Creating a Foundation for eKnowledge in Your Call Center

The call center landscape continues to change dramatically, as the industry adapts to emerging business needs, user requirements and technology trends. From the outsourcing boom (and now backlash), to the emergence of Web self-service as a primary service and support model, to investments in workforce management, customer analytics and solutions to enable users to better collaborate — and help each other — today’s contact center is more dynamic, under more pressure, and more wired than ever before.

From a functional perspective, two sides are shaping current models. On the one hand, users are demanding the ability to serve themselves, and access information when they want it, and in the format that best suits their expertise, role, and needs. On the other hand, businesses continue to be driven by cost savings with a need for gaining better visibility into internal and external processes, and to push as much expense out to the consumer.

While self-service has become a top priority for customer service executives, knowledge management (KM) has also become a key foundation for enabling this as recent AMR Research and Genesys Labs studies have illustrated. Meanwhile, consumers increasing prefer to use self-service channels for tasks such as managing their mobile phone accounts (as demonstrated in a recent Netonomy-sponsored study in the UK), booking and checking in to their airline flights, researching high-end purchases, and troubleshooting consumer electronics and other high-tech devices.

For businesses, the value proposition for this fourth wave is clear: offer a better customer experience, achieve greater staff efficiency, lower costs by sharing and reusing corporate content and know-how, and even gain the ability to sell more goods and services by understanding what customers want — and when they want it.

This White Paper looks at these trends, the evolution of knowledge management, and the emergence of a new approach to KM within call centers that offers to address a number of traditional limitations while embracing a new world of more loosely coupled and ad hoc processes, more sophisticated users, and a broader range of “support” applications.