A key challenge in contact centers today is the fact that information and processes are changing faster than ever. Company updates are more frequent. Price points and promotions change daily. Critical updates must be readily and easily accessible by agents who struggle to keep up with the change needed to deliver outstanding customer experiences.
That’s where a dynamic internal knowledge base (IKB) comes into play, because the fact is, outdated knowledge bases are common across contact centers of any size. And this can cause a few issues:
As a result, it’s mission-critical to maintain and keep a company-wide IKB up-to-date. The IKB should be the agent’s go-to whenever they need help. By providing prompt and accurate information, the agent can do their job efficiently, be mindful of the customer’s time, and improve company credibility.
In this blog, we’ll share seven tried and true ways to ensure your internal knowledge base is used to its full potential to enhance agent performance and deliver a world-class customer service experience.
Agents, supervisors, trainers, and operations managers are all trained to use the IKB, but how many of them are taking advantage of it on a day-to-day basis? The intention is to deliver valid information about a product or company easily while on customer calls, but are they continuing to use it for that reason? By understanding who is utilizing your IKB and on what topics, you can identify topics to create coaching content around.
Some tips to consider:
Tracking and monitoring what articles are visited and what keywords are being searched bring to light how the IKB is being used, and uncovers gaps that can be mitigated. This helps you clean up old material; surface relevant, but overlooked information; and better tailor the IKB to your organization's needs.
Try asking these questions:
Contact center AI allows contact centers to analyze 100% of voice calls, which provides a massive breadth of insights into both the contents of the call and the agent’s performance. These insights are valuable in making data-driven decisions on what resources should be included throughout the IKB, what content should be displayed most prominently, and what areas require more targeted coaching outside of the knowledge base.
Examples of insights you can gather from contact center AI to fuel a better IKB include:
By the way, IKBs are just one of the many AI-driven transformations you can make on quality programs in the modern contact center. Check out our new Guide, The Future of Quality Assurance in the Contact Center for more.
Layout and usability are key for driving adoption and continued use of an IKB. So tracking UX and UI metrics will provide the insights you need to improve overall intuition of the IKB. Questions to ask include:
Providing best practices for utilizing the IKB to its full potential will help drive adoption and retention. If the information being presented doesn’t match with how it’s being used in the live contact center environment, it’ll more likely turn agents away from using it and understanding the importance of having the IKB. Some ways to train agents on the IKB include:
The IKB should be treated just like an organization’s website, collateral, marketing, and social media. It needs to be consistent and on-message. Some things to consider:
Beyond initial training, refresher courses (sometimes called continuous improvement) help maintain agent skills and keep everyone on the same page. With contact center AI, refresher courses can be better tailored to individual agents, identifying areas of improvement and knowledge gaps. An IKB is a great place to promote refreshers, allowing organizations to present the material in digestible “micro” formats.
Check out our guide on The Future of Quality Assurance in the Contact Center, which includes transformational use cases, best practices from leaders in the space, and more to reinvent your quality program.
Or watch our most recent webinar on 5 Secrets for Building an Ultra-efficient Contact Center with Root Insurance and Talkdesk.
Adrian Valenzuela leads onboarding at Observe.AI. Adrian has a track record of moving contact centers to the cloud in high-growth environments. Adrian has worked in implementation management, business process optimization, analytics, contact center operations, and customer success. Connect with him on LinkedIn or reach out to adrian@observe.ai.