What are KM Tools?

Knowledge Management (KM) is the process of creating, using, sharing, and managing the information in an organization. To enable this process end to end, organizations need to implement the right Knowledge Management tools or KM tools included as part of their KM system.

These tools ensure that important KM functions – easy authoring, publishing it in a useful way, making it findable by users across channels and touchpoints – happen reliably and consistently, so that your business benefits from it.

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Why are KM tools critical in customer service?

Customer service without knowledge is like flying blind, posing peril to both the customer experience and the agent experience. In multiple CX surveys, users have lamented the lack of knowledge as a hurdle to good customer support. The result? Repeat calls, escalating service costs, and customer defection.

So, KM is critical for customer service and KM tools play a critical role in delivering that customer service.

Types of KM tools

• Knowledge bases
• Content management systems
• Search
• Artificial Intelligence for KM
• Authoring tools
• Analytics

KNOWLEDGE BASES

The knowledge base is a repository of all information in the organization. The first requirement of KM is a centralized knowledge base that is accessible across channels and touchpoints.

The knowledge base software or tool supports the creation, maintenance, and distribution of multilingual and multichannel knowledge base articles. It provides users — customers, contact center agents, frontline staff, business stakeholders — easy access to answers through multiple search methods. The enterprise knowledge base ensures that your customers are getting, and the business is delivering, timely, consistent, accurate knowledge across channels and touchpoints.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (CMS)

Content management (and document management) provides a way to create and store documents, HTML pages, and other types of content. It includes things like version tracking and approval processes. It tags and classifies information, often grouping knowledge by domain. All in all, it provides a cost‐effective way to create and organize information, which is clearly a common business need.

What content management systems do not do well is improve findability of answers. This issue affects both employee and customer experience and can be addressed by leveraging KM solutions.

SEARCH

Including federated, faceted, and guided search

Search is a strong tool. It has a simple interface that is easy and intuitive to use. But it is only as good as the technology powering it.

Effective search is powered by AI, includes auto-suggestions, allows searching by topics and relevance, and is intelligent. A mature search tool offers flexible search options. Users can choose which mode to use or the system can assign a path according to the user’s level of expertise. Some search options are – FAQ, keyword search, natural language search, federated search, topic tree browsing, AI-guided dialog.

According to John Ragsdale, VP of Research at Technology Services Industry Association, eGain’s intelligent search tool has given it best of breed status within KM, incident tracking, multichannel management, and enterprise search. A robust search tool boosts customer retention, loyalty, and satisfaction.

Know how eGain knowledge base improves search and findability

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

• Natural language processing
  A subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) enables chatbots to understand language as we humans speak it. It enables the automated system to understand the intent of a consumer’s question as well as the context of the conversation.
• Reasoning
  Know how eGain’s patented case-based reasoning capability enables step-by-step conversational guidance through processes and answers for customers and agents

AUTHORING TOOLS

• Comprehensive editor
• Workflows
• Ability to crowd-source and include in the knowledge base after the content is vetted and approved
• Single-sourced publishing

ANALYTICS FOR KNOWLEDGE

You need to actively monitor how the knowledge in your organization is performing. Knowledge analytics will tell you

• the effectiveness of search,
• knowledge base articles being used,
• what users are searching for,
• if customers and agents find the answers to their issues,
• what are the gaps in content.

A good analytics tool will provide dashboards, real-time and historical reports, and insights for quick action.