With the upsurge of workforce conversations on digital collaboration apps, knowledge base is no longer used for storage of content in databases waiting to be accessed. It is essential and should be proactively helping users across the digital communication channels learning the new trends based on recent searches. If organizations fail to respond quickly and do not make it easy to find answers then customers will abandon their purchase.
Due to the exponential growth of information and with the immediate need for the right knowledge to share with their employees and customers, organizations are scrambling for knowledge management systems.
The global market for Knowledge Management is $366.8 Billion and the U.S. Market is at $98.9 Billion. It is projected to reach a revised size of $1.1 Trillion by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 16.8%
Knowledge Management (KM) – A Quick Intro
Knowledge management (KM) is a process to create, share feedback, continuous improvement and share ideas, solutions across all channels. It is present in every documentation – databases, manuals, files, memos, guidelines, lists, etc. It is also available in the minds of subject matter experts, experienced staff, and team members – the expertise that enhances a business.
Knowledge Management – The definitive Guide
Knowledge management, when executed effectively, leads to Improved innovation and collaboration; enabling the whole organization to access perspectives of different business units. There is a faster access to information and knowledge, allowing employees to be more efficient and productive. Collectively, these lead to increased customer satisfaction creating an ideal product and buying experience.
Example – Customers prefers self-service support to find answers quickly online at their convenience and for the contact center agents it helps to promptly answer their customers questions on chat or phone with reference from knowledge base to provide better customer experience will always result in greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Oracle Knowledge Advanced – Quick Intro
Knowledge Advanced enables organizations to effectively create and refine their knowledge assets to deliver a seamless cross-channel customer experience for both end customers and contact center agents.
Oracle Knowledge Advanced clouddelivers rich capabilities including highly accurate cross-lingual search using natural language processing (available in 36 languages) and self-learning algorithms. There is a flexible authoring (available in 19 languages) workflow and rich analytics.
By taking advantage of the federated search, organizations can find and display knowledge in one single interface regardless of where it is located, including the knowledgebase, other content stores and social sites.
Then, what is the difference between a normal Knowledge Management and a Knowledge Advanced Solution? Knowledge in Oracle Service Cloud — Picking KA vs KF?
Oracle Knowledge Advanced Features
Here are some key features that every organization needs:
- Natural Language Processing – Users can enter their search query in a natural way, and the system understands the intent, and provides them with the right content.
- Industry Dictionaries – A lot of industry specific language components are available for different industries like retail, automotive, finance, telecom etc. This saves a lot of time in adding synonyms and industry specific terms to the dictionary or as synonyms.
- Article Feedback – Allowing both agents and customers to provide feedback and rating on articles will help to improve the quality. The feedback is created as incident and assigned to respective SME for review then can be proposed as an answer to publish as knowledge article to close the gaps…
- Federated Search – Most organizations have their knowledge scattered over multiple systems. In the cases where it is not possible to migrate all knowledge content to a single platform to a central knowledge base, the federated search comes to the rescue in one single interface regardless of the source.
- Smart Excerpts – Having a clear title for every article is important in any knowledge base since it helps users to quickly decide if it is worth opening the article for them. However, Knowledge Advanced shows in the search results in addition to the title a small part of the article with the section in which your search terms have been found. This provides users with an additional piece of information the evaluate if this is the article they have been looking for.
- Multilingual – A translation workflow is available for articles in which authors have access to a side by side view so they can work efficiently. Users can see articles in all available languages, and direct customers to an article in their native language, even if the employee does not speak that language.
- Versioning – The version management system of Knowledge Advanced is one of the most powerful systems around. Every change in a document will be saved into a new version, and only if the complete workflow has been completed, the changes will be visible to end users. Different versions can be compared to each other in a side by side view in which all changes have been highlighted. Not only content changes, but as well changes in metadata are displayed. In this way you have a full audit trail, including remarks added by the author about the reason why certain changes have been performed.
Want to know more? Here is Oracle Knowledge Advanced competitive analysis for you.
SoftClouds & Oracle Knowledge Advanced (OKA) – Some Innovative Implementations
SoftClouds has been a front runner in knowledge management. The engineers and architects at SoftClouds have great, varied, and unique experiences implementing OKA for some of the biggest companies. Here are some of our recent implementations.
Growing Knowledge for a Telecommunication Firm
The customer was one of the biggest Canadian telecommunications company, who mostly focuses on VoIP products. They had grown exponentially but lacked the modern systems to manage and grow.
Even the deeply analyzed reports did not contain the data needed by the business and offered no flexibility for custom reporting. They required analytics that captured and integrated both knowledge activities within the service desk applications and activities within the Authoring interface.
SoftClouds helped them design and deploy custom applications to address the analytics needs of a large network corporation. The first step to do was to help with an enhanced KA connector that captures Knowledge usage data from multiple service desk applications. The next step was to help them with a data integrator to extract, transform, and load authoring data, providing reporting analysts a 360-degree view of knowledge usage across all integrated applications.
Now, the client has a flexible data integration solution that allows to scale and delivers on immediate data needs beyond the standard product offerings.
Advancing Knowledge for a Large Automotive Distributor
The customer was one of the largest distributors of vehicles, parts, and accessories through a network of more than 600 dealers throughout the United States. They were facing issues with the kind of intelligence they received from their knowledge bases which was directly affecting their customer service experience.
They also wanted to Improve the speed and efficiency for delivering notifications to the dealers and respond quickly to the customer complaint notifications.
Based on the problems the customer was facing, SoftClouds built different portal interfaces for customers, dealers, and internal agents. They were integrated with the Siebel CRM system to receive dealer complaints by phone and sync back to the customer portal. SoftClouds also configured Knowledge Advanced to author content types with workflows and optimize search in all the user interfaces
This resulted in 40% call volume reduction and 60% decrease in overall maintenance costs due to the cloud platform. Their productivity also shot up by 50% with an upgraded email management system for the agents.
Enhancing Knowledge for a Consumer Product Manufacturer
One of the North America’s largest independent consumer product manufacturers was having a tough time with their complicated document structure. The employees in multiple locations had no single sign on process to access to the right documents. It was difficult for them to transition from HCM to KA to access the right knowledge
SoftClouds executed a multi-faceted strategy to deploy Oracle’s KA in conjunction with the existing Oracle HCM system system. We also built a custom connector that enabled single sign-on enabling ease of access to the knowledge base for its employees.
After the implementation, the customer has an efficient way to manage employee access to knowledge in multiple locations. This also resulted in a flexible knowledge management system that can expand to multiple language offerings and long-term scalability with data integrity.
Final Thoughts
In today’s digital economy, customers want an effortless engagement and instant gratification. They have many channels like phone, email, self-service, and social to approach for help. So, do not keep your customers waiting, the speed of response/resolution is the most important aspect of customer service. This makes it essential that organizations go for knowledge advanced as mere knowledge management would not satisfy anymore.
Moreover, in today’s typically siloed work environments, sharing knowledge between individuals across various departments is a collaborative effect. It facilitates knowledge innovation and provides cohesiveness that is otherwise difficult to achieve.
It is vital to continue to encourage creativity and engagement using the technologies that are available for remote and distributed workers, and we at SoftClouds do exactly that – bridging the gap between technology, knowledge, and the customer experience.