Customer Service organisations vary massively in size, geography, industries, products, and services; as such, the Knowledge Manager role can vary depending on those factors. However, some responsibilities of a Knowledge Manager are generic across these boundaries and below is my take on the main ones for a Knowledge Manager in Customer Service.

1 – Define and own the Knowledge Management Vision and broader strategy, get buy-in from the business and lead the organisation towards that vision. Ensure there is buy-in from Senior sponsors and decision-makers.

2 – Continuously communicate to all relevant business stakeholders the value of Knowledge Management and its impact in line with the broader business objectives. Including sharing the vision far and wide across the organisation.

3 – Manage Relationships – There is a range of stakeholders to engage with to ensure successful knowledge management.
For example:

• Operational Teams
• Risk, Legal Compliance Teams
• Project Teams
• Product Teams
• Customer Journey Teams
• Senior Leadership
• Finance Teams
• Digital Teams
• Reporting and Data Teams
• Internal IT Teams
• External Vendors

Knowledge Management's success may depend on how well the relationship is managed with these stakeholders and how well they buy into a Knowledge Culture.

4 – Track and deliver against the Knowledge Management Strategy. – Sometimes, it's called KM Initiative, KM Blueprint, KM Framework or KM Operating Rhythm. The Knowledge Manager must ensure that the core components of good knowledge management, as defined in more detail here are continuously monitored and improved in line with the KM Vision. These are: -

• Content
• Process
• People
• Governance
• Technology
• Culture
• Metrics

5 – Accountability – The Knowledge Manager must be proudly accountable for Knowledge Management. The Knowledge Manager and broader team should take the credit if things are going well and value is delivered. Inversely if things go wrong or some things need to improve, the Knowledge Manager should take full ownership and drive any issue through to resolution.

6 – Champion of the Customer – Represents the voice of the customer and frontline staff to relevant stakeholders from a knowledge management perspective. Ideally, the Knowledge Manager will have significant experience and empathy for the big challenges for frontline staff and customers and understand how good KM practices can help. A good Knowledge Manager does not need a technical background.

7 – Owns Knowledge Governance - Facilitates the governance of KM through either steering groups or centre of excellence sessions. Ensuring Senior sponsors or decision makers are included. 

8 - Keeps up to date - A good Knowledge Manager will keep up with the latest trends and technical innovations in Knowledge Management. In addition, they will build a network of other KM professionals and proactively share knowledge and experiences. They may attend and participate in industry events and best practice forums. 

So these are my top 8 responsibilities of a Knowledge Manager in customer service. Is there anything else you could add? 

Introduction

Today, for many organizations Community Engagement is celebrated; leaders are investing in enabling their Vision and driving Transformation through Community Managers.  When creating a rewarding Community Experience, we often forget why individuals engage in a Community and eventually focus on driving Community Engagement. This ‘Know-Why’ is the start of what can truly engage Experts, drive Collaboration, and enable a KM Culture to Innovate if we recognize the four stages of Group Dynamics.  Let's find out how...

As per Tuckman, there are four key stages of Group Dynamics. Each of these engaged stages is based on a defined set of traits and behaviors, and if we understand this, we can use it for driving Effective Community Engagement.  

Recognize how Forming Can be the start to Community Engagement

As a seasoned KM Practitioner, do you feel you are often met with a lack of understanding of KM and practitioners stating an unclear (or unmet) need for engaging in KM Conversations? If your answer is yes, then often we learn to deal with this as a first step by giving Guidance and Direction. These are traits of the Forming Stage. In this stage you are often meeting people for the first time and there is a positive and polite atmosphere.  Here is where we need to step away from individually driving motive and instead foster Collaboration.

As a KM Professional, one powerful tool I always use is a Team Charter in bringing together a diverse group of Knowledge Seekers with a Common Need to Collaborate and Lead them into Community Engagement.  To define a Team Charter, we need focus on Context Building and through powerful tools like Knowledge Café’s, we can engage in ensuring we discuss why we have all gathered, how the problem seems relatable to the larger set of team objectives, and define a Mission that becomes our Lighthouse to achieving our individual goals and share our resources to enable each other.  This Knowledge Building behavior ensures we engage more often and understand each other better.

Storming: How to Move from Conflict to Coaching Mindset while driving Community Engagement

Knowledge Management Strategy must be aligned to Organizational Culture that is easier said than proven. Through years of driving Community Engagement its proven that to truly build rewarding outcomes we need to limit the number of CoPs such that Experts don’t feel overwhelmed. Also, at times we are so busy with analytics and reporting that we forget to manage the chaos. In yielding to the Power Struggle many Experts are driven away as the feel the sense of no increased clarity of purpose on why they are engaging. It is important for Community Managers to resolve these Power Struggles and define how to ensure the experience is more rewarding in building something.

Now imagine a Community is like a Project and the Members are like Project Teams with their own Roles and Responsibilities. So if we manage to define the right Projects that the Community should engage then that build a defined purpose which aligns to the Mission and Objectives of the group. To do this It’s important for KM Professionals to build User Persona’s and align them to balancing the Composition (Right Mix of Skills and Expertise) and Roles (Stakeholder Mapping aligned to Customer Journey Mapping is called for) to build an engaging experience. It’s important we move from just moderating how the Community is systemically driven to becoming a Coach and enable shared understanding through purposeful action navigated by the Organization Mission.

Norming: The Sweet Spot for turning Knowledge Management into Innovation Management

As Community Managers we are driven by results. We all want to showcase how through consistent culture building we are driving our leaders and their Community Vision. In adding this Knowledge Speaking Behavior of our leaders we often fail to diagnose those real elements of Idea Sharing that can turn into real Innovative Solutions. When a CoP is active and thriving and KM Policy is being enabled and Rule Based Structure are being respected this is the Ideal State to realize there is a need to start capturing those real problems where teams can engage and come together. Remember the Knowledge Café during Forming its time to repeat it and briefly introduce those organization wide projects which truly can take a firm to the next level and Innovate.

With reference to the Team Charter model there is a clear need for Authority defining Boundaries where the Leader is seen as enabling KM with a budget to drive Engagement. Many culture building exercises fail to go beyond just Knowledge Building as there is no rewarding benefits, clear mandate in terms of focused time and effort and this is where there is a hijack and loyal followers limit their shared understanding to contribute to something big.

This is where there needs to be a clear budget outlined and revisiting our Lighthouse the Mission revisited for driving those Projects we spoke about during the Storming stage. The KM team has to be provided with a budget to fuel this shared passion and go beyond and recruit passionate team members for driving the Engagement and elevating their Roles towards the organization strategy. This included travel and briefing meeting and anything that drives the culture. Imagine if there was a large global Knowledge Community Engagement Team but the recruits were all passionate about the larger Mission which is the Ideal state where the CXO Leaders would enable more.

Performing: Linking KM Operations to KM Culture Building and Beyond

Imagine you have everything setup for driving true Collaboration through a Community but no one shows up. This is possible only when there is a failure of KM Operations. In the Performing phase it is important for each key member driving the Team Charter to play out their designated Roles to perfection which means slowly the Community Manager or the Leader takes the back seat and there is a sense of urgency that is owned and governed by them but the rest is driven through a passionate Champion Network. It’s important in this state there is a lot of Best Practice Sharing, Lessons Learnt and basically openness for Coaching with New Leaders evolving and driving the Engagement forward.

Adjourning: Making sure the best is celebrated as a Community Experience

Many a time we see senior leaders 'eat the cake,' as they are the ones with the highest risk leading the Team Charter. It is their skill-based leadership that identifies passionate leaders to deliver on key goals, and as time goes they want to be seen as visible icons. Most of the time shared credit leads to the system prevailing and this is where Community Engagement can be elevated to what I call Community Experience - where the leader believes that he is rewarded through the Knowledge Management Community Culture enabling larger organization wide transformation.

In-Summary

What comes to mind when you see the below graphic. Today as Communities thrive in organizations many leaders see them as a source of Innovation. True to its purpose it is interesting to wonder what if someone asked you are you Engaged in a Community or Engaged with a Community  or Engaged for a Community. Well, our answers would mean we relate to Community Engagement in different ways. 

Source: Principles of Community Engagement – Institute for Community Studies

As Community Managers we strive to make available Resources and Assets and enable Culture such that Knowledge flows and there is a sense of ownership, accountability, and shared understanding. We serve leaders and engage in aligning Community Metrics to Organization Strategy however the missing elements are to move ahead and create a Community Experience.

Through understanding each of Tuckman’s Stages of Group Dynamics and relating it to the above Team Charter elements we can truly build a rewarding KM Culture enabling Innovation.

Disclaimer: These are purely my own views and experiences as a seasoned KM practitioner in driving employee engagement and operationalizing the KM strategy through helping employees Connect & Collaborate.

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.

In my last blog on CX Strategy I spoke about designing an experiential KM system.  I touched upon aspects of Design Thinking to pay attention to customer feedback and reverse engineer the experience you want to deliver to your community of users. Building on this approach we spoke about using Creative KM aspects and building a team of KM professionals passionate with a customer experience mindset who engage at all levels through champion networks to ensure KM is engrained in all we do. Then where is the problem? 

Today, most KM systems are text based and don’t promote interactive learning and while rich textual content is curated we ourselves fall folly to not engaging in understanding learning practices that help in improving our cognitive abilities to how knowledge flow can transform KM.                                                     

Let’s look at the below graphic and relate to what comes to mind when we consider our senses and apply the same to Learning. You clearly can see that as humans we assimilate better with a mix of both hearing and seeing and one great example of success could be social platform and how video based learning is becoming a part of our lives.  In this blog I share some new Learning Practices that can help us hone our own learning styles and transform KM through engaging our audience.
 

Let us explore a few concepts and techniques that we can explore to improve our craft.

Practice Reflective Learning

Reflective Learning involves actively monitoring and assessing your knowledge, abilities and performance during the learning process.

Let’s begin with some questions that we could ask such as:

• Which part of the KM system do you find difficult to use and what are some of the ways we could improve this experience?
• Describe critical situations where you mostly use the KM system and consider it trustworthy over other sources they engage with?
• How enjoyable do they find the experience including the softer aspects such as engaging with champions?
• What are some ways in which you could contribute to the knowledge-base for showcasing their abilities better?

Now imagine you run this workshop for 25 sales leaders and through their reflective learning feedback you understand how tacit knowledge that they have gained through client conversations an actually help you visualize how to better improve your KM processes. So the obvious question is what it would lead us to. It would help us better engage in designing better experiential KM without the bias of relating KM to only a systemic approach and reporting metrics based on annual survey feedback of how users are visiting the platform.

Are you Knowledge-Telling or Knowledge-Building

If you ask leaders to engage in how Knowledge Management is enabling their business they suffer from the Knowledge-Telling bias where they depend on their instincts rather than Reflective Learning and helping us better engage with how we can serve better their teams. Knowledge-Building bias on the other hand is what KM Leaders and teams suffer from where we believe that Knowledge Sharing is enabling individuals to better learn as we are providing them with a readily available source of content that is curated by experts and delivered with a powerful search on their fingertips.

So how do we promote knowledge-building and make it a rewarding experience. It is through better engaging in sharing what we known with what we can learn from the larger community and one great example is through the activities listed in the cheat sheet below. There could be more we are familiar as it’s our own individual learning methods that we are sharing for engaging our teams.

So does Knowledge-Building help with promoting KM. It helps Knowledge flow and improves on introducing us to our own biases. It helps improve how we assist others to better Collaborate through encouraging leaders to talk more about Declarative KM Practices and help their teams Know-Why they are KM advocates and build trust to foster Collaboration through CoPs and beyond.
 

In-time we can also see how KM is promoted with a mix of both knowledge-building where we see more champions engage in enabling others to better adopt KM practices and a mix of reflecting learning with leaders. This helps us move beyond just the larger community applying KM to realizing its benefits, acknowledging how it helps them advance / grow in their roles / responsibilities and contribute as business partners.

What is Protégé Learning on transforming KM

Its incidental that in designing the KM strategy it’s never about measuring how much the KM team is learning because of the focus on improved knowledge sharing practices.

The ideal state for measuring KM adoption is to setup expert communities and facilitate learning. In the practical sense it is more around enabling Connections and enabling knowledge flow. Imagine a consulting firm that has critical knowledge and experts have no time to engage in social exchange and enabling authenticity of sharing information so how does learning thrive. The answer is the CoPs are marked In-active and the leaders fail to acknowledge that it’s missing a good Community Manager who is passionate about enabling Conversations through engaging in Protégé Learning.

The protégé effect is a psychological phenomenon which helps a person to learn from information through teaching.  This has two forms Incidental where we facilitate knowledge sharing sessions and engage on researched topics around key themes to engage audiences. This could be webinars, knowledge talks or even podcasts. Contrary to this predictable approach there could be Intentional learning where we summarize a good pack of thought leadership articles and curate the content and share it in a newsletter to engage audiences to form better Connections and circle back to the CoP and enable knowledge-flow. 

In-Summary

In this article we learned about the difference between Knowledge Talking and how we can enable leaders to practice Knowledge Building. Through understanding our own biases and engaging with the larger community in Reflective Learning we understand more on the Ideal versus Expected state of Design of Knowledge Management and how we should not limit to just systemic processes and measure metrics around adoption.  In moving beyond Content and building a rewarding experience we discussed the importance of Protégé Learning and how we can engage in both incidentally and intentionally styles of engagement for enabling our broader teams to form Connections and Collaborate. Finally we learn better by teaching others and we as professionals are called to practice Interleaving and develop mastery of our existing abilities to become better Curators.

One of the most underrated and under-utilised aspects of Knowledge Management is its ability to lead to innovative solutions for customers and frontline staff. Below is a real example of award winning innovation from early on in my career at WDS (See my KM origin story)

Use Case

Whilst working for WDS, back in the early noughties, we created mobile phone knowledge for Network Operators (MNOs) and mobile phone manufacturers, as well as being an outsourced call centre for technical data queries.

We created, refined, simple and easy-to-use content for the end user. Still, some of the most time-intensive and complicated problems to solve for call centre agents and customers were setting up the Internet, WAP, MMS and Email on their mobile phones. And although we had the proper knowledge to talk users through the journey, it was still a timely process and involved the customers knowing their technical settings.

A couple of intelligent people at WDS identified this problem. So they looked for a more brilliant, innovative way to deliver customer knowledge to solve these issues. They discovered they could send components of knowledge and settings directly to the mobile phones through SMS and automatically set the customer up in a matter of seconds, instead of the 15-minute calls it would take in the call centre. Due to this innovation WDS actually won "Most Innovative use of technology in a small call centre 2001", what a great night that was. (In 2001!!!! I feel old). 

Anyway, after this innovation, WDS productised this technology and made it available directly to MNOs and Manufacturers for self-service channels. First, customers would get a new device. Then, go to the MNO or Manufacturer web site and send the settings they need directly to their phone. All from the same single source of knowledge where the original knowledge articles were housed.

This technology evolved even further over the coming years by embedding the knowledge directly onto SIM cards and Manufacturer devices. So the moment a user inserted a new sim card or entered their email address, the correct settings and configurations were automatically configured without the customer knowing it. Solving a problem before the customer realised they had one.

This technology saved millions of dollars in the cost to service customers for these particular problems. And customers nowadays take for granted that setting up email and the internet on your phone is easy and automatic.

Summary

A well-rounded Knowledge Strategy should have continuous improvement and innovation embedded as part of the process. It should look at customers' problems and how knowledge can help innovatively find a better solution. Don't just think about knowledge as a static piece of content. Think about how a combination of knowledge and technology can provide real customer benefits.

Knowledge Management, when done right, will help lead to innovation.