What are the top cross-industry challenges that organizations are facing related to knowledge management?
Sagi Eliyahu: The main challenge we see is the lack of uniform and consistent knowledge being distributed to various channels.
How is this affecting their information-fueled processes?
SE: Organizations are providing different answers to the same questions depending on which channel requested the information. Different departments within an organization provide information to call centers, points of sale (branches and shops), distributed workforce, and self-service, and they give different answers to everyone because there’s no centralized knowledge repository.
Another critical challenge is the reliance organizations are placing on the skills and knowledge of the person answering a call or providing a service. This too, is inconsistent between different agents and different service centers. We are reducing the dependency on employee skills, shortening training times and proactively providing knowledge to employees and customers directly. Lighthouse is a personal assistant for anyone looking for information.
Why have these issues emerged now? What is changing?
SE: Many products are becoming a commodity and organizations are focusing on providing excellent service. This shift in focus to give customers the right answers on the first call (preventing a second call) keeps the customer happier with the organization and service provider.
As channels today manage their own individual siloed knowledge bases, organizations are beginning to understand the need for a single truth of knowledge and are looking for next-generation platforms that can provide this.
What are some of the key features and technologies that organizations seek now to address these new requirements?
SE: Organizations are looking for very strong search mechanisms based on AI, machine learning, and intuitive decision trees to enable customers to get the information they need on their own. Most importantly is an open API that can connect the knowledge base to any platform and ensure that all channels are given the same answers for the same questions. Organizations are using many different tools and systems such as chat-bots, CRMs, self-service, ordering systems etc. – all of which must have access to the same information in order to be effective.
What do companies hope to achieve with these capabilities?
SE: Being able to provide consistent information across an organization’s various systems offers customers a more efficient experience and improves the customer journey. We call this next generation of knowledge systems “knowledge.3″—the third generation of knowledge systems.
What are your recommendations to organizations that want to build knowledge management capabilities that for the future?
SE: My recommendation is to look for systems coming from the new world that are business-minded, enable “drag-and-drop” widgets that do not require coding (like Sharepoint and other development tools). As I mentioned, an open API, which enables organizations to connect between systems and manage their knowledge in one centralized location, is also very important. Overall, I think that organizations that want to survive and win the customer journey should focus on the customer and what makes the customer happy.
