In today’s world, many of us cannot get away from digital devices. We rely on computers for work, mobile phones for social connection, and all kinds of other screens for entertainment and relaxation. For workers immersed in this digital environment, the threat of digital overload is all too real.

Digital overload is an unpleasant and unproductive experience that business leaders should strive to overcome. Fortunately, knowledge management plays a unique role in mitigating factors that lead to overload. To better protect your workforce, a strong knowledge management system is one of your greatest assets.

However, using knowledge management to protect employees from digital overload first requires understanding. Learn how to recognize digital overload, then apply knowledge management in the following ways.

What is Digital Overload?

Let’s start with a clearer definition of digital overload. This is closely related to information overload; however, digital overload is a bit more on the nose considering modern working conditions. When too much information crowds a person, they tend to enter into a state of limited functionality—even a sort of paralysis—in which it becomes difficult to make winning business decisions. Some refer to this state as “infoxication.”

With digital overload, this state is caused by the number of messages, notifications, channels, tabs, devices, monitors, instruments, and whatever other digital tech you happen to work with. Information overload has become increasingly digital due to the convenience and efficiency of digital workflows. These are information systems and management dashboards designed for productivity and oversight and resultantly come with a lot of notifications.

That’s where knowledge management can help. These systems can make information complete, organizable, and searchable across an organization. From there managing digital overload can be as simple as setting filters and customizing dashboards.

The Role of Knowledge Management in Preventing Overload

Knowledge management tools play a significant role in preventing digital overload. That’s because with these knowledge bases come a safe place for employees to turn to when they feel most overwhelmed.

Primarily, the role of these systems in protecting employee health and well-being is to provide resources and information in an organized and coherent fashion, best fitted to the user. In this case, users are employees seeking out solutions to a cluttered digital landscape. The right management tools make it easy to find these solutions.

Routing Resources

First and foremost, a knowledge management system functions to connect employees to resources. This can mean training, reference guides, templates, and much more. In the modern era of comprehensive management platforms, workers are even managing workflows entirely within these systems. This allows for convenient routing to schedules complete with necessary breaks.

A knowledge system can even link employees to resources that help them mitigate symptoms of digital overload such as computer fatigue. Paired with tech advancements like artificial intelligence, these platforms can recommend strategies like stepping away from the computer and going for a walk for employees struggling with overload.

Organizing Info

Additionally, knowledge management systems lend themselves to the kind of digital organization that can improve the employee experience. After an interruption in—perhaps out of a need to seek out additional information—workers require time to get back on task. Well-organized information makes that easy.

That’s because this information comes with all kinds of benefits that combat digital overload. These benefits include:

• Increased worker productivity
• Reduced stress levels
• Enhanced efficiency

Workers struggling to catch up with an overwhelming digital environment need a knowledge management system organized to fit their needs. Fortunately, many of these tools offer customizability and flexibility across devices and networks that can accommodate your business model.

Tips for Using Knowledge to Protect Employees

However, finding and utilizing the right knowledge management platform to suit your digital workflow isn’t always simple. For success, you’ll have to define the specific needs of your employees as well as assess their digital workflow for risks and usability challenges.

As you explore the uses of knowledge management systems in protecting employees’ digital health, consider the following tips:

Prioritize user experience. UX is the basis of a quality knowledge system. In this case, the users are employees. Their ability to navigate a system will make or break its effectiveness.

Provide employee education and resources. A great knowledge management platform is relatively self-explanatory. Still, employees need the resources to learn and utilize them well to avoid being overwhelmed by another digital tool.

Invite feedback in an inclusive environment. Build your knowledge management approach with employees’ digital overload concerns directly in mind by engaging them in the choice and implementation of these tools. This requires an inclusive working environment in which workers feel heard.

Knowledge management can be your most important tool in combating the mental fatigue that comes with too much technology. As workforces rely more on remote employees tied to these systems, it's in everyone’s best interest to choose and manage the right knowledge systems. Use these tips to aid in the process.

Supporting Employee Success

Knowledge management, by nature of its role in employee success, is a crucial part of protecting employees from digital overload. This brain power-sapping condition hamstrings workforces. Fortunately, having the resources you need where you need them is an important aspect of knowledge management that can cut down your time shifting through digital systems.

Find what you need in a complete and helpful picture with the right approach to knowledge management.

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What is the secret to customer loyalty? The answer straight from ~50,000 consumers, per a massive survey conducted by Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner), was: Make it easy to get service.

In order to find the recipe for “ease,” Forrester Consulting asked 5,000 consumers (on our behalf) about their biggest hurdles to getting customer service. The answers (by far) were lack of knowledgeability among contact center agents and inconsistency of answers across touchpoints, followed by the inability of websites to deliver answers. With a common “knowledge and intelligence” theme running across the pain points, the panacea is clearly unified omnichannel knowledge management, infused with AI.

Done right, a modern knowledge management system (KMS) can transform contact centers. Here are sample metrics and real- world examples from our Global 1000 clientele.

First-Contact Resolution (FCR)

FCR is an important contact center metric that significantly reduces customer effort. While FAQs, search, and topic-tree browsing help with simple queries, more sophisticated technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help resolve issues of medium-to-high complexity at the very first contact through conversational guidance. When a premier telco client made  it mandatory for agents to use this technology to solve customer problems, FCR improved by 37% and NPS by 30 points across 10,000 agents and 600 retail  stores.

Average Handle Time (AHT)

As you know, AHT without FCR increases customer frustration even more. Happily, a modern KMS can transform both these seemingly conflicting metrics. A premier banking client reduced AHT by 67% while improving FCR by 36% by leveraging eGain AI to guide  customers to answers. In fact, advisors in its contact center used the technology to guide customers through processes such as account opening and other banking transactions while complying with industry regulations!

Annual Training Hours (ATH)

How do you reduce training needs without compromising service quality? Again, KM delivers the answer. A global banking client soared to #1 in customer service NPS and reduced training time by 50%, even as it expanded to 11 countries with mostly novice agents in its workforce! With the same technology, a telco reduced induction training time by 43% and time-to-competency by half. Note that reducing the need for training also cuts shrinkage, which is the amount of time lost due to agents’ breaks at work, sick time, training time, holidays, etc.

Call / Email / Chat deflection

One of the popular metrics for measuring digital self-service effectiveness is the number of deflections from agent-assisted channels. Using contextual self-service, with robust KM as its backbone, a media and legal services giant deflected 70% of requests for email and chat customer service.

Product returns and exchanges

No-charge product returns or exchanges has become standard policy in many branded manufacturing firms, retailers, and telecoms due to customer expectations and competitive pressures. Called No Fault Found (NFF), many of these returns and exchanges are unwarranted where the products were not defective but the contact center could not solve the customers’ problems. NFF costs organizations tens millions of dollars each year, but here’s the good news: KM and AI can address this issue head on—one of our large telco clients has reduced unwarranted handset exchanges by 38% while improving FCR by 19% and call quality by 23% in its contact center.

Dispatch avoidance rate

Depending on the industry, each truck roll or engineer callout for issue resolution can cost from a couple of hundred to a few thousand dollars. With omnichannel AI knowledge deployed in the contact center and on the website, a water utilities client saved ~$5M per year by reducing unnecessary engineer callouts, while improving FCR by 30%!

Final word

Some technologies improve customer service on the margins, some enable incremental improvement, but only a handful truly transform it. Modern knowledge management, infused with AI, clearly falls into the last category. Gain the edge today with knowledge!

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Today the Questioning Mindset can be a barrier to advancing one's career and this impacts also in many what Knowledge Management must be offer. It can be attributed mostly to the 'users' unclear needs exploration that can be a challenge to overall adoption.

If we only limit KM to advancing a user's needs based on the remit of the organizational objectives, then possibly we are not addressing his/her 'Fears' and many-a-times 'Aspirations'. If a user for example is a Business Consultant and wants to grow into a Practice Leader in 10 years, then we need to ensure we also help him Grow feels values for his/her Contributions towards KM.

Let me introduce the 7-step framework which is a Pain-Gain Journey map that helps you understand how to advance the 'user' to becoming a believer in Knowledge Management.

1) Know: Today many leaders are focusing on enabling new-joiners to learn around the benefits of KM practices and the ready tools through the on-boarding. They are ideally introduced to a buddy who is a Champion either from their project team or at the department level and it is this person who is responsible for ensuring that the tenets of the leadership talk during the induction are translated to practices that help the person recognize KM as a part of the culture of the firm.

Larger issue that remains un-addressed is the user has his own learning-apps, personal-devices that he uses and work-apps that are not linked to the World of Organizational KM.

2) Search: Let us assume the 'user' moves ahead and has accepted the stand-alone KM system with its features and is compelled to use the system due to collaborative rule-based nature of his internal work-practices. Then in such cases we see that the user is sub-consciously accustomed to visiting KM portal when he/she is lost. They explore the expert corner; they view the self-help group channel for frequent km trainings and in-time slowly KM is becoming a part of their daily routine.

Larger issue is we are still not addressing the user's aspirational need for a personalized system that helps him get noticed at work. Most would say Gamification is the key. However, throughout my career I have seen simple things like a simple reward & recognition page for the quarterly winners being published on the intranet where a simple Like button & Comment section did the trick. It helps peers appreciate the person for the mentor they are, the team member they have always been and most importantly as a humane leader who practices the firm's values, while congratulating the person.

3) Qualify: Most of the time a CKO is chartered with measuring metrics and the focus is on ensuring the team is responsible for talking about KM in a standardized manner, so it is adopted by all. However, this leaves out the aspect of 'Fear' as today there is a rich tacit knowledge that is not so easy to codify and hence the KM team tries to address this larger issue with standard templates and contests for collecting what is available.

The larger issue at hand however is how can we ensure the expert community is initiative-taking and sees benefit in co-authoring / co-developing or co-innovating articles / IP or other differentiators that would help the user advance. Can KM ensure the user moves away from always depending on this team lead to advancing a conversation with a pool of SMEs available on a Community of Practice forum, which is credible as a source?

4) Apply: Usually as a part of a KM audit we are given a mandate to check the categories of knowledge that is most effective. Right at the top we see whitepapers, webinar content , practice asset SOPs and more such artifacts/tools as enablers. These are a clear sign that the organizational KM framework is developing,

The larger issue at hand is such artifacts also exist on client systems and there is a growing need for both clients & the organizations KM system to be unified to ensure minimal effort, better quality of output and higher usage by the community.

If we look back then we have managed to map KM by understanding the user's persona through his Fears, Aspirations and partially Skillsets. However, to advance a user and ensure he/she sees KM as a true enabler we need to also address their 'Interests' partially.

5) Realize: If you have read the Knowledge Management Toolkit by Amrut Tiwani the book talks about how a system must advance the user to know-why and ensure his knowledge orientation is aligned to exposing him/her to extensive exposure to problem solving.

However, if as leaders we only feel ecstatic that KM has been accepted and not acknowledged we fail to build the right system that is aligned to bringing in the ability to deal with unknown interactions and unseen situation. There by we remain at the know-how stage only as we fail to encourage employees to participate in the problem solving and get a feel for the issue-at-hand. It is important we are clear about the KM touchpoints, and we allow employees to get together fortnightly and share their Failures / Lessons learnt, talk about their failure moments and this improves the overall culture that it is ok to speak up.

6) Grow: While running a design thinking workshop we surveyed twenty-five leaders across various departments like Marketing, HR, Finance, Sales and few more aligned to the cohort of designing an org-wide customer portal. We intended to understand how does KM enable / impact their roles. There was a mixed consensus as the room was pivoted to design a better system based on standardizing KM templates aligned to marketing case studies, offering decks aligned to how the sales present it to clients etc.

The larger issue at hand was there was not anyone who shared that we have enabled a People Champion to talk about the need for knowledge management in not duplicating our content. Many times effective KM can come out of a conference deck, a networking dinner or a sales representative traveling to the client side.

7) Contribute: Lastly knowledge cannot be consumed unless someone creates or shares it. Having a governance policy in-place and a well-trained KM team are just enablers unless the individual is intrinsically motivated.

The larger issue at hand is how can we advance a user to promote KM and be an evangelist and along the journey help us build systems , define policies and be a true people champion.

The next time you take that all important induction remember you are advancing someone's career and hopefully this article helps you to address the user's persona-based needs rather than your structured KM approach. Who knows you might help someone turn into a believer?

Pundits have long talked about the importance of customer experience for business performance. You may have received the edict from the CEO or advice from your consulting firm to differentiate yourself through CX. However, you may also know that businesses have been at it for years with only a handful having any semblance of success. Just look at CX benchmarks, such as the Forrester CX Index, which have plateaued or dropped with not a single organization delivering “excellent” customer service in Forrester’s evaluation. How do you separate yourself from the pack?

The answer lies in knowledge management. According to Gartner, Inc. (paywall), organizations with a high level of CX maturity are investing disproportionately in KM.

Based on my experience working for a company that offers knowledge hub solutions, I want to help you understand what to look for in a provider. But first, let’s explore an approach to knowledge-powered CX differentiation based on the ability to solve customer queries.

Recognize not all customer queries are equal.

Customer queries come in different shapes and sizes. They can be broadly grouped into the following categories, organized in ascending order of customer effort involved: 

• Informational queries: Informational queries are of the “garden variety,” where customers are looking for basic information like when a store may be open, what their account balance might be or the status of an order they placed with a retailer.

• Procedural queries: More complex than informational queries, procedural queries are about how to do something like return a product, get a refund or fill out a form. Another example would be helping a customer open a certain type of account by not only answering customer questions but also taking compliant conversational and action steps with the customer along the way.

• Problem resolution: This is where the customer states the symptom of a problem and the self-service system or the contact center agent converses with the customer, diagnoses the problem and prescribes a solution. This requires reasoning expertise, where the agent can get from symptom to problem by asking the right questions, looking at similar cases from the past and what resolution worked and prescribing that resolution to the customer. Depending on the query and the industry that the business is in, the conversation may also need to go through some steps that are required for compliance. For example, when a customer calls the contact center regarding a mortgage loan in progress, the agent is required to identify the customer by asking a certain set of questions.

• Advice: Examples of advice queries include suggestions on what dishwasher to buy from a big-box retail store or what type of investment to make in the case of a financial services firm. Not that different from problem resolution queries, the agent or advisor has to have a conversation, asking the right questions of the customer and prescribing the right product or plan to buy that meets the customer needs, while still making sure to comply with industry regulations.

• Coaching: The next frontier in knowledge-powered customer engagement, coaching is not a query type, per se. In fact, it typically entails all the above query types. Customers are not only given answers and prescriptions but are taken through a coaching journey that adapts with evolving customer context and gamification motivation to help them reach a certain goal. An example is coaching a consumer to financial wellness over time so they can buy a house or car.

Understand the different query types and CX differentiation.

Handling informational queries may seem like table stakes, though many businesses are not even doing a good job in handling these basic queries. While perfecting the handling of informational queries is a good start, handling the more advanced query types that create significant effort for customers — procedural, problem resolution, advice and coaching — presents an even bigger opportunity for CX differentiation. Let’s categorize each query type by differentiation:

• Medium: Informational.

• Medium High: Procedural.

• High: Problem resolution.

• High: Advice.

• Super High: Coaching.

Handling queries well and getting to high levels of differentiation is not easy to do. The answer lies in seamlessly combining knowledge tools or technology building blocks into a unified and complete knowledge hub. In fact, per that earlier Gartner, Inc. study, a common challenge that organizations face is they need all the tools to achieve their CX goals but have just one or two of them, which hinders their effort to improve CX.

Look for certain criteria as you seek a solution partner.

A knowledge hub can maximize your CX differentiation by enabling you to handle a broad range of customer queries with context, content, consistency and compliance at scale. But not all knowledge hubs are created equal. Here’s what to look for:

• The knowledge hub should have rich functionality immediately out of the box for quick business value. If you have to start from scratch with a toolkit or do extensive development and customization to get deep functionality, you may wind up with a multimonth or multiyear project, which you likely can’t afford at today’s speed of business. Ask unambiguous yes/no questions upfront to determine if vendors offer your required capabilities out of the box.

• The company demonstrates domain expertise in knowledge management best practices. Have they deployed knowledge management at scale for demanding enterprise clients? What is their deployment and business value assessment methodology?

• Do they have a track record of successful deployments at scale in your own industry? Ask for customer testimonials and references.

• There should be a risk-free way to try out the solution. For example, do they offer a production pilot with no cost and no obligation to you? This tells you whether the vendor is willing to put real skin in the game.

Understanding what a knowledge hub can do for you and working with the right solution partner can get you to high CX differentiation, great agent experience and market domination at warp speed!

Originally published on Forbes.com.

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To many skilled professional certifications are the key to improving their competency getting recognized; advancing their careers as their gain experience and grow into a new role; finally become experts.

However, if one were to look at the above there are four keywords as below

• Skill : the ability to do something that comes from training, experience, or practice
• Competency : possession of sufficient knowledge or skill
• Experience : skill or knowledge that you get by doing something
• Expert : one with the special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject

Many a time we relate knowledge on-the-job to experience and discount the other aspects. However, it is important to realize that executing a job over a period does not necessarily qualify you as an expert.

So to become an expert how does one hone themselves; a simple technique is a 'cheat sheet' which is a written or graphic aid (as below) that can be referred to enable oneself to be effective in terms of developing your core-competencies, as they say practice makes a man perfect. The below depicts some 'Must-Do Tips' that can help you grow in your credibility.

Over a period, you would start perfecting some of these techniques and that is where you start advancing in your own understanding and investing in more self-learning; training on-the-job and mentoring to name a few. The folly that most of us make as we advance in building our own core competencies on our subject, we fail to combine the below:

• declarative knowledge refers to facts or information stored in the memory
• procedural knowledge refers to the knowledge of how to perform a specific skill or task

If you now go back to the first para and you reflect on competencies to advancing oneself, you now understand that it is a particular set of core competencies that make oneself recognized and credible as an expert for a particular role.

Summary : Every professional field has their own competency-based framework that is based on combination of procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge. It is important we develop a 'cheat sheet' and monitor how we are progressing to build our core competencies that help us advance as professionals and gain credibility known for our expertise contrary to just our experience over the years as skilled professionals.