The Human Side of Knowledge Management
Unlocking People Potential in the Knowledge Economy

With its emphasis on people, process and technology, knowledge management (KM) is often considered an academic discipline, a "nice to have" complement to the core business, and an investment that may pay dividends down the road. However, it is the human element of KM executives—that can deliver quantifiable business benefits today.

How KM can drive business improvement.
Specifically, investments in facilitating a knowledge culture can directly drive business performance by improving the lives of three core constituencies:

• Customers’ support experiences can be improved as they have ready access to the information they need. KM is the foundation for service delivery across channels, enabling a seamless support experience regardless of how customers choose to interact with the company. The Web support experience, the agent-support experience and even the community-based support experience, all emanate from one platform that allows the customer to move seamlessly between channels.

Faster problem resolution, either through self-service or more expeditious agent assistance, directly reduces costs. It also boosts customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Customer service agents’ easy access to knowledge resources increases their efficacy, also speeding time-to-resolution and reducing support costs. Equally important, it increases agents’ job satisfaction, lowering turnover.
• Executives can see the cost savings that knowledge management can effect, through call deflection and improved contact center efficiency. Dashboards’ display of service-quality metrics provides proof that KM technology can improve on the bottom line. KM can also help to identify trends in customer satisfaction and developments in the market, enabling executives to make more informed decisions. It can help identify gaps in the knowledgebase, recognize experts in the employee and customer communities, highlight regional needs and provide other insights that improve decision-making.

Focusing on the needs of these core groups constitutes a solid value proposition for creating a knowledge culture at your company, facilitated by KM technology that makes it easy for everyone to engage in the KM process.

KM shapes a positive customer experience.
Customers do not come to your website or call your contact center to explicitly engage with your knowledgebase. Rather, they come with a specific purpose in mind. KM can influence the outcomes of those customer interactions, and reinforce affinity for your brand, in three ways:

1. Experiences with your company via direct (phone) and online (Web self-service) channels. Whether they interact with a customer service agent or online resources, their satisfaction is based on the answers to three simple questions: Did the company understand my need? Did it satisfy that need? Did it do it quickly?

2. The ease with which they can access the information they need. The quality of customers’ experiences is largely driven by their ability to quickly get the information they need when they need it.

3. The quality of the information—did it answer the customer’s question or solve the problem? Problem resolution is the ultimate goal that your company and your customers share.

The ease with which customers participate in the knowledge management process is critical to their success. An effective customer-facing KM system should allow customers to:

• Access high-quality online content quickly, through advanced search and browse technologies that dynamically respond to customers’ needs and behavior, and incorporate contextual and profile information to deliver the most relevant support experience possible. The important driver is to recognize and respond to customers’ needs as quickly as possible.
• Assess the service experience through direct feedback and the opportunity to rate the value of the content at the heart of the service interaction. This allows high-quality resources (i.e., knowledge contributors) to be identified by customers, further reinforcing their connection with your company.
• Participate in the process through contribution to forums and other collaboration tools. Your company should provide an avenue where customers can speak directly, and a platform where they can help one another (and expand and improve upon the knowledgebase).
• Control how they interact with you in the future. A customer service experience
  that exceeds expectations will encourage customers to return. Allow them to personalize that experience through email subscriptions, RSS feeds and personal preferences.

KM drives agent productivity and satisfaction.
Easy access to the right information is essential to customer service agents’ success and, thus, their productivity and job satisfaction. Agents’ perception of knowledge management comes from:

• Their ability to access information and solutions, in real-time, to satisfactorily address specific customer issues in an expedited manner. It’s important to recognize that the alternative often implies searching multiple sources with ineffective tools, over-reliance on sticky-note cheat sheets and frequent escalation of support issues—all of which frustrates the agent.
• The ability to participate in the KM process from within the agents’ existing workflow. Information that can be accessed only outside of the standard workflow translates into extra work—which reduces efficiency and frustrates agents. Contributions to the KM ecosystem should be harvested directly from the tasks and activities associated with resolving customer problems.
• Recognition for their contributions. The best KM systems feature a greater degree of transparency and accountability where the customer and agent community validates quality. Agents who tackle complex problems and contribute knowledge content that is highly rated by customers and frequently reused by other agents should be both recognized and rewarded. Happier agents reduces turnover and increases productivity.

Customer service agents’ participation in the knowledge management process ensures the KM process is organic, relevant and grows with the organization. Agents provide a direct link between customers and the KM system, authoring new content that originates from the problem resolution process, and triggering workflows to fill content gaps with input from subject matter experts that could be distributed across the organization.