Managing knowledge in a call center is challenging.
Typically, companies have a variety of products and services that a call center needs to support, and each product and service has dozens or even hundreds of procedures associated with them. It’s difficult to keep them all straight.
Unfortunately, keeping all of your call center procedures and guides organized, up-to-date, and accessible often feels like being invited to a card game only to arrive and learn you are playing 52 Pick-Up. Not fun.
I’ve worked with a bunch of call center managers through my role as a consultant for ScreenSteps, a knowledge base and training solution company. Through these coaching sessions, I’ve noticed some common mistakes that managers make when it comes to knowledge management.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. From my experience, I know that managers and supervisors wear many hats and are doing their best to keep things running at their contact center. They simply don’t have a lot of time to work on a knowledge management strategy. They seem to always be putting out fires.
So, if that’s your situation, I’ve come up with a list of common practices you should avoid, and their alternatives, to help you improve your knowledge management practices.
Hopefully, when you get a minute to work on knowledge management, you can save time by avoiding these mistakes.
Companies have official policies and procedures and provide these to call center departments. These are typically written by the IT, engineering, or compliance teams.
While these guides may have all the required information (although that’s rare), they are often written in a very technical way and NOT user-friendly. It is difficult for agents to read and follow the instructions, especially while they are on a call.
Create separate guides for your call center agents. Instead of having technical jargon that is meant to pass compliance or follow ISO requirements, these guides will be written with the intent to help your call center agents handle calls and perform tasks in your systems.
If you don’t have any policies, procedures, or guides for your agents to reference on a call, then you are setting reps up for failure. You expect your reps to interpret the purpose of a call and remember the process for all the reasons a caller may reach out to your company.
Your agents are human, which means they won’t remember everything you teach them in training.
Write guides that are easy for your agents to follow while they are on a call with a customer. Whether it is a call flow, reference sheet, or another document, it should help reps navigate through the process.
Maybe you have guides, but they don’t match real situations that reps experience on calls. This could involve writing the wrong titles so that reps aren’t able to find the guide they need. Or this could mean that the information in the guides doesn’t address what the agent is facing on the call.
When writing guides, listen to calls. Think through every possible outcome and decision tree. Have SMEs write your guides for each procedure.
Your documented guides are exclusively pages of text. You don’t include visuals like screenshots or images to help direct the reader.
Add screenshots with annotations, tables, charts, or other images that make it easier and quicker for your call center reps to follow a guide. And if you’re supporting physical products, include pictures of those products in your guides.
The software you use to write your guides is complicated or tricky. It takes you a long time to write your guides because of formatting issues. Also, you are including too many unnecessary details in your guides.
Use software that simplifies the creation process. Software like Microsoft Word, Madcap Flare, or RoboHelp makes it difficult to quickly write helpful guides and format them in a way that’s easy for reps to navigate (e.g. decision trees or expandible sections).
Look for software specifically designed for creating end-user guides. Make sure it has fast authoring and formatting features.
Your documented guides resemble more of a novel than a guide. The guides go into details that aren’t necessary for agents to get their jobs done. Or, the guides cover multiple procedures in one document.
Break guides up so that they only handle one procedure. You want your guides to have all the necessary information to handle a procedure without overwhelming agents. One guide might be a simple bulleted list. Another guide might be a table with NPI numbers or contact information. And another guide might include decision trees.
Remember: The purpose of your guide is to help reps do something — not to teach them everything there is to know about a procedure. Think of your guides like a food recipe.
You create guides and publish them. However, you fail to test whether your guides are usable by your reps. You aren’t making sure the guides are complete and accurate. Nor, do you ensure that your agents can follow the guide.
Before publishing guides, have agents try out your guides and make sure they can follow them without needing to ask for clarification. Watch and listen in to those calls as they use their guides. Are there any places where the agent gets stuck or stumbles? Revise your guides with the necessary edits.
Not updating the guides every time there is a change to the policy or procedure.
Once companies write guides for all their policies and procedures, they think their job is done. However, policies and procedures change regularly. Depending on your industry, your standard operating procedures (SOPs) could change on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.
This causes your agents to follow inaccurate guides with outdated mistakes. These are forced mistakes since your agents don’t have access to the correct information. Once your guides become outdated, they are no longer reliable and reps will stop using them.
Develop a habit of revising and updating articles immediately. Overall, changes to SOPs are small. It only involves a couple of steps.
It also helps to have documentation software — like a knowledge base or other knowledge management system — that makes it easy to update articles with new instructions, screenshots, etc.
Your agents are on the front lines. They use your knowledge resources every day on the job. They will be the first to notice if there are errors in the guides or if something is confusing. If there isn’t an immediate and succinct way to comment on an article, it will likely get ignored.
Have a system in place for people to provide feedback. Ideally, your agents wouldn’t need to go to email or chat messages to send feedback. The best way is if your agents can comment on the article so that you can pinpoint the exact area that needs editing.
Just like reps will notice when there are mistakes in an article, they’ll also be the first ones to discover that there is no existing guide that answers their question. They need a way to request new knowledge base articles.
Create a system for how agents can request new guides. Ensure there is an appointed person to screen those requests and assign different subject matter experts (SMEs) to write those guides.
If you have a knowledge base or other knowledge management system and aren’t reviewing metrics, you aren’t getting insights into how people are using your knowledge base.
Review metrics regularly. This could be weekly or monthly. Pay attention to what people are looking at, which articles are getting the most views, who is viewing which articles, etc. These insights will help you improve your articles so they are easier for agents to find and follow them.
When people have questions, managers and supervisors jump in to answer the questions. They teach agents to rely on them for answers instead of pushing them to the documented resources.
Instead, managers and supervisors should answer employee questions by sending them a link to the documented guides. That way supervisors aren’t answering the same questions over and over again for information that already exists in documented job aids.
Once you’ve written a guide, you consider it complete. You don’t have a plan for when you will review those guides for accuracy and make sure the information is up to date.
Have a system in place to review and update guides. Create a schedule for when you will review every call flow and guide. Some articles may need to be reviewed weekly, monthly, or annually.
Another option is to get knowledge management software that has built-in features that remind you to certify your articles.
Your reps have access to all articles. When they search for specific articles, they get results that don’t pertain to them.
Lock down your permissions. Create restrictions on different groups or individuals for which articles they can see in your knowledge management system.
Guides are scattered in different locations. When agents have questions, they need to search chat messages, emails, shared folders, etc. to find the appropriate guide.
Get a cloud-based software solution where you can centralize all of your call center resources.
You create resources, but you didn’t plan which resources you needed to create. This left a lot of knowledge gaps or unanswered questions (and a lot of wasted time creating guides nobody needs).
Hold a Find & Follow Planning Workshop. Work with a team to discuss what guides you need to create so that your agents always have a knowledge article to reference.
Only letting one person create guides and manage your knowledge. This one person becomes a bottleneck for all of your information reaching your agents.
Build a team of collaborators who can make edits to content when necessary. Delegate different articles for each collaborator to own responsibility.
During training, you don’t have your new hires spend time getting to know and using your knowledge management tool. Maybe you explain to your new hires that a knowledge management tool exists, but you don’t have them get experience using it.
Use your knowledge management software to practice realistic scenarios your agents will encounter on the job. Your agents can role-play different situations while following the guides in your knowledge management tool.
When you update articles, you don’t have a direct way to communicate those article changes to your agents.
While you can send emails and messages in chat channels, you’ll want to have a more direct way of tracking and notifying end-users of updates. Get software that allows you to send notifications within its system.
When it comes to teaching your agents everything there is to know about your call center, you may consider video. Video can be a powerful tool for transferring knowledge — but there is such a thing as too much video.
Don’t rely on video as your only training tool. Not creating job aids or guides is a mistake. While agents can reference guides on a call, they can’t stop to watch a video while they are on a call with a customer and have a question.
Have a good mix of media for training your agents. Transfer knowledge through videos, classroom/virtual discussions, guides, and practice scenarios.
Knowledge management at a call center takes a lot of planning and organization. It helps to have a tool that simplifies creating, organizing, and sharing your company information. A knowledge base helps you do that.
With a ScreenSteps knowledge base, you can write and update articles quickly. Plus, you can track how your agents use your knowledge base articles while receiving feedback directly from within the knowledge base.
A ScreenSteps knowledge base is built to put your agents first, helping them achieve better KPIs and feel more confident.
See how ScreenSteps features help call centers better manage their knowledge and improve agent performance. Check out the pre-recorded demos for call centers. You’ll learn how ScreenSteps features work for creating, sharing, and analyzing usage.