The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management

What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management (KM) is the method of identifying, understanding, using, and sharing knowledge across an organization. Successful knowledge management empowers the workforce, helps customers self-serve, and creates better customer experiences

What is the main objective of knowledge management?

At its core, knowledge management’s primary goal is to make organizations more efficient by championing access to existing documentation, experience, and ideas – whilst also capturing new knowledge. It does this by creating systems or processes that allow a workforce to share this information as a single source of truth, making knowledge available at the right time and in the right place

What are some examples of knowledge management?

1. Knowledge management to enable high-performing contact centers: When your customers have questions or issues, they demand immediate, accurate answers in their channel of choice. But, with your products and processes frequently changing, the amount of information housed within your organization grows daily. The result? Your employees struggle to find the information they need to answer an unending stream of complex questions. The solution? A knowledge management system that enables your agents to find up-to-date information effortlessly in the most efficient way possible to increase engagement levels and improve operational efficiency.
2. Knowledge management to enable customers to self-serve: Today’s customers live in a digital world. They expect brands to not only meet them on the channels of their choice but also provide exceptional self-service experiences. The right knowledge management platform helps agents to provide consistent service across all channels and offers customers seamless self-service pathways. This lowers a brand’s cost to serve when engaging with its customers and improves the customers experience.
3. Knowledge management to ensure quality and compliance across the enterprise: The right knowledge management system provides your agents with consistent information, enabling them to keep up with compliance requirements. Enterprise knowledge management software can also guide agents step-by-step through complex procedures, so that all required steps are followed to ensure behavioral compliance. A fully integrated knowledge management system will enable real-time guidance and assistance for front-line agents. This will also help with upskilling and cross-skilling of new hires.

What are the benefits of knowledge management?

Benefits of knowledge management include:

1. Lower Average Handle Times: A knowledge base provides a quick way to get reliable answers to even the most complex questions. One of the benefits of knowledge management is putting the information that customers seek in front of agents for quick access and use. When agents can efficiently and thoroughly answer customer questions, average handle times can be reduced.
2. Provide Consistent Information: As customers communicate with organizations on more and more channels, it is critical to supply a single source of the truth so agents can provide consistent answers to customer questions across phone, email, chat, SMS, social media, and private messaging apps. A central knowledge management system that is accessible across channels eliminates silos of information that can lead to different answers given to the same question.
3. Reduce Inbound Contact Volume: One of the benefits of knowledge management is it connects customers with the answers they need. With an easy-to-use self-service website, more customers will help themselves and not require an agent-assisted interaction.
4. Decrease Issue Escalation: If the right information is not easily accessible, the call will likely result in an escalation to a more specialized resource. A knowledge management system can contain literally millions of articles, across a wide variety of topics. Even if an agent has never handled a specific type of query, they will be able to resolve the issue with confidence.
5. Increased First Contact Resolution: Knowledge management platforms provide complete, accurate, up-to-date information, which reduces the risk of customers needing to reach out again because their issue is not fully resolved. Also, each knowledge article can automatically show related articles that can proactively answer follow-up questions the customer may have.
6. Increased Customer Satisfaction: Creating the world’s best customer experience has a lot of factors to consider. But, when a knowledge management system empowers employees to answer customer questions efficiently and thoroughly, a huge benefit is an increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
7. Reduced Training Time: Employee turnover can be extremely costly. Each time a new employee is onboarded, weeks of time are spent training the new individual on the vast array of information required to help customers. A knowledge management system that contains the information needed to answer customer questions can significantly reduce training time, allowing trainers to focus on soft skills and customer engagement.
8. Increased Employee Engagement: It’s important to provide the tools for employees to feel engaged, do their job well, and feel confident and motivated in their work. A comprehensive knowledge management system is a very useful tool for employees to feel empowered to answer a broad range of customer questions, even on topics that they may not have encountered before.
9. Multi-skilled Agents: Specialized agents can cause frustration and inefficiency, as customers get transferred from employee to employee to get an answer. When each agent can access the full breadth of information in a central knowledge base, there is less need to specialize agents for tier-one calls.

Examples of knowledge management

IAG implemented Verint Knowledge Management to enable customers to access information and transact business online. As a result, IAG has seen a dramatic impact to its annual phone and in-branch transaction volumes. The company has achieved an 18 percent call volume reduction and the growth in online self-service has resulted in fewer customer visits to its branches.

Sky Deutschland improved first contact resolution by 8%, whilst increasing CSAT to 70%+, by implementing Verint Knowledge Management. By creating a centralized repository of technical content, frequently asked questions, procedures and more, Sky Deutschland’s team could search the knowledge base using keywords and natural language – and provide consistent, accurate answers to customer inquiries, through whichever channel the customer chooses to communicate.

Equiniti implemented Verint Knowledge Management to develop a more consumer-centric service. The company noted: “Adoption amongst employees has been fantastic. It’s not often you can say this about technology, but the team really enjoys using the system. User voting, quality scores and feedback are all visible. It gives genuine purpose to their work”.

Verint’s market-leading knowledge management features

Verint Knowledge Management provides an enterprise-grade solution to the largest, most complex knowledge management challenges. It provides a comprehensive set of knowledge development and delivery features, including:

• AI-Infused Search – Uses patented cognitive intelligence to store and recall information in the same way that the human brain thinks, so that searches can recognize what people mean versus what they type.
• Automated Content Curation – Removes the burden of manual tagging and linking to optimize content results. The knowledge base can automatically analyze new content and optimize it for searching.
• Enterprise-Scale Deployment – Benefit from a proven solution deployed in some of the largest, most complex operations, with some spanning more than 20 languages, hundreds of thousands of content objects, and enterprise-level usage.
• Rich, Multilingual Authoring and Workflow – Easily create knowledge articles formatted with tables, images, video, and more. Define who needs to approve an article before it is published. View previous versions of articles and go back to earlier versions.
• Article Tags for Filtering – Assign relevant product, region, publish/expiration, and permission tags to content to help users find the right information faster. Use multiple filters to quickly and accurately home in on the best answers, while leveraging faceted searching to present the best filter options dynamically as users search.
• External Content Spidering – Search content from websites and file systems alongside native knowledge base content.
• Integration with Verint Employee Desktop – Leverage deep, inherent integration to drive contextual knowledge across any relevant interaction and screen in the agent desktop and workflow.

Why Verint is a knowledge management leader

Verint Knowledge Management is a highly scalable solution that makes it easy to deliver the right knowledge to users in the contact center and to customers through self-service. Available in the cloud or on-premise, it gives your agents the tools they need to provide exceptional service. It can help you increase first-contact resolution, improve the consistency and quality of answers, achieve compliance with regulations and company processes and reduce agent training time.   Making it easy for users to search for answers is helpful, but what if users didn’t have to search at all? Verint Knowledge Management uses context to personalize results, often resulting in the right knowledge appearing with little to no searching. Examples include:

• Customer History – Uses information about customers, such as their location, products owned, and active cases to drive what knowledge articles are likely to be needed.
• Contact Question Details – Allows text from the customer’s chat message, email conversation, or IVR selections to be used to automatically search for relevant answers without needing to manually type a search.
• Verint Desktop Process Analytics™ Integration – Provides direct feedback and triggers on screen interactions to drive best knowledge response, and to assess quality.
• Verint Real-time Speech Analytics Integration – Enables Verint Real-Time Speech Analytics™ to listen to calls between customers and agents and automatically present contextual results based on words spoken.
• Agent Desktop Integration – Presents articles inside the agent’s desktop to drive next best actions forward in real time.
• Internet of Things (IoT) – Searches automatically for knowledge articles based on model numbers and error codes sent from external devices, helping to resolve issues quickly.

Contextual knowledge can be configured to appear wherever it helps drive effective outcomes. Responsive design enables deployment on any computing device (PC, tablet, mobile, web, even voice-activated channels). With Verint Knowledge Management, you can address today’s complex omnichannel customer service environment for customers and agents.  Verint Knowledge Management is a robust, highly configurable solution that provides customers and contact center agents with instant access to information across channels to improve both customer experience and operational productivity.   Its patented, AI-infused search technology can quickly find and present users with accurate, relevant answers, eliminating time-consuming research.  With a rich array of search, content management, reporting and integration features, Verint Knowledge Management is configurable to meet the demands of growing organizations and seamlessly blend into the most complex business environments.