Empowering people with the right knowledge, at the right time

Datacom’s Knowledge Management team is helping organisations transform their data into useful, accessible information to activate higher quality customer service experiences.

Contact centre teams have a huge amount of information they need to access in order to serve their customers effectively and efficiently – particularly as customer demand and expectations increase. To help companies maintain and access accurate information with ease, Datacom’s Knowledge Management team provide an integrated, user-centric solution that houses all their informational needs in one place while empowering people to utilise it to its maximum potential.

The team describes knowledge management as "the missing piece in a lot of organisations when it comes to a single source of truth for their information".

Companies often have information that sits disparately across SharePoint, Outlook, Word documents or – potentially even worse – a number of different individuals hold critical business knowledge inside their head. Without good knowledge management practices and tools, organisations don't know when information was last updated or verified, or if teams are accessing and sharing consistent information with customers and partners. With staff attrition they also face losing important company knowledge and valuable IP. All these things create massive gaps when it comes to accessing information in an organisation.

Knowledge Management is about bringing all these pieces of information together in a central location – and making them easily accessible to they can be used to constantly improve overall business performance.

Asked to describe the ideal solution, Datacom's expert team says a Knowledge Management platform should be a one-stop shop that staff can access at any time the platform and – importantly –they should "be able to have every confidence that the information that they're getting is both current and accurate".

The sheer amount of information across an organisation can be confronting. Without proper Knowledge Management, the ability of staff (both Customer Service Representatives - CSRs - and support staff) to source and deliver the right information to the end customer is severely impacted.

Incorrect, inconsistent, or outdated information passed on to customers quickly leads to more complaints, more rework, increased handling times, and a greater cost to serve which leads to poor experiences for both customers and employees.

Datacom's Knowledge Management Team was created in 2016 when a client was experiencing this same problem – out of date information being used by staff and passed on to customers. Having started a relationship with platform provider Livepro, an opportunity to deliver Knowledge Management was born.

After initially focusing on simply bringing together information onto a central platform, Datacom started to explore customising the platforms and embracing the current Knowledge Management approach – making it more than just a place to store information, but a way to actively improve and change the way that information is found, updated, delivered, and actioned on.

What sets Datacom's Knowledge Management apart is the principles behind it. It is now built with end users in mind and how it can be constantly improved and learnt from in real time. 

These days, Datacom's Knowledge Management offering plays a key role in contact centre performance and improvement, learning from behaviours that seek to continuously improve the platform and the experience. It takes the guess work out of CSR's role, and guides users quickly to where they want to go next by looking at several aspects, including the structure of articles, keyword searches, common pathways/next steps and reporting insights and recommendations.

This approach has allowed Datacom to recommend actionable insights driven by data, which has garnered some fantastic results for our clients including improving speed-to-competency through optimising how training is delivered, reducing handling times, removing unnecessary call transferring, and enabling an enhanced customer experience to be achieved through first call resolution.

For the Knowledge Management team the focus is on making it easy for the users and for the end client. When customer service teams are confident about where to find information, and they know it is up-to-date and accurate, then they can focus their attention on helping people and giving them the best service possible.

Right now, Knowledge Management is focused on compiling, organising and optimising information used by contact centres and CSRs to help their customers. Longer term, the team’s sights are set on expanding Knowledge Management to optimise the way clients manage internal information as well. Internal systems are often disparate and messy – Knowledge Management has the power to simplify these processes, particularly when paired with machine learning.

Internal processes are often the last in line for attention, but as the team points out, employees are users as well and making it easier for them to do their work can have a significant pay-off for the business.

"We want to explore how to extend the support we already offer to customer service teams and apply it to the whole organisation to deliver enterprise knowledge management."