Question:

Our contact center is moving in-house from an outsourcer. Much of the documentation used by the outsourcer is out-of-date and some is paper-based. How do we organize information for our new center?

Answer:

A knowledge base (KB) or knowledge management (KM) solution can be an effective way to meet your immediate and ongoing needs. A KB not only facilitates the organization of information used in a contact center, it can do much more. Once little more than document repositories, many of today’s KBs can help organizations manage content, send automated notifications for information review and updates, allow document collaboration between multiple authors, provide communication forums for employee and customer communities, and help break down internal silos by ensuring all employees in an enterprise have access to the same information.

An effective KB application can be both employee- and customer-facing, supporting “Google-like” searches through internal or external websites and populating answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). Additionally, KBs can include analytics that give contact center leadership insight into agent training gaps or help marketing organizations better understand customer and prospect trends, based on analysis of the questions being asked by different constituents.

Knowledge bases are also playing an important role in the emergence of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and chatbots in contact center environments. IVAs have proven to be effective in supporting employee and customer self-service capabilities in multiple communication channels including voice, interactive voice response (IVR), chat, social media, and mobile apps, by leveraging context-aware knowledge bases to retrieve the information needed to answer questions or satisfy requests. Built on artificial intelligence (AI) technology, IVAs utilize machine learning to refine answers by continually and quickly accessing better and more accurate information in KBs.