wikis in business

The process for collecting and managing knowledge from customer facing staff is developing fast. Managing knowledge upwards and downwards is giving way to sharing knowledge across frontline staff without management intervention. This improves resolution and handling times, if the best agent’s knowledge is available to all agents and presented in a way that agents can use quickly. Wikis have a major role to play to support front line agents, by replacing static ‘knowledge bases’ with dynamic ‘knowledge sharing’. At their core, Wikis enable collaboration across a “community”, so members can share or build content together. Operating rapidly “many to many”, these social networks create stronger, more relevant content than standalone knowledge bases, or than so-called experts can do.

“A Wiki is a tool to empower agents with a new voice, one that enables them to collaborate with their peers near and far. One company we’ve been working with in the US”, say’s Bill Price, co-founder with Peter Massey of the LimeBridge global alliance, “reports a 15-20% reduction in call handle time, cutting up to 4 minutes from its longer technical support calls.”

Wikis are taking major companies by storm and helping to drive internal efficiencies among employees who can now share knowledge on products and processes across the organization. Leading companies, BT, HP, Motorola, Nokia, Yahoo!, Whole Foods and Walt Disney, to name a few, are finding that non-linear collaboration brings benefits to the enterprise, its agents, and its customers, along with increased buzz and energy for resolving customer issues.

"The challenge for management is to let go of control and trust the agent community to police its own knowledge. Look at what can be created on the web this way without control, e.g., www.wikipedia.com. The real focus for management is now moving on in advanced companies: to be able to detect and listen to the underlying causes of dissatisfaction and remove them, not just resolve the problem. The trouble is there is now so much conflicting or confusing noise coming from customer feedback, analytics and research data that a single view of what needs to be done is hard to develop, let alone focus and work with. This is the real battleground if you want competitive advantage now. Get the basics right first, then get the company to align across the business functions to continually address the top frustrations and opportunities that customers know you have. The management processes we are now implementing are drawn from the 21st century companies who are great at this.”

To read more, visit www.budd.uk.com and download our latest whitepaper: From Knowledge Base to Knowledge Sharing: Wikis in the Contact Center, from our library
(in the ‘Contact Centre and Operations Management’ section)

posted by Marion Howard-Healy 13 Sept 07