KMWorld 2019 Case Study: How GE Healthcare uses knowledge management to enhance its call center

KMS Lighthouse and GE Healthcare joined forces at KMWorld 2019 to present a session showcasing how the medical technology company implemented a new knowledge management system for its call center.

KMS Lighthouse provides a SaaS-based knowledge system to enable productivity and efficiency with digitized knowledge that makes it easy to update, collaborate, share, or provide feedback in real time. The KM system offers native integrations to social media, product catalogs, operational systems, chatbots, virtual assistants, and open API integrations with existing applications such as CRM, ticketing, and help desk services.

Videos of KMWorld 2019 awards presentations,  keynotes, and sessions can be found here.

GE Healthcare provides a broad portfolio of products, solutions, and services used in the diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of patients. Its customers span 160 countries, it has an installed base of more than four million imaging systems, and performs more than two billion scans annually, with three patients imaged every second on GE Healthcare systems. GE Healthcare's Cares Call Centers supports healthcare facilities in the U.S. and Canada and handles four distinct lines of business and more than 25 modalities of medical equipment ranging from MRIs to patient monitoring systems.

According to Doron Gower, chief solution architect of KMS Lighthouse, the company's goal is help organizations "to consistently provide the right answer at the right time to the right person." In a world where interactions are increasingly spread across contact centers, websites, shops or branches, and distributed workforces, call centers are still the place where the most challenging interactions take place, he noted.

Burgoyne Hughes, senior manager, Call Center Operations at GE Healthcare, explained how KMS Lighthouse and TTEC, a digital global customer experience technology and services company, helped the call center,which already head a strong QMS in place, go "from good to exceptional."  

GE Healthcare's goal, said Hughes is not to sell equipment but to "make a difference in the moments that matter" to benefit customers and patients.

The GE Healthcare Cares Call Center must be available 24x7. At the time of the implementation, he said the call center already had tight controls in place for procedural updates and there was an error rate of only 1.6%.

The challenges, said Hughes, were that each LOB had its own documents/formats; procedures were designed as artifacts not tools; agents felt little ownership for documentation; inefficiency led to homegrown alternatives; change control processes were cumbersome; and basically everything just took too long.

The call center wanted to shorten the time to proficiency for new hires by 50% and reduce error rate to just 0.25%.

Unlike other call centers, at the GE Healthcare Cares Call Center an error could simply be someone incorrectly asking for a purchase order since it would mean a piece of potentially lifesaving equipment being unusable while a nurse wastes time looking for unnecessary paperwork.

KMS Lighthouse was "incredibly important" in the call center's ability to accomplish its goals, Hughes said.

Since implementation, call center employees have gone from being consumers of knowledge to owners of knowledge, and feedback on the system by employees has jumped to 1,000 submissions annually. Call center employees now rely completely on the KMS Lighthouse knowledge management tool and they understand that by providing the feedback they are helping to make it better.  "They own this and they are going to be as good as they make the tool," he said.

The result, Hughes said, is that for the GE Healthcare Cares Call Center, time to proficiency for new hires has been reduced to 3 months and the error rate has dropped to 0.11%.

Many speakers at KMWorld 2019 are making their presentations available at www.kmworld.com/Conference/2019/Presentations.aspx.

KMWorld 2019 is a part of a unique program of five co-located conferences, which also includes Enterprise Search & Discovery, Office 365 Symposium, Taxonomy Boot Camp, and Text Analytics Forum. 

SAVE THE DATE FOR KMWORLD 2020- NOVEMBER 16-19, 2020!