Author: Áine McInerney

Ease of Access Through AI

Choose internal knowledge base software that is built on AI and that utilises NLP. With these forces as work, agents have access to a rich library of knowledge articles at their fingertips using a simple search function. As NLP takes care of identifying, retrieving and producing relevant results rather than the agent doing this manually, significant time is saved and efficiency is boosted. For some contact centres the result of which is up to 25% reduction in Average Handling Times.

Without an AI-powered tool in place, First Contact Resolution (FCR) rates suffer. Without a tool that helps agents quickly find that critical piece of information that will satisfy a customer’s issue, often customers are transferred or a call back is arranged for when the information has been found. However, internal knowledge bases that utilise NLP’s intent-based search features increase FCR rates considerably. This is due to its capabilities to understand what is being asked and matching queries with their most relevant results.

Real-Time Article Updates

When it comes to the distribution of information, whether that is internally to agents or externally to customers and other stakeholders, consistency is key. Distributing inconsistent, inaccurate or outdated information can prove detrimental to companies, damaging reputation and worse in some cases. Ensure you choose internal knowledge base software that enables the straightforward editing and updating of knowledge articles in real-time. This means that once an article has been amended, the changes will instantly be reflected through whichever channel your knowledge base connects to.

With circumstances frequently changing and therefore the way many businesses operate, changes must be quickly made available to those who have direct contact with your customers.

A simple knowledge base editor allows those with permission to easily add, edit and update knowledge article whilst agents can make article suggestions and flag those they suspect require updating.

Integrations That Help Serve Customers

Including an agent-facing knowledge base is hugely beneficial to your business operations. However, what happens when you introduce a customer-facing knowledge base, or in other words, an online FAQ or self-service tool is of significant value.

By choosing knowledge base software that powers both an internal interface for agents and an external interface for customers, not only are you providing consistent information across channels, but also contact reduction. By including a self-service option on your website, the level of contact that would otherwise reach the contact centre – most of which including routine queries – is significantly reduced. This not only improves CX but allows agents greater bandwidth to effectively deal with customers’ more complex issues – resulting in higher CSAT scores.

Internal Knowledge

Customer Facing Knowledge

Features That Promote Productivity

Some internal knowledge base tools. offer additional features designed to further promote agent productivity.

For instance, AI-predictive suggestions use AI to recommend relevant knowledge articles on every agent keypress. These suggestions are displayed within the internal knowledge base and can easily be opened, then copied and pasted over to the customer to further reduce AHT.

When integrated with your live chat solution, features such as the live keypress feed help agents deal with chats with optimal efficiency. It lets agents see what customers are typing with every keypress, often allowing them time to solve and prepare a resolution before the customer has hit “send”.

Embed into Culture

Introduce employees to the idea of knowledge sharing and the internal knowledge base well in advanced to prepare them for the roll-out. This might involve weekly company meetings or even tasks that help them become familiar with the initiative. When practised over time, this will become engrained in your company culture.

Assigning Advocates

Before the roll-out takes place, assign several advocates whose responsibility will be to coach others on the upcoming internal knowledge base deployment. Have them act as other employees’ first port of call if they have any questions regarding the roll-out.

By having people of influence within your company advocate the internal knowledge base, it encourages the wider team to get excited about change. If employees are prepared and championing new technology it is likely that other stakeholders will also buy-in.

Employee Involvement

Involve everyone in the initiative as much as possible, as early as possible. This not only helps employees get used to the idea of any changes, but it’s also an opportunity for any employee input.

Organise company-wide surveys and smaller in-depth meetings for those directly involved, for example, agents. This will help with the internal knowledge base’s effectiveness by enriching the content from those with first-hand experience but also helps with user adoption. By familiarising agents with how it will work and having them contribute to the roll-out, the more likely they are to support the new initiative once it is deployed.

Encourage Engagement Through Gamification

To keep agents motivated and engaged, gamified visuals are available to champion user wins and encourage healthy competition in the contact centre. User scoreboard metrics such as most queries solved and top searches are visible to all and displayed in graphics to incentivise and create transparency.

Measure Effectiveness Against Objectives

To make sure that your internal knowledge base is proving effective in its intended areas, it is good practice to have its core goals and objectives always in mind. This way you can easily measure the system’s metrics against objectives to assess whether you remain on track or not. From this, appropriate changes can be made if necessary.

Measure metrics that reside in the tool’s analytics suite, such as search result metrics which reveal how many queries were successfully dealt with using the internal knowledge base and how many are optimisable.

Optimise Your Internal Knowledge Base with Analytics

Keep your knowledge articles up to date and your internal knowledge base accurate by assessing top query analytics that identifies any gaps in your existing content. This is also an opportunity to discover trends as they emerge.

To optimise your content, you can also carry out regular employee surveys and agent interviews to capture new insights and information, continuing to develop your internal library of knowledge.

Dedicated Knowledge Executive

Whether its a Knowledge Manager or dedicated executive from a division such as Customer Service, Customer Experience or Marketing, it’s fundamental that you have someone that takes ownership and accountability over knowledge management.

Ensure that your knowledge executive has the skill and experience to deal with knowledge. This includes knowing how to collect, curate, and harvest knowledge, but also involves the translation of tacit data into consumable knowledge.

Without a Knowledge Manager or equivalent in place, your knowledge will become ineffective, inconsistent and redundant. Without a dedicated individual updating, editing and adding to your bank of knowledge then not only does knowledge management not work as a function but inaccurate and therefore potentially damaging information can circulate.

Knowledge Management Process

Process is imperative when it comes executing your knowledge management strategy. Whilst there is no cookie-cutter approach to this and steps will differ from business to business, it’s important to follow the knowledge management process at the least in its’s simplest form:Discovery:The first step concerns identifying and capturing any explicit knowledge that already exists within the company. This can be found in intranets, DMS and shared company documents, for example, HR policies and Sales processes.

Capture: This focuses on extracting any tacit, undocumented knowledge which generally resides within the brains of senior employees. Interviews and reflection exercises are used to harvest knowledge that would otherwise remain subconscious.

Organise: Once all data has been collected, it must be analysed, grouped and translated into digestible content that is familiar with its audiences. This means communicating data as knowledge articles that are written in the company’s tone of voice.

Share: Using knowledge management software such as an intelligent knowledge base, the sharing of knowledge amongst colleagues and with other stakeholders such as customers is seamless and secure. Knowledge bases that utilise AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) ensure knowledge is fully accessible.

Evaluate: This fundamental step focuses on the constant review and monitoring of knowledge to ensure it is always accurate, up-to-date and serving its audiences effectively. Such evaluation exercises can be carried out using analytics.

This approach can be used time and time again for the effective flow of knowledge to a range of outlets. Ensure each step is given careful attention and that none are skipped or disregarded.

Read more about the Knowledge Management Process stages, here.

Implementation

The implementation of knowledge management software – that is from the SRS agreement to being fully up and running – does not need to be complicated or time-consuming. By choosing knowledge management software that utilises low code, depending on your business requirements, your employees and customers could be benefiting from knowledge within days or weeks. All it requires is a simple line of code that is installed on your website.

Your knowledge base seamlessly integrates with your fundamental customer service tools for the two-way sharing of knowledge. whether it’s self-service widgets , chatbots or live chat , all users can access consistent information fed from the same source.

Through its open RESTful API capabilities, an intelligent knowledge base can also connect to any key 3rd party applications that your company relies on, for example, your CRM.

What Is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management, a key business function, is practised by a multitude of businesses to optimise knowledge, treating it an asset with significant monetary value attached. When implemented effectively, knowledge becomes embedded into a company’s culture so that the collection, analysis, sharing and evaluation of knowledge is second nature.

Companies that implement knowledge management understand the significant value knowledge holds when it comes to business. When we consider how fundamental intellectual property, processes and patents once stemmed from knowledge, it’s apparent why so many companies encourage the collection and sharing of knowledge.

When businesses have teams across multiple locations, knowledge becomes isolated and knowledge silos are formed. This can prove detrimental to business operations and innovation and only exacerbates as companies scale up. Knowledge management instead promotes a knowledge sharing culture which helps to tear down knowledge silos and retain important company knowledge. It also ensures that when an employee leaves a company, their tacit knowledge does not leave with them.

Further, knowledge management helps to bring new employees up to speed quickly, transforming them into experts through the knowledge that has been collected.

Businesses that implement and practice knowledge management benefit from:

• A significant reduction to customer service support costs
• Higher CSAT ratings
• Efficient operations
• Enhanced decision-making process
• A cultural shift towards knowledge sharing
• Empowered employees
• Growth and innovation

For more on the fundamentals of knowledge management, click here.

Step 1: Discovery

Before Discovery, it is good practice to discuss knowledge management goals and objectives to provide your knowledge manager with clear direction as to what your company needs to know and what knowledge needs to be found.

Following this, the first step of the knowledge management process concerns the collection of any explicit knowledge that already exists within the company. Explicit knowledge is codified, consumable and can be easily communicated, some examples include:

• Policies such as HR or returns policies
• Processes such as Sales or product launch processes
• Documents such as product specifications or supplier agreements
• Reports such as marketing effectiveness and customer research

Due to its nature, the collection of explicit knowledge is straightforward but can take time.

Knowledge managers might discover explicit knowledge in shared company DMSs, CRMs, intranets and other records. Whilst this knowledge already exists, it is likely to be highly fragmented and therefore requires dedicated time to data-mine. Effective knowledge management software assists in semi-automating this otherwise time-consuming step.

Step 2: Capture

The Capture stage of the knowledge management process is responsible for extracting and capturing any tacit knowledge that exists within the company. Unlike explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge is generally difficult to identify, articulate and remains below the surface.

Tacit knowledge is learnt over many years, is usually utilised subconsciously and resides within the minds of senior employees, often becoming second nature to them. Because tacit knowledge is not easily communicated, specialist skills and methods are used in order to extract this incredibly valuable type of knowledge. Such methods include:

• Observation
• Interviews
• Surveys
• Retrospect (reflection meetings that take place after the completion of a project)
• Knowledge harvesting (often involving senior employees)

Once tacit knowledge, for example, expert opinions on competitors or salesperson intuition on customer behaviours has been captured, it is the role of the knowledge manager to transform it into a digestible form.

Step 3: Organise

The purpose of knowledge management is to embed, share and teach knowledge to relevant audiences, therefore it is paramount that the knowledge itself is presented in a comprehensive yet simple and digestible way.

This means that your knowledge executive must translate the tacit data collected into consumable knowledge.

Deep analysis and skill are required to collect, unpick, combine and rebuild tacit knowledge into comprehendible articles that match the company’s tone of voice and the entity in which the user is searching for.

Most businesses use knowledge base technology to simplify this process, ensuring control and organisation whilst knowledge is imported to one centralised repository.

Knowledge base providers that utilise Natural Language Processing (NLP), can even advise knowledge managers, flagging poorly structured titles and offering recommendation to improve them.

Step 4: Share

This stage is particularly important to knowledge management, it is what makes knowledge accessible and available to the right people at the right time, whether it’s:

• Internally for employees searching for critical documents, acting as a central knowledge library
• Externally for customers in the form of self-service software , using a filtered view they can access relevant articles

The most effective way to share knowledge throughout a company is through a knowledge base. Once articles are imported, they can easily be updated, reviewed or added to using the straightforward editor. Any changes are reflected in real-time to ensure information consistency and accuracy, no matter how or who is viewing it.

Built on AI and harnessing NLP, intelligent knowledge base technology, users have access to results fast. By unpicking sentence structure and analysing each word, NLP can comprehend what a user is asking regardless of how they have asked it. Such knowledge bases offer article recommendations on every keypress to further boost efficiency.

Users can also navigate to knowledge articles using categories, sub-categories, filtered views and favourites tabs.

For more on how to successfully roll-out a knowledge base, click here.

Step 5: Evaluate

The final stage of the knowledge management process is one that should be continuously carried out. It is responsible for ensuring that the knowledge stored and distributed is proving effective to its audiences. Without this step your knowledge becomes stagnant and knowledge management has no space to optimise.

For constant operational and knowledge improvements, your knowledge base analytics should measure:

• Search result metrics:analytics that demonstrate the effectiveness of articles based on resolved queries, subsequently revealing the effectiveness of your knowledge base
• Top query metrics: these provide key insights into customer trends and requirements, revealing where any content gaps are and areas for optimisation
• Trigger metrics: these metrics show where certain tools trigger on your website, revealing effectiveness and how customers are interacting with your brand

Intelligent Knowledge Bases

Built on AI and harnessing powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP), an intelligent knowledge base is the nucleus of knowledge management. It stores and shares valuable information using AI, intelligent search systems and filters to ensure the correct knowledge is served to the correct audience.

Its editor system allows knowledge articles to be added, updated, edited and linked to one another with ease, all reflecting in real-time to ensure the consistent distribution of answers. Not only is it easy to maintain, but users can also find what they’re looking for through categories, views and the system’s sophisticated NLP.

Integral to CSAT

An intelligent knowledge base’s NLP helps customers find quick and relevant answers through the customer-facing tools they interact with, positively contributing to CSAT. Self-service and chatbot applications for example that integrate with your knowledge base utilise NLP to understand the context and intent behind customer queries. By unpicking sentence structure and analysing keywords, intent, grammar and popularity, relevant results can be delivered regardless of how a query is phrased. This allows a large proportion of routine queries to be solved simultaneously and at scale using AI, removing the need for an agent and providing a smooth customer journey.

Essential to Agent Efficiency

For the contact centre, an intelligent knowledge base is essential when it comes to agent efficiency. With all information intuitively available at agents’ fingertips, they do not have to toggle between windows and resources to find the right knowledge articles. The result of which means that more customers can be served, reducing Average Handling Times (AHT) by 40%. Additionally, knowledge bases that harness Natural language processing (NLP) are shown to consistently deliver accurate information to the agent, increasing First Contact Resolution (FCR).

Your knowledge base helps to reduce training times, up to 30% in some cases. Less time and fewer costs are spent on onboarding and training as the knowledge required to train new user has already been extracted and stored in the knowledge base. The provision of your knowledge base ensures that starters don’t have to know an answer to a query or process in your contact centre, but only to know how to find that information.