From the course: Customer Service: Knowledge Management

What is knowledge management (KM)?

From the course: Customer Service: Knowledge Management

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What is knowledge management (KM)?

- We often use the words data, information, and knowledge interchangeably, but there are subtle differences that matter. Here's how I think about it. If it's just numbers without any particular relevance to you, that's data. If the data is relevant to you, that's information. And if you can take action or make decisions based on that information, then it becomes knowledge. Here's an example. Imagine the weather in Peoria. That's just data. If you live there, the weather is relevant information. But if you're a farmer deciding whether to irrigate today, the weather is knowledge that drives what you do. That means knowledge to you might not be knowledge to me. It's all about our personal context. In a company, customer service agents are the keepers of knowledge. Now, they go by different names, CSR, analyst, rep, TSE, and many more. But for our purposes, we'll call them agents. Where do agents get their knowledge? Experience. They answer questions and solve problems all day long using their own personal knowledge. But imagine if they could also access all the knowledge that the organization has developed. How would this improve agents' speed, accuracy, and confidence? And then, what if we could share all this collective experience directly with our customers, so they could find their answers themselves rather than contacting a customer service agent? I mean, think about your own life. What do you do when you have a problem or issue? Most of us google it. We would generally rather search and find answers ourselves than wait on hold for someone else to solve our problems. This knowledge that customer service agents write down to share, we call a knowledge base. Knowledge bases are composed of articles, short nuggets documenting specific experiences we've had. Now, I want you to grab a pen and paper or open up a blank document on your computer, so we can play a simple game that covers all the big ideas in knowledge management. Imagine you're an agent, and you get an urgent, high-severity customer request. List all animals spelled with three letters. Please answer. Pause the video for 60 seconds while you write down as many as you can, no googling or asking a friend. When I try this game with groups at companies we're working with, I'll find out who has the most animals written down. That person's list may look like this. Then we ask if anyone has any animals that aren't on this list. I bet you did. When we hear from everyone, we get something like this. I have one more question. Have you ever seen a Japanese garden that has a pond with colorful fish called koi? This game illustrates four points that apply directly to knowledge management. Who's the real expert? All of us, sharing our knowledge together. It wasn't all that easy coming up with those animals, right? Imagine how much easier it would have been if we could have used an article. And if we'd all used the same article, we'd give consistent answers, which customers like. When you ask someone to write down everything they know, maybe when they're leaving the organization, it doesn't work very well. But as long as you've got questions to ask, they'll give great answers. So the right time to turn knowledge in our heads into written down knowledge is when we're answering a question. These are the key principles of knowledge management.

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