I've often wondered after the 20+ years I have been working in Knowledge Management, why are the same KM issues still happening in customer service organisations?

• Agents still need help finding the information they need.
• When Agents do find what they need, it's often overcomplicated and full of jargon.
• Customers still get an inconsistent experience across channels.
• Customers still get frustrated when agents put them on hold to ask a team manager.
• Team Managers are frustrated as they spend all their time dealing with agent queries and escalations.
• Back-office functions are still frustrated when the wrong form or incorrect details are used.
• Broadband Engineers get frustrated going to a house and finding no issue to resolve; the customer needs the correct knowledge.
• Senior Leadership get frustrated with poor customer service metrics as a result of poor knowledge management.
• Senior Leadership get very frustrated in having to deal with regulatory issues.

So why is this still happening? Why are organisations yet to get this right? Technology has come on leaps and bounds, so what's going on?

Possible reasons

Greater Complexity - In the last 20 years, organisations' Products, Services and Processes have become more complicated than before. A mobile phone 20 years ago may have had 30 things a customer may need to know. Nowadays, it could be hundreds or even thousands of different scenarios with different applications, interoperability with other devices, and multiple phone plans to handle.   

Also, the pace of change is far greater than 20 years ago. Software updates can come monthly, rather than every few years. In addition, promotions, campaigns and processes change far more frequently than before.

The belief in a Technical silver bullet - Over time, many organisations have overlaid technology upon technology to try and resolve their Knowledge Management issues and sometimes over-customise their software so much that it becomes unusable. This results in a large technical debt for the business, and end users are confused about which system they need for different knowledge.

Organisational Design - Many customer service organisations are siloed. For example the digital customer service team are separate to the contact centre team, who are in different division to the retail team, all with separate budgets and different goals and objectives. As time has moved on over the last few decades, organisations have added more channels (e.g. social, chat) to support customers than ever before, increasing the likely hood of siloes and making it easier for conflicts and confusion between the different channels.

Lack of Knowledge Management strategy - When organisations see KM as a technical problem to fix, the other components of a well-rounded Knowledge management strategy get neglected. It's easy to understand why, with the huge marketing from vendors offering the latest AI tech to solve all problems. Organisations prefer to pay a vendor to implement technology to resolve an issue than invest internally in a robust Knowledge Management strategy. 

Summary

These are my observations as to why the same issues are seen over and over again in Knowledge Management. Will these keep happening in the future? Who knows?

Organisations need a clear vision for Knowledge Management and combine that with a well-rounded Knowledge Management strategy , covering Content, People, Process, Technology, and Culture delivering the metrics and value to the end users.

Gary Wyatt is an award-winning knowledge management professional with over 22 years of experience across multiple roles, countries, languages, and industries. Gary has a proven track record of helping businesses achieve greater effectiveness and efficiency through the application of knowledge management tools, principles, and techniques across multiple channels. Gary is committed to helping organisations to deliver tangible, measurable results and believes that by effectively managing and leveraging knowledge, businesses can unlock huge potential and achieve their goals.  
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