Customer service has emerged as one

Customer service has emerged as one of
the few remaining differentiators that busi-
nesses can sustain over time. Companies
that are winning in this environment provide
“stand-out” customer service by using
knowledge to empower contact center
agents and drive self-service interactions.
In delivering KM solutions to world-
class contact centers and self-service oper-
ations for more than 15 years, we have
compiled hundreds of best practices that
improve the odds of success in KM imple-
mentations, while maximizing ROI. Listed
below are some of the popular ones.
1. Quantify value.
Assessing expected and realized ROI
before and after the deployment helps you
justify the initial investment as well as
ongoing maintenance of the knowledge-
base (KB) while elevating your visibility
as a value creator for your business.
Best practice: Make sure the metrics
you use are aligned with business objec-
tives. For instance, if your main business
goal is to increase upsell and cross-sell
through knowledge-enabled contextual
offers, reduction in call handle times will
be a conflicting metric. As you assess ROI,
keep in mind that KM delivers positive
ROI in areas such as:
u Increase in first-time fixes and revenue
through upsell and cross-sell; and
u Reduction in escalations, transfers, repeat
calls, call handle times, training time, un-
warranted product returns, field visits and
staff wage premiums.
2. Build the right team.
Successful KM implementations start
with the right team for knowledge capture
and creation.
Best practice: Build a cross-functional
team that can bring a 360-degree approach
to knowledge creation. Best-practice teams
typically include:
u Lead expert: individual who decides how
the KB will be organized, which topics
will be covered, what the roles of various
people in the team are and plans for main-
tenancte;
u Users: high-performance contact center
agents who provide suggestions;
u Knowledge authors: individuals who are
trained to use authoring tools; and
u Project manager: individual who keeps
the project on track.
. Avoid the “swiss cheese” syndrome.
Ambitious deployments almost always
esult in a KB that is solid in places, but
ull of holes, like a slice of Swiss cheese.
This is a recipe for failure, because if users
an’t find the answers, or get inadequate or
wrong answers, they will quickly stop
sing the system.
Best practice: Focus on depth and qual-
ty rather than breadth. For instance, if an
nterprise sells printers, scanners and
opiers, the best approach would be to
over one product line thoroughly first.
. Maintain velocity.
A classic mistake in KM implementa-
ions is not making midcourse adjustments
o keep the project on track.
Best practice: If the deployment
ppears to be falling behind schedule,
arrow the scope of the KB and finish on
chedule. In fact, it is better to widen the
cope later to expand the benefits of the
eployment. As a rough guide, a typical
nterprise deployment should not take
more than three months after the initial
lanning, with three or four full-time peo-
le engaged. Deployment includes soft-
ware installation, knowledge gathering
nd testing both the quality of the KB and
ystem performance.
. Balance “ivory tower knowledge” with
street smarts.”
Enterprises often make the mistake of
elying solely on internally focused
omain experts who rarely speak to cus-
omers. It is sometimes difficult for
xperts to get down to the level of ordinary
ustomers who may not know technical
erms such as whether their mutual fund is
no load,” “frontloaded” or “back-loaded.”
Using jargon in questions posed by agents
or self-service systems is a guaranteed
way to increase escalations and customer
defections.
Best practice: Find KB contributors
who are both technically competent and
not too far removed from customer contact.
Successful customer service depends as
much on the questions posed to customers
as the answers.
6. Provide flexible content access.
People have different ways of finding
information, or the same person may use
different methods to suit the situation. A
flexible approach to information access
dramatically improves user adoption and
ROI. For instance, novice agents, whether
they are in-house or outsourced, may find
it difficult to wade through hundreds of
search hits to find the right answer, but
may fare better if they are guided through
a dialogue, powered by an inference
engine. On the other hand, experienced
agents may prefer to quickly process
search hits.
Best practice: Provide users multiple
ways to access information—FAQ, browse,
search and guided help. The key here is to
make sure that the KB remains the same
and there are no content silos. z
eGain has helped world-class companies achieve and
sustain customer service excellence for more than a
decade. eGain Service™, the company’s top-rated cus-
tomer service and knowledge management software
suite, enables organizations to build customer interac-
tion hubs to provide best-in-class customer service and