What is Knowledge Management?

One of the best examples of successful knowledge management? Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia is basically one gigantic knowledge base with over 40 million articles, that can be easily accessed and searched by its customers – you, me and everyone else with an internet connection. New knowledge is contributed daily and existing articles are updated vigorously by an active community.

While knowledge management can be straight forward, within a lot of organizations, even those where IT service management is commonplace, it never really gets off the ground. Why? A lot of the time, the person in charge of knowledge management is simply unable to get around to it all. They’ll block out their Friday afternoons for writing and updating manuals, but end up spending those afternoons catching up on the growing list of calls.

Successfully implementing knowledge management into your organization requires a change in priorities. Something that can help you do that is Knowledge Centered Service (KCS), a methodology developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation. Using KCS, recording knowledge becomes your new objective, instead of processing calls. Why? Because a properly documented answer will help you resolve not just one call, but aid all clients who have the same question.

Solve: record or improve knowledge using the incoming calls. Here’s how it works: You receive a call. First, you check the knowledge base to see whether the question has been answered before. No? Record the question and your answer in the knowledge base and resolve the call. Is there an answer? See if it still holds up. If so, reuse it. If not, edit the answer so all your coworkers can use it next time around.

Evolve: once you’ve been solving calls for a while, you can start evolving. The Evolve stage is about everything you do to improve your knowledge management. This is the time to analyse your knowledge base: which answers are called up frequently, and how can you prevent those questions from being asked?

(All rights and interpretations on KCS belong to and continue to belong to the Consortium for Service Innovation and can be found on www.serviceinnovation.org.)

Now you know what knowledge management and KCS are, the next question is: why should you invest in these things? There are many reasons to do so. Let’s have a look at 4 of the most important reasons to invest in knowledge management and Knowledge Centered Service:

• Spend less time on recurring calls. A complete knowledge base helps you to handle recurring calls much faster. In our experience, up to 20%. And if you make knowledge available to your clients through Shift Left, you can even prevent calls in the first place and let clients solve their own problems.
• Increase your client satisfaction levels. Clients want the right answer quickly. Your knowledge base will help you process more questions in your first line of support. And guarantee you give the right answers, because your answers will be reviewed continuously.
• New employees are up and running much faster. Familiarizing new co-workers often takes a lot of time, especially at a skilled service desk. But what if your new employees had a complete knowledge base ready and waiting?
• Working at the service desk becomes more fun. Solving things yourself is a lot more satisfying than forwarding them to other people. Working on complex issues makes for more of a challenge than repetitive work. If you get knowledge management right, it will make delivering service more fun. And as we all know: happy people provide better service!

In our experience, knowledge management can cut the time to resolve recurring calls by 20% within 2 to 4 months. Around half of that time saved is used for supplementing and updating your knowledge base. This means you’ll reduce the average time to resolve recurring calls by 10%.

What this means? Let’s say your organization spends 200 hours a week processing calls. 75% of your calls could be resolved faster, if you would implement knowledge management. That means you would save about: 200 hours a week x 0.75 of calls x 0.10 = 15 hours every week. Tell one of your employees he or she can spend 2 days each week doing more valuable things, and share his or her response with us!