Information can be valuable. Outdated or inaccessible information is effectively useless. In a contact center, your Knowledgebase is subject to the GIGO principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Building and maintaining a knowledgebase is crucial. Without formal documentation, policies and procedures become “institutional knowledge” where the information resides only in the minds of the employees. While this may get the immediate job done in some cases, institutional knowledge is neither future-forward nor scalable.
There are several factors to consider when evaluating how effective your knowledgebase solution is, whether it is a new implementation or updating an age-old internal system. Here are a few tips to consider:
Is your knowledgebase like a well-stocked library?
Ease of Use
It seems obvious that your tools should be easy to use. The operative word here is “should.” While the tools should be easy to use, are they? How often do you assess this? How, specifically, do you quantify this?
End user feedback is the primary data point for evidence of the usability of your knowledgebase. From feedback gleaned in team huddles, to formal employee satisfaction surveys regarding tools and other work elements, periodic assessments should be conducted to gauge the effectiveness of a knowledgebase.
Keep in mind that end-users may describe a problem incorrectly. For example, an agent may complain that a knowledgebase is hard to use because they can never find what they are looking for, but the root cause of that issue may be that the content does not exist; this is not a fault of the platform design or functionality of the search tools. Iterative dialogue is key to drill down on reported issues to ensure full understanding of the team’s needs, and to clarify where grievances originate.
Set-Up
The initial work to stand up a knowledgebase may be simple, from a software standpoint. It may be a simple matter of assigning permissions to users to manually edit content in a tool such as SharePoint. More advanced (and expensive) knowledgebase solutions can accept uploads of thousands of pages of PDF files, and digitally scan then and index the content automatically.
For the manual set-up, don’t underestimate the effort. The starting point may be a thorough review of all of your existing documentation, to filter out what is current and what is outdated. You also need to mine for gaps, and create new documents to fill them. Once you have your content organized, it needs to be uploaded, and based on the tools you have at your disposal, extra steps such as creating tags for the content or adding contextual questions to help retrieve the item when needed can mandate extra time for every item added. This can take days or weeks, and may require input from multiple departments.
Knowledgebase tools that can be populated automatically still need rigorous user acceptance testing, and any contact center knowledgebase set-up should culminate with a comprehensive end-user training.
Maintenance
A knowledgebase is not a “set it and forget it” tool. Content may be added or revised on a regular basis, even daily, given your operating environment. New product specs, marketing promotions, streamlined troubleshooting guides, cross-sell / up-sell recommendations are all examples of content that can change frequently. Removing or archiving outdated content, updating existing articles, and loading in new information can be a full time job.
Your agents rely on this information, and your customers rely on your agents.
Reporting
In addition to direct end-user feedback, an effective knowledgebase will have reporting to highlight user adoption rates, and usage patterns.
Who isn’t using the tool? If it’s a veteran agent with great quality scores, CSAT, and other KPIs, frequent knowledgebase use may not be necessary. But if low usage rates are observed next to low performance, the agent should be coached on how to use the knowledgebase (and other tools) more effectively.
Which articles are accessed most frequently? If this content isn’t already highlighted in training, look to the knowledgebase reporting to identify areas for stronger learning exercises in your curriculum.
Which articles are never accessed? Evaluate if they should be archived; if articles are used circumstantially, such as seasonally or by new hires in nesting, in which cases there will be identifiable patterns in the usage.
If the knowledgebase is customer facing, how do the topics customers search for relate to your call drivers? Do customers frequently call in for support on a topic after searching for it online? The ability to tie these data points together is crucial to fine-tuning your content, and for maximizing the value of the knowledgebase, both for the licensing of the tool and the labor required to keep it in use.
