CALL CENTER KNOWLEDGE BASE

We hope you find the information on this page of use in your call center or customer service related search. Keeping informed about call center issues regarding customers, technology, staffing, management, monitoring, outsourcing, jobs and relationship management is always a differentiating factor for customer care organizations.

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CALL CENTER KNOWLEDGE BASE

Whether your call center has 10 or 1,000 agents, it can benefit form the many features of a well designed Call Center Knowledge Base. A Call Center Knowledge Base is a usually a web based application that allows the organization to capture, house and share important information that phone agents must know.

While a Call Center Knowledge Base can take many forms and include a complete array of functions, it must meet three basic criteria in order to be effective. The Call Center Knowledge Base must posses only information that is relevant, it must be intuitive so information can be easily found, and it must allow for real time updates.

Relevant Information: A Call Center Knowledge Base is only as useful as the information that it contains. Regardless of how expensive a system is, or how much data it can store, it is simply a waste of time, effort and money if it does not provide agents with relevant information. As call centers deploy a knowledge base across their entire enterprise, they must appoint a dedicated, and well-informed administrator who can make sure that the Call Center Knowledge Base provides agents with only the information they need and nothing else.

Ease of Use: A Call Center Knowledge Base that is full of relevant information is a great staring point for a well-trained agent population; however, the information must be reachable. The search functionality for the Call Center Knowledge Base must be intuitive and should allow an untrained person to quickly find the facts they need. It is suggested that shortcuts to commonly used pages be easily accessible to phone reps, but Call Center Knowledge Base designers should be careful not to drown reps in a sea of links to useful pages. Whatever the interface that is chosen, it must be well organized and devoid or clutter.

Real-Time Updates: A last tenet of an effective Call Center Knowledge Base is the ability to receive updates as the information becomes available. Especially in a call center environment where a myriad of campaigns, offers, products and services must be referenced quickly in order to handle calls, it is imperative to give agents accurate information. A Call Center Knowledge Base that requires a long update cycle is useless. As short a time as 24 hours can prove to be disastrous for a call center operation with high call volumes. Imagine what would happen if 20,000 callers a day received wrong information because the Call Center Knowledge Base is not displaying the latest data. Call centers depend on a 1-call resolution and manageable handle times to function properly. If 20,000 call backs occur at any given time, the entire operation will be overwhelmed and a vicious cycle of high queues, call backs, escalated calls and complete mayhem can easily take place.