If knowledge is power, have you harnessed yours?

There’s nothing worse than being asked a question you don’t know the answer to, and at Telnet we get asked thousands of questions each day. Our agents often work on several campaigns at once, so the overload of questions may seem a little daunting. That’s why, instead of spending large amounts of time training for every single possible scenario, we have spent the last 20+ years perfecting our ContactSuite knowledge base, ensuring our people always have the tools to find the answers they need (see www.contactsuite.com for more about ContactSuite).

A simple knowledge base is an online library, it holds things like product information, FAQs, contact lists, job guides, policies and procedures and process documentation. Just like a wiki or a Google search, you simply type in a few keywords, hit the search button and hopefully get the answer you want.

A good knowledge base takes this further. It makes it easy for you to keep your knowledge up to date and understand which questions being asked weren’t resolved. A good KB lets users give feedback on how well their search was satisfied and lets you see the types of questions being asked most frequently so you can refine your product or service offering.

Creating knowledge content should be easy, letting you combine richly formatted text with video, sound, or links to other knowledge sources.  To make sure your knowledge content is correct before it’s accessible, a good system will let you workflow new or changed content to someone for authorisation before it’s published.

When dealing with a customer call, sometimes all an agent needs is a clear yes or no answer – not an afternoon’s worth of reading material. That’s why we store our knowledge content in question and answer format and use a search algorithm based on NLP (natural language processing).  NLP lets our agents query the knowledge base chatbot using plain language which then gets interpreted by machine learning technology to present the most likely answer.  The more the chatbot is used, the more accurate it becomes.

Knowledge can’t be powerful unless it’s easily accessible.  Gathering all your business’s knowledge together into a central knowledge repository allows you to publish content beyond your business walls and onto your website, app or kiosk.  Once it’s been “trained”, a chatbot can easily be exposed to the public, or your customer base so they can self-serve themselves and more easily access the same information they’d get if they called the contact centre.

At Telnet, we continually invest in our technology to help us give our clients’ customers the best service experiences possible.  Knowledge is central to that capability and tools like ContactSuite will power service experiences that put the power in the hands of the people who need it most – your customers.

If you’d like to see how Telnet’s knowledge-centric approach can benefit your business, or if you’d like to consider using ContactSuite yourself, please get in touch here.

John Chetwynd
Founder and CEO