The Marriage of Knowledge Management and Quality Management
Thinking back on my time in Operations, like so many other people I spent a significant amount of time trying to understand the root cause of the quality management (QM) opportunities in my organization.
What could it be? Should we improve our classroom training, should we do more on-the-job training, or were we hiring the right kind of people? 
As a first course of action, you do training, you do side-by-side coaching, and you can even offer to drive individuals home and have dinner in an attempt to improve their knowledge. But after you do all this, they continue to use the most preferred way to gain immediate knowledge in any organization—they “ask a friend.”
I have always believed that the representatives have by far one of the most difficult jobs; they are your company’s best spokesperson. We expect them to remember so many things—I sometimes wonder if we drive them toward their teammates for answers rather than looking for the proper information elsewhere.
While you may expect them to go to their managers, managers often have scheduling conflicts with tasks outside of sitting with their immediate team and answering questions. Without their managers, where will they go? I also believe that in some cases, not everyone is comfortable declaring a knowledge gap.
What if you were able to leverage a knowledge management system loaded with all of the reference materials your representatives need? And then deliver it to their desktops in real time when handling transactions, not complicating things but making sure the content is self-explanatory to help ensure your staff is as efficient as possible.
Front line agents are handling more complex transactions these days, and retention of so much information is a challenge. By introducing knowledge management into the quality cycle, employees critical to the customer experience are enabled with tools to help improve average handle time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR), customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, sales success and secure process compliance, in real time.
And with each review cycle, employee knowledge usage and trends inform QA/analytics targets and training needs, and QA/analytics assessment can uncover necessary evolution and gap fills in employee knowledge. Together both can make each other better, and lift every employee to respond and execute on rapidly changing needs like never before, for true comprehensive QM that drives continuous improvement.
The marriage of KM and QM is something that many organizations are now thinking about. Integrating the two can begin to:
- Improve the baseline knowledge of your representatives and understand where knowledge gaps exist
- Positively impact employee morale and empowerment
- Provide customers more ease of doing business
- Help ensure consistent information is being provided to help improve compliance
- Drive consistent improvement in your quality results
- Improve customer experience and satisfaction.
Now is the time to start thinking about bridging the gaps—let us show you how.
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