Why You Should Create a Visual Tribal Knowledge Base

A tribal knowledge base is the key to preserving the precious accumulated wisdom of a company’s most experienced workers – here’s why it should be visual.

A Retiring Workforce

Field service organizations around the world face the challenge of an aging workforce with 70% of those surveyed stating that they will experience knowledge loss caused by a retiring workforce over the next five to ten years, resulting in millions of technical positions remaining unfilled.

Even if management scrambles to hire new, younger workers to replace the outgoing personnel, courses can last 2–4 years and are therefore extremely expensive.

Challenges in the contact center

Field service organizations are not the only group suffering from a decline in experience and knowledge. Contact center attrition rates are notoriously high. According to research conducted by The Quality Assurance & Training Connection (QATC), the average annual turnover rate for agents in US contact centers ranges between 30 and 45 percent, more than double the average for all occupations.

This results not only in high costs for recruiting and training new agents, but also the loss of knowledge when experienced staff leave. And with research indicating that contact center employees between the ages of 20 and 24 stay for only around a year and those aged 25 – 34 remain for less than three years, contact centers are finding themselves with relatively few highly experienced agents who can act as the go-to people for complex inquiries.

This gap in experience and knowledge is exacerbated by rapidly rising levels of issue complexity in the Smart Home era, with customers requiring more help from contact centers and technicians than ever before.

For industries like these, the pressure is on: many of their seasoned workers built up their experience and skills before the digital age, so unless their knowledge is recorded and preserved, it could be lost forever.

The operational impact

It’s not hard to understand why a high rate of turnover and an aging workforce can have a negative impact on KPIs. The drop in productivity due to the loss of an employee and the steep learning curve of the new hire, coupled with the loss of knowledge and expertise of experienced staff, is a recipe for disaster.

When it takes longer to find the right resolutions, a higher Average Handling Time (AHT) will follow. When agents have knowledge gaps, the contact center will experience a lower First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate, and a higher technician dispatch rate. If technicians do not have sufficient skills or expertise, repeat visits will be necessary. All this adds up to higher costs for the organization and a major blow to customer satisfaction.

Preserving tribal knowledge

Faced with the challenge of a “brain drain,” companies must take steps to capture and preserve the knowledge of their “tribe” before it is lost due to attrition and retirement. According to a Deloitte survey, over 80% of respondents believe that sharing knowledge delivers a major competitive advantage and helps to deliver better customer service.

Four methods of capturing employee knowledge:

Traditional methods of capturing employee knowledge include:

Identifying the keepers of knowledge

Determine which employees hold the tribal knowledge that must be preserved. These may be workers who have been with the organization the longest, those who are considered gurus in specific areas, or solo specialists who accomplish certain tasks. Figuring out how to get a “brain dump” from these employees and document it before they walk out the door with this critical knowledge, is vital.

Determining key knowledge areas

Important knowledge can range from minor to major information. Minor knowledge worth keeping is how to descale the office coffee machine or where best to source toner for the printer. Major knowledge can include diagnostic procedures, especially concerning older devices or machinery.

Building relationships

Partnering experienced workers with novice staff – apprenticeships, essentially – is another way to accomplish knowledge transfer. However, keep in mind that sitting down with older employees and attempting to record their accumulated wisdom is inevitably a laborious process. Their knowledge is, by definition, unstructured and can be imprecise.

Creating a written knowledge base

Setting up a repository of documents, such as formal intellectual property, informal best practices, and employee-contributed “tribal knowledge” is a good way to ensure new hires have access to important information and training materials. It’s always worth encouraging employees to contribute even if the documentation isn’t perfect – it can be improved over time.

While traditional knowledge capture efforts are helping companies make headway in keeping their data in-house, it will take a long time and significant effort to transfer all the skills and tribal knowledge accumulated by experienced agents or field service workers. One innovative method that can accelerate the process is Visual Assistance.

Benefits of Visual Assistance for Field Service or Contact Centers Operations

Here are some ways in which Visual Assistance can be incorporated into field service or contact center operations:

View the issue remotely

One method involves a technician or customer service agent viewing a customer’s issue through their smartphone camera or by sharing their screen. This enables the agent to quickly understand and diagnose the problem and visually guide the customer to a solution, without the need to escalate the issue.

Immediate expert assistance

Likewise, field service technicians can use their smartphone cameras to easily transmit images and videos of issues to remote supervisors for immediate assistance, eliminating the need for follow-up visits.

Pre-dispatch preparations

Visual Assistance also aids collaboration, allowing an agent to prepare the technician ahead of the dispatch, providing images of the issue, making sure the technician brings the right equipment and parts, and alerting them to any access problems or potential dangers.

Building a visual tribal knowledge base

Most knowledge bases are hindered by poor usability. More than 70 percent of employees said they have difficulty finding and accessing the information they need to do their jobs effectively. Converting written information into visuals eases the data transfer and streamlines future training processes. A visual knowledge base represents a massive conceptual change, combining human input and AI-driven analysis.

How to create a visual tech support knowledge base

First, a Visual Assistance technology provider converts a company’s existing contact center knowledge base into a visual knowledge base. The provider takes each article and extracts the visual symptoms of every device and issue described, both from customers and from field technicians. Then the Computer Vision AI model is trained, using several different approaches:

• synthetic visual data (gathered in the lab)
• existing visual resources
• images supplied by customers.

When the system is trained on a particular device, product experts can use it to recognize it, identify the issue and provide predefined resolution instructions from the knowledge base. This not only offers vital decision support in complex cases – it also saves valuable time when dealing with a wide range of common issues. For example, when a customer requests assistance with installing a new router, an agent can essentially automate the process of confirming the model, the specific issue and supplying the correct resolution. This increases operational efficiency and, more importantly, reduces customer effort.

Creating an effective visual tribal knowledge base is a dynamic process involving ongoing optimization. The AI-powered systems can analyze, time and measure the success of each step of every resolution, shortening and optimizing them over time.

Benefits of a Visual Knowledge Management System

When agents can access the right resolutions quickly and efficiently, the organization will benefit from lower AHT, a higher FCR rate, and a lower technician dispatch rate. Empowering field technicians with a visual knowledge base, rather than a difficult-to-navigate text-based system helps avoid repeat technician visits, lowering costs and enhancing customer satisfaction.

When deployed properly, a cross-organizational visual platform drives knowledge sharing across enterprise service channels, including contact centers, field services and self-service digital channels, leading to a holistic approach to knowledge that guarantees success.

Visual tribal knowledge base: Invest in the future

The most experienced personnel in any company possess vast amounts of critical knowledge. In many cases, this information isn’t recorded, making it difficult to train new workers and define best practices. Visual Assistance – and the associated visual tribal knowledge base – provide an effective solution, enabling analysis of workflows, seamless communication and the identification – and optimization – of best practices in both contact centers and field services.