of it was just sitting down with key stakeholders and explaining why this is important and actually how it’s going to impact and benefit them as well.

Participant: Hey, Liam, is going to add. I’m going to ask a question I’m not certain of the answer to which is always dangerous. They are those authorizing groups, approving groups are using the tool as well, aren’t they?

Liam: They are, yes. They can see it, they understand it. I think the thing which they appreciate is the fact that we use it as a communications platform as well as a knowledge platform. Pushing out information really quickly to groups when they need it. If they notice there’s a problem and they connect with us, we’re actually able to get it to the agents on their screens within minutes of them telling us. I think that the “what’s in it for them” is really clear through that as well.

Participant 1: Fantastic. I’m just going to read out the very last question before we award their champagne prize. Rich has asked, this is a really interesting one, to what degree organizations should leverage crowdsource KM alongside internally-driven KM, Jacob, what are your thoughts?

Jacob: [laughs] It’s not a cracking question, Rich. I feel that some organizations go too far on crowdsourcing and lose control of their information. I think one of the biggest– I often say that being done badly. I think you need to find a balance between your community sharing information and then that whole role that, how do you get approved curated content into that environment? From a Variant perspective, my standard answer is that you use your community for the community purpose, but then you insert approved content from your knowledge environment in that place and make sure it’s prioritized properly. I think you’ve got to be really careful.

I think some people have gone way too far on letting the jungle decide what truth is, and you’ve got to be very careful on making sure that you’re controlling the narrative. That’s a critical part of getting by, you would have seen in BMW. By having the search engines sit directly, retrieve non-knowledge content, you’re going to get to the right answers faster, and people are going to be seeing what the answers you want them to be seeing much faster, much more regularly. That’s probably the way I’d answer that, but I’d love to have a proper conversation with you about it, of course, because that’s a fascinating little beast.

Participant 1: Thank you.

Jacob: Yes, the part of the API is that it let you lock yourself out, it would be the easiest way, then you remove that need for the crowdsourcing.

Sharon: Fantastic. We’re almost at the end. I know there was a question in the chat room from Duncan which we’ll answer offline, but I think, Michael, if you could just take into account when judging the best audience question, the question was working in the healthcare sector. We don’t have a readily available ability to connect our employees with your policies and procedures on the go co-Verint partner with a cloud-based operational management CRM, or does it need to sit alone? I’ll let you answer that question offline.

Jacob: Duncan, the answer is, yes.

Sharon: That’s a great answer.

[laughter]

Liam: What a quick one. Well done.

Sharon: Michael, it’s time to announce the winner of the best question.

Michael: You really put me on the spot here. There’s a couple of really good questions.

Sharon: We can do two bottles of champagne if it’s a tie-break.

Michael: I’ll tell you what, let’s do that. I’ll tell you the one that jumped out at me, which I really liked, was Chris’s question because it’s a real-world internal-navigation type challenge, very relevant. That was spot on and bonus points because you came up with KAPA [chuckles]. Knowledge At the Point of Action. We have a potential new definition. For the second one, Jacob, let me throw it to you. What would you pick the second bottle for?

Jacob: Alison, Georgia’s very close, but I think Rich just got me a little bit harder so I think I’ll go with– Are you okay with that, Georgia?

[laughter]

Jacob: Sorry.

Georgia: Totally fine. I’ll get my own champagne.

Participant 1: Lovely.

Jacob: [laughs].

Participant 1: Thank you. Let me just add, everybody, let me just add that I’ve found in my time working with Jacob and Freida that this thing really comes alive when you can see a very short demonstration, really differentiates itself, very easy to use. The things that Jacob talked about, they materialize so I’d extend the invitation to you. If you’re wanting to learn more about our knowledge, please when we reach out, we’ll be happy to take you through a demonstration of the product. Thank you very much, everyone. I really appreciate your attendance. I can certainly add, Sharon’s wrapping me up.

[laughter]

Sharon: We’re going to send around a short survey, but thank you so much everyone for attending. The Verint team, of course, will remain available to engage with you further and I’ll share their contact details on the survey email. Wishing everyone a wonderful day ahead. Stay safe, stay well, and see you next time.

Participant: Thanks.

Sharon: Thank you.

Jacob: See you all.

Georgia: Bye.

Sharon: Bye-bye.

[01:02:06] [END OF AUDIO]