But as more complaints emerged from consumers about the quality of service they received - on-line or off - call centers recognized that a constant refrain of "Find it yourself!" wasn't helping their companies win and keep customers.

Call avoidance proved not to be the best justification for KM. Asking live experts sometimes yields quicker answers, even after waiting on hold, than rummaging around Web sites. And when customers have questions that lend themselves to on-line searches, a long list of Web pages is not what they're looking for.

"A search engine really is irrelevant," says Scott Schwartzman, COO of ServiceWare (Oakmont, PA). "In a call center, you have to get people the answer."

Other vendors concur.

"Traditional searches put burdens on the user," says Andre Pino, senior vice president of marketing with iPhrase (Cambridge, MA).

If you want to encourage customers to use a knowledge base, "returning a series of links presents a barrier," says James Speer, director of product marketing with Jeeves Solutions (Emeryville, CA).

Fortunately, three trends in KM support your call center's efforts to get customers right answers right away, through live service or self-service.

The first and biggest trend is that more products now adopt content management features to automate the process of keeping knowledge bases current.

Second, search tools within KM suites are more efficient at organizing and extracting possible answers so that customers can find what they need in less time.

Third, as call center agents use KM software to find suggestions for responding to customers' questions, more KM tools aid agents with inferring a customer's state of mind. That's an important capability because when a customer's question is part of a complaint, the priority is to resolve the issue, and not only to state the correct answer.

How do you use these trends to your advantage? Before you select KM software, you have to define your goal. Do you plan to use KM software to build knowledge bases that catalog information about your company? Or do you intend to rely on KM software to categorize customers' needs so that call center agents or, where applicable, automated channels like Web sites, can fulfill them right away?

In this article, we look at KM tools to help you meet one or both of these goals.

Content (Rather Than Contention) with KM

Content management used to be the domain of Web site administrators, who tracked the status of on-line documents from initial drafting to final approval. But whether KM dovetails with content management in call centers depends on several factors.

At a time when downsizing is the norm, a knowledge base with information from agents allows your call center to hold on to agents' knowledge when they leave the company.

"When an experienced agent walks out the door, you don't want to lose that knowledge," says Yoram Nelken, CEO of Banter (San Francisco, CA), a developer of content analysis tools.

Beyond retaining agents' knowledge for posterity, knowledge bases foster a spirit of collaboration, another necessity when corporate resources are limited.

David Fuller, director of product marketing with Interactive Intelligence (Indianapolis, IN), observes that companies with dedicated content management teams work more closely with call center agents than they did a few years ago. If they don't employ content management teams, he finds, companies assign subject matter experts responsibility over what's in their knowledge bases.

Bud Michael, executive vice president of products and marketing with Kana Software (Menlo Park, CA), says that in businesses that mostly serve consumers, "usually there's a team of folks whose job it is to make sure the knowledge base is accurate and properly structured before it's published." Michael notes that at business-to-business outfits, "in some cases, they want every agent to do their own authoring."

That's the situation at New York City-based on-line ad agency DoubleClick, a client of KnowledgeBase Solutions (Los Angeles, CA). James Segil, president and COO of KnowledgeBase, points out that DoubleClick requires each support analyst to create a certain number of articles for the knowledge base.

David Ridout, vice president of business development and marketing with Primus (Seattle, WA), notes that Primus' clients entrust more specialized or senior agents to review and approve knowledge base contributions. Ridout hasn't seen many instances where clients treat KM as a job in itself. "A knowledge engineer is not common," he says.

In a tough economy is contributing to a knowledge base a condition of agents' remaining employed? Or is it a boost for agents' careers? The answer: both.

"Companies are looking to expand roles of agents," says Jake Levirne, a product manager with iPhrase.

Harlan Hugh, co-founder and chief technology officer of TheBrain Technologies (Santa Monica, CA), suggests this trend bodes well for call centers. "Organizations that have low turnover rates look at agents as true knowledge assets," he says.

The higher the turnover among agents, adds Hugh, the more likely the organization is to perceive agents' suggestions for the knowledge base as clutter rather than contributions. (Whether turnover is the cause or effect of this perception is a topic in itself.)

But Greg Gianforte, founder and CEO of RightNow Technologies (Bozeman, MT), questions the premise of gathering knowledge base contributions. "The content you end up with is what the subject matter expert considers important rather than what the customer considers important," he says.

Yet as KM widens in scope from an isolated effort within call centers to a corporate mandate, more KM tools are integrating with or including features of content management systems.

For instance, the new reports within KnowledgeBase's KnowledgeBase Enterprise Edition 3.0 let you track the editing and approval history of a knowledge base or the documents that comprise it. New reports also record which documents agents or customers viewed most often and which received the highest ratings. To review contributions among individuals, the reports let you drill down on the status, usage and ratings of documents from each author.

Version 3.6 of TheBrain's BrainEKP for Customer Care, due out next month, will enable you to define approval processes for documents. The software will also identify content that your company hasn't updated, or that users haven't viewed, within a timeframe you specify. We'll provide more details about upcoming BrainEKP releases throughout the year.

ServiceWare's ServiceWare Enterprise 5.0 lets you define workflow for approving knowledge base items. The software displays links to items for you to review or approve. After you sign off on the item, if another colleague needs to look at it, the software automatically places that item on a list for the colleague to review.

A new workflow model is also part of version 2.2 of Interactive Intelligence's e-FAQ. The software lets you indicate if individuals or departments must approve certain items before your company publishes them within internal or external knowledge bases. e-FAQ has new reports that list who reviewed or approved knowledge base items, and when.

When you assign colleagues to create, change or review knowledge base items, one option is to send an e-mail message that contains a link to e-FAQ Knowledge Manager, the on-line authoring tool that comes with e-FAQ. Interactive Intelligence's Fuller says that a future version of e-FAQ will generate notifications by e-mail as the approval status of a knowledge base item changes.

Transforming Questions Into Knowledge

One precursor of on-line knowledge bases is a list of answers to frequently-asked questions, or FAQs, on your Web site.

FAQs are among the most straightforward self-service options you can offer. That's especially true when you focus on customers' five to ten most common questions, in total or within specific categories.

Various KM tools enable you to create and update FAQs. Interactive Intelligence's e-FAQ lets you draft, edit and categorize FAQs to answer questions, or provide suggested replies for agents, in response to customers' e-mail or live text messages.

With e-FAQ 2.2, you can more easily assign FAQs to multiple categories than before. As with earlier versions, e-FAQ lets customers indicate whether specific FAQs helped them, although only FAQ authors determine FAQs' rankings.

As we've seen with e-FAQ, FAQs draw from knowledge bases, and vice versa. That's why vendors often include FAQs among components of their KM product suites.

Example: Primus FAQ, one of the modules Primus introduced last month with its Primus Knowledge Suite, lists FAQs that customers and colleagues consult most often or in the order in which they rate them. You can also apply your own rankings to FAQs.

Primus eMail Assist refers to your knowledge base to present agents with possible answers to customers' e-mail messages. Primus Self-Service enables customers and colleagues to search your knowledge base or other information you make available about your company.

Next month, Primus will add Primus Answer Pro, which uses information from a trouble ticket or customer's record to search your knowledge base. Primus' Ridout explains that Answer Pro guides agents through looking up information as they communicate with customers.

Also next month, Primus will debut Primus Knowledge Pro, a module for more senior agents. Unlike Answer Pro, Knowledge Pro will enable agents to add, edit and view reports about items in your knowledge base.

RightNow Technologies offers eService Center, which your center uses to build a knowledge base and generate automated responses to on-line inquiries from customers. The software also recommends answers to agents that reflect what's in your knowledge base.

To gather customers' feedback about your knowledge base or your company, RightNow Metrics enables you to display on-line surveys or send them to customers by e-mail. One of RightNow's newest KM tools is RightNow Locator, a standalone module that lets customers find addresses, maps and other information about your company's stores, offices or dealerships.

FAQs and on-line response tools have long been components of KM software from eGain (Sunnyvale, CA). You can also create and track FAQs with KnowledgeBase's newest KM suite, which we describe further in an upcoming Test Drive.