ABCs for Optimizing Your Knowledge Base
A knowledge management system can have tremendous benefits for your employees—providing them consistent, accurate answers to a variety of complex issues and questions, and helping them work more efficiently and effectively. But knowledge bases can be effective only if they contain the right information. For many organizations, determining what knowledge to add to the knowledge base is a big challenge. What do end users need, and what information is missing? The following ABCs of knowledge management can help you add the right content to your knowledge base as it grows over time.
Analyze Search Logs
The simplest way to determine what should be in your knowledge base is to examine what people are actually looking for. Once you’ve launched your knowledge management system, your search queries should be checked on a regular basis. First, take a look at your most popular searches. These queries represent the most important content to cover in your knowledge base. Test them and analyze the representative content to ensure the system is providing high quality answers to your most common questions. Second, check for searches that are not returning results. These may represent knowledge gaps where your users are looking for information and not finding it. Route these inquiries to your knowledge authors to craft new content. Finally, you should elicit and monitor search feedback. Your users are your best source for what’s working and what’s not. Providing a way for them to offer feedback within the knowledge base lets you know what content is missing or inaccurate.
Bring in Your Online Community
While your knowledge management system houses the organization’s structured information, unstructured social content should not be ignored. Online communities are growing in popularity and can be a valuable addition to your knowledge strategy. Emerging issues often come up in the online community before knowledge base authors are even aware of them. In many cases, peers within the community are able to provide accurate answers to these issues, making these communities great sources to mine for information that needs to be added into the knowledge base. Community content can be searched in addition to structured knowledge, and popular community posts can automatically trigger a workflow for knowledge base authors to craft new content. By verifying and formalizing peer-authored community content, users can feel more confident in the information, and the organization can maintain brand control of the content.
Check Speech Analytics
Speech analytics enables you to transcribe and analyze millions of calls automatically. Call recordings can become a gold mine of rich insights about customer satisfaction, customer churn, competitive intelligence, service issues, agent performance and campaign effectiveness. As part of this analysis, your organization can look for calls with low satisfaction or long handle times, and determine what knowledge was used or what knowledge was needed. In many cases, a call takes much longer than necessary because service agents are searching for information or cannot find the answer to a question. By analyzing trends for which types of calls are least efficient and result in the lowest satisfaction, your organization can derive insights for what knowledge to author to create the biggest impact on satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Optimizing your knowledge base with the right information doesn’t have to be an overwhelming challenge. By taking the right steps to determine what your customers are searching for and talking about, you’ll have a great source of data to use to author new content. Since information is always changing, your knowledge base should be constantly evolving. A well-crafted knowledge base has many advantages—from operational efficiency to customer satisfaction, and from increased revenue to improved compliance. To best serve your users, keep your knowledge base up to date by following these best practices.
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