Step Two Designs

Call centre staff have important information needs that greatly influence the quality of customer service provided.

Following a core set of guidelines will greatly improve the effectiveness of staff interviews.

A range of tools and techniques can be used to help remote teams work well together, despite the distances involved.

Collaboration tools are vital, but left unmanaged, their spread can be anti knowledge sharing.

The field of information architecture (IA) has much to offer those creating taxonomies, including a range of structured techniques for testing their effectiveness.

Organisations should abandon the search for ‘knowledge management systems’, and focus more closely on the specific capabilities required.

Beyond just helping staff to ‘find stuff’, search can play a valuable role in meeting broader knowledge management goals.

Users are not all the same, and do not have the same needs. A key principle is therefore: you can’t usefully deliver information to users you haven’t personally met.

In-bound call centres deal with either queries or transactions (or both), and this has a big impact on the knowledge and information required.

This briefing contrasts the role of knowledge management in supporting both innovation and consistency.

While ‘knowledge sharing’ is a common goal for KM projects, it is often neither meaningful or effective.

A successful knowledge management strategy must identify the key needs and issues within the organisation, and provide a framework for addressing these.

The intranet can serve as a platform for knowledge management initiatives, via approaches such as collaborative environments, staff directories, wikis and weblogs.

The front-line environment must be understood when implementing knowledge management initiatives.

This briefing focuses on who to select for stakeholder interviews. It provides some general guidelines, and lists some areas of the organisation to involve.

Stakeholder interviews are a very effective way of gaining an understanding of an organisation, and can be considered a form of ‘knowledge mapping’.

In answering this question, light will be shed on the long-term value of a CMS in capturing organisational knowledge, and its role in a broader KM strategy.

This briefing presents a simple checklist that will allow you to judge just how much work will be required to bring your intranet back to top performance.

Metrics are an effective way of setting project targets, assessing success, and tracking ongoing health. This article summarises a range of practical KM and CM-related metrics.

There are considerable benefits to be obtained from the knowledge management frameworks, for both the KM community and businesses.

KM has much to learn from usability, which can provide many useful starting points for structuring and managing KM projects.

Call centres are growing rapidly. They are also confronted with many challenges, and KM has much to offer in overcoming these difficulties.