There is knowledge everywhere

Customers calling the help desk multiple times for the same issue, field service technicians visiting the same piece of equipment many times, often in remote areas, to fix the same breakdown – it’s all a part of daily life in service organizations that are not optimized for increasing quality and customer satisfaction.

For most businesses, you’ll find that the essential data, information, and knowledge are scattered throughout endless product manuals, electrical diagrams, printouts and binders, flow charts, notes, and even in the minds of employees themselves. Often, you will see documentation and expert advice captured in everything from old Lotus Notes systems, SAP documents, Sharepoint, and ticket system knowledge base articles. You will see “underground” efforts to collect simple static documents and spreadsheets containing information related to best practices and random solution descriptions for common errors across shared network drives. You might even see FAQ systems (often in the form of hand-coded HTML files) internally built by employees who need a central place to get help and who are forced to start building something on their own that colleagues can share. These systems are rarely maintained, as they are time-consuming to update, and there is no real ownership, procedure, feedback cycle, or sense of community to ensure continuous growth in the knowledge base. Solutions such as these never really gain traction in environments that are already using many different software systems, and adopting a new system is a tough challenge itself.

It’s a state of “virtual knowledge base” that lacks corporate financing and support. The knowledge is there within the organization, but it’s not rapidly accessible, forcing companies to dispatch expensive engineers to the same site over and over again, dealing with the same problems and having to address the same issues every time. Often, the problem is escalated back to factories and R&D departments at headquarters.

We are left with extreme difficulties in retaining knowledge, low quality of service, high call volumes to the call center, high average hweandling times, and high customer service costs!

Customers, on the other hand, are left with unacceptable fault handling experiences resulting in annoyance, downtime, loss of production, and ultimately frustration.

To improve this situation, we need to structure and optimize the call center processes to be much more dynamic and automated. We need to make sure our staff is assisted in the best possible way by offering them the most efficient action to perform at any given time and in any given situation and all environments. We need to automate difficult manual, tedious evaluation of complex data to ensure a correct and precise fault handling process every single time and not leave out important pieces of data.

We need to organize data and information and aggregate facts, processes, and data into knowledge and capture it in a structured form. To do this, we need to find out what knowledge is – join us next time when we will be looking into the very important distinction between data, information, and knowledge.

Here at Dezide, we have helped organizations structure knowledge for 20 years and achieved reductions in average handling time of more than 20% and a 60% decrease in calls to HQ from field service staff as a direct result of capturing and organizing expert knowledge using Causal AI. I hope that this inspires you and makes you want to learn more about the great opportunities for building a great knowledge base for your organization.