Transcript:

Pete Wright:
You know the business school tropes, right? Business moves fast, knowledge is power. It sounds like a commercial somewhere in the triple-digit cable channels. But tropes don’t become tropes for no reason at all. And today we’re taking on one that truly defines how many of us do our work every day. What good is knowledge if it’s locked away in a silo? Upland Zoned, Alex Baker and Rosemary Kirk are back this week to guide us through the intricate landscape of knowledge management solutions, helping us understand not only what knowledge management is, but why it has become crucial for organizations of all sizes to thrive in today’s competitive environment. I’m Pete Wright, and welcome to Connected Knowledge. Alex, Rosemary, welcome back to the show.

Alex Baker:
Thank you for having us.

Rosemary Kirk:
Thank you.

Pete Wright:
We were talking about the essentials of knowledge management and eventually we’ll talk about what are the questions you need to ask to pick the solution that’s right for you. But first, let’s just start at a high level. What do we need to be thinking about if we haven’t yet put together a knowledge management solution at our organization? What is it and why should we care?

Alex Baker:
One of our key goals is, and this is what we encourage all our customers to do, is seek to understand before you seek to be understood. And that’s not just from a vendor perspective, but that’s also within your organization. So, what are the challenges you’re trying to address? And sometimes it varies very widely from industry to industry. Are we dealing with complex troubleshooting? Are we dealing with processes that we’re trying to make sure that we get them exactly right, exactly the same every time? Are we trying to script our calls to make them more consistent?

So, just figuring out what some of the challenges you have are, what are the current pain points, where is your knowledge currently? Those are all things that you want to try and ask yourself and address. And you want to be honest too. So, a lot of times we’ll ask people, “Okay, well what do you have right now?” And if the answer is it’s just in everybody’s heads, that’s okay, that’s your starting point. But you need to know where you’re starting before, where you’re going to go.

Pete Wright:
Well, I think that poses a follow on question, which is maybe all of our knowledge is in a Word document that Jacob runs over in HR. How do you know when it’s time to transition to a more sophisticated solution? Do you have a discernment process to help organizations figure out like, “Okay, we need to get serious today.”

Alex Baker:
Yeah. Some of it is just there are hard metrics that go along with it. So, if you see that you’re measuring things like first call resolution and average handle time. If you see them starting to creep up, and I think traditionally it’s about two thirds of the time on the average phone call for customer service or tech support is spent just trying to research or figure out the answers to problems and anecdotally, everybody can prove that out. How often have you called your cable company or your bank and how much of that time is you actually talking to somebody versus you waiting on hold while they’re frantically trying to figure something out?

So, just having access to the resources that people need makes it quicker and easier for them to spend less time. But in answer to your question, it really is metrics based. So, if you see that your people are spending a lot of time answering calls, if they’re not getting it right the first time, if you have poor customer satisfaction scores. It’s not necessarily correlation and causation, but all those things can be indicators leading you to believe that, “Hey, maybe one of the things we need to inspect is our knowledge management practice and are we doing it right?”

Rosemary Kirk:
And if I could answer, if you’re watching those agents also walk out the door. If your attrition numbers are through the roof and everybody’s talking now about how agents are burnt out, its information overload, its high pressure, its metrics. You got to do all of this in seconds. And like Alex said, then you’re digging for answers in a million different systems. You’ve got a gazillion different resources of CRMs and other things that are blinking and flashing in your face and probably somebody on the phone who’s screaming at you because nobody wants to call into that call center.

So yeah, if they’re walking out the door, because frankly some states I know now in the US the minimum wage, they’re making more if they’re flipping burgers down the street. The person that served them coffee at the drive-through is making more than what that rep is. So, under all that stress, if they’re walking out the door, that’s a huge red flag and a sign that something needs to be fixed.

Alex Baker:
And you brought up a good point, Rose, and that’s that nobody woke up today wanting to call customer service or tech support. So, it’s not like you’re calling happy people, we’re calling to check in and see how you’re doing. They’re calling because they have a question or a problem, but this was not their first choice. So, aside from just the conversation of self-service and how can we let them answer the questions themselves, what can we do to make it less scary? I think a lot of times you have executives where they’ve never worked in customer service, they’ve never worked in IT or any kind of technical support.

And they don’t realize that you have your training period, you have your incubation period, but then when you are dropped out on your own and you’re answering phone calls, it’s unhappy people who want something from you and you’re just trying to figure it out. And if you don’t have the resources to answer the questions they’re asking, you’re either going to be miserable or you’re going to quit. And it’s beholden upon us as students of knowledge management say, “What can we do to help these people?”

Pete Wright:
That’s a really great point that you forget after not sitting in the seat for a while, that the calls that you are trained on are generally calls that are managed or actually performed by training managers pretending to be upset. And there is a dramatic difference between pretending and actual upset customers.

Alex Baker:
My first day in tech support about 30 years ago, I went and sat behind a large air conditioning unit behind the building and cried while eating my lunch. Really, it was horrible and that’s part of why I do what I do now, is just to try and just what can we do to make people’s lives better.

Pete Wright:
On all of the home and garden, like home flipping shows that I watch. I have been told that I need to define my needs before I start breaking down walls. So, let’s talk about defining our goals before we start pinpointing what the actual features are that we need. How do you lead organizations through the process of discovering what they need to do? Rose, you already brought up retention, so obviously maybe retention is a goal call time. What else are we looking at? Let’s build a checklist.

Rosemary Kirk:
I was just saying, building on that things like the job satisfaction. I think Alex and I were just talking not that long ago about how a great company will do things like engagement scores. And typically, one of those questions is, do you have the tools to do your job? And one of the things I love is that when they implement a knowledge management system, that score should go up because now they feel relieved and such. So, like you were saying, those folks that forget what customer service is like or they make somebody else call the 800 number because they don’t have time for that sort of thing.

They need to look at that bottom line of the turnover and maybe they’re not meeting SLAs and so they’re paying out fines. I know for Panviva, we work with a lot of financial institutions, healthcare hospitals. If mistakes are made, that’s a lot of money, that’s what CFOs pay attention to sometimes.

Alex Baker:
And one of my favorite customers is a hospital where we talk to them day one and we said, “What are your pain points? What are your primary challenges?” And they said, “Our number one goal is to improve patient outcomes.” That’s very noble, that’s wonderful. Sometimes you have people where they’re like, “We’re in a financial crunch. We need to save money, we need less people on the phones.” That’s a legitimate reason but sometimes you have people where they’re trying to make their patient’s lives better or make their agents’ lives better. So, a lot of it it’s really just there is no one size fits all it’s just what pain points are you trying to achieve? What metrics are you suffering in and where would you like to do better? Whether it’s financial user satisfaction, agent satisfaction, or just general metrics.

Pete Wright:
Tying it, I assume to customer satisfaction, right? How often do you look at customer sat against job sat?

Alex Baker:
Most customers that I see, there’s two big failures in measurement. A lot of people don’t measure their agent or job satisfaction, and they also don’t measure the MTTP, which is mean time to proficiency, which is how long is it between when you hire somebody and they’re basically good enough to be out there on their own. Most people do at least some kind of customer satisfaction, but not a lot of people actually measure those agent metrics. And it might sound cliche, but it’s the happy agents being happy customers. People can read it on your face even if they can’t see your face on the phone.

Pete Wright:
They certainly hear it in your voice. Okay, so let’s look at figuring out what the best knowledge management solutions for us, right? Collectively, we may be in a hospital, we may be in let’s say a large law firm. There are all kinds of different contexts for managing our knowledge. Where do you start to figure out what the best fit is?

Alex Baker:
So, I think some of it is your goals as an organization. Is it process adherence? Is it collaboration between users? So, Rose might want to talk about Panviva and for example, and how Panviva helps people minimize mistakes, helps people get things consistently right in terms of adhering to processes. Whereas something like RightAnswers would be more of a tool for enterprise knowledge management. You have a lot of people who are following KCS practices, which is knowledge centered service, which is an industry standard. And they’re trying to do a lot of collaboration amongst maybe disparate groups and even disparate geographic locations. So, some of it really is just what are your goals and what are your challenges coming into it?

Rosemary Kirk:
Is it about that training? Is it about upskilling? Is it about up support? Is it the access to just the latest and greatest? Not having to spend all that time second guessing that like you were saying, time to competency, the confidence of that agent. You were talking about a happy agent. A happy agent is a confident agent knowing that everything they’re looking at is not only accurate, but appropriate for their role, how they like to learn, how they like to absorb information and then spit it back out. I know I was a trainer for a really long time in contact centers and I frequently would put people through the fake it until you make it scenario, which was so unfair.

But it was also a scenario where I would explain all of this stuff in our slang and jargon and everything of that particular industry. And then they would turn around and say, “Well, great, but how do I explain that to the caller? Because that’s not the language they use.” So, that idea of, again, recognizing what you need, that efficiency of that technology and making the investment. Not only investing in those agents and recognizing that they really shouldn’t be at the bottom of the org chart barrel kind of thing. But also investing in the technology that they need to be able to help because they’re the face, they’re the ones directing [inaudible 00:11:23].

Alex Baker:
And you brought up a good point too, Rose. It’s not just the technology, some of it is the best practices around the technology. We could have the greatest knowledge base in the world, but if you have a knowledge article called Active Directory Password Reset and somebody calls up and says, “Hey, I can’t get into Windows.” If the agent types in, I can’t get into Windows, even if it finds that active directory password reset article, they might not even know what that means. So, just having a good search that will find things in a neural fashion, but also just capturing content in the language of the customer, capturing things in context.

So, we’re not trying to rewrite history later on after we’ve already forgotten what they said. There’s a lot of best practice stuff that we recommend for people in addition to just having software that supports it.

Pete Wright:
I think this idea of putting, of shifting perspectives against your investment, and I guess this goes down to a CIO, CFO conversation, which is how are we going to put this new technology investment in place and make sure that we humanize it in favor of customer first by way of agent? Because I imagine it’s easy to get that lost.

Rosemary Kirk:
Oh, yeah. And I was just going to say, every C-level person I’ve been talking to for the last probably a year has just said, “Well, I want AI to fix everything.” But as of this very moment of this recording, it’s still a garbage in, garbage out. So, like you were saying, if you’re an organization, which I just talked to last week, where literally everything is still in everybody’s heads, nothing is documented, AI is not ready for that yet kind of thing. So, it’s that idea of if they think it’s going to fix everything, it’s not.

There was a Gartner report that just came out, and I’m paraphrasing it, but it basically said that, “The majority, if not all of those AI integration projects are going to fail if there’s no structured organized knowledge management system behind it.”

Alex Baker:
And the human element too. You have that technology to support it, but then you can’t just send somebody to an hour-long training class and say, “Okay, this is the way we do business now.” You have to talk to them, “And what are your concerns? What are your fears? What are your current challenges? Do you think this addresses them or does it not? What feedback can you give us? Where do you go if it’s not working for you or who will tell you if you’re doing a good job?” Because you don’t only want to deal with negative feedback, all those things, making it human. It’s a really hard thing for a lot of IT people. A lot of times when we’re dealing with software sales and stuff, the people we talk to, they’re in purchasing or they’re in IT provisioning or the more hardcore IT portions of the business.

And they’re just thinking about getting things to work on a zeros and ones level, but it’s human beings who are talking to other human beings who are the users of the software and how does this make their lives easier? How does this help them? How does this help the customers? How does it make them feel at the end of the day when they go home? Do they feel good or bad about the job that they did and the resources that they had? And just getting into that human element of the software is challenging, especially for IT people. But you have to approach it like any other problem. It is a real thing that you have to take into consideration and you have to address.

Pete Wright:
I hope this isn’t an unfair question because I know there are so many points that are specific to customer implementations, but I’m thinking again to the CIO, CFO conversation. How far down the runway should I be looking for being in implementation mode and management mode for a knowledge management project? Because we’re talking about making not just technological change, but cultural change, and that requires a way to change how we think. How do you both approach that, Rose? You want to go first?

Rosemary Kirk:
Yeah. It’s all a methodology about buy-in. You need to let them know, especially if you’re talking about that bottom line, if that’s what’s resonating with them of, “I’m tired of paying the fines, I’m tired of writing a check because I didn’t meet my SLA.” All of those types of things, or they’re being sued, that’s even a worse thing in a whole different conversation. But it’s that idea of, okay, if you’re looking at the numbers, then let’s look at the numbers of how that’s going to increase your productivity, how it’s going to keep those people from walking out the door. So then, you’re not paying all that money in a retraining and hiring and going through that vicious cycle and such.

Making sure that there’s a continuous improvement aspect of it. And once they buy in, then they can communicate to everyone down. But just helping them know or convincing that C-level, how that workforce is going to benefit from it, and then how that’ll lead to the dollar signs on the way down. But yeah, it’s a lot of that buy-in is a lot of, oh, well, if they believe in it, then we can talk to everyone else about how they believe in it. And then also conversely working from the bottom up, letting those agents know to look at how much this is going to help you and how this is going to save and take away the stress and all of that sort of thing.

So, then once they’re bought in, it then works its way up is typically how I see it. And then it meets in that middle management stuff of when, okay, now they’re going to talk to the trainers and the supervisors and those folks to just all get on the train, and then it starts to break down those silos that you mentioned before.

Alex Baker:
So, just from a C-suite perspective, just if I’m giving my elevator pitch to somebody in the C-suite, what should I expect? You should expect some disruption if everybody’s been working off of notes that they have on their desk. I’ve seen people where their entire wall in their cubicle and the call center has just posted with sticky notes, and that’s what they’re working off of. And that’s great for you, but then nobody else has access to those sticky notes and if the information on one of those sticky notes changes today and you didn’t know now, you just gave somebody a wrong number, you gave them wrong information, you gave them wrong pricing.

So, just having the ability to standardize that and make sure that everybody has access to all the collected information all at the same time. There’s a little bit of a cultural shift because sometimes people don’t like to admit this, but they have a culture that rewards hoarding knowledge. So, the person who is seen as the most valuable or the most, you ask somebody who couldn’t you live without in this call center environment? They’ll say the guy who’s got the line of 20 people standing at their desk. But that’s not something necessarily to be proud of. If you have 20 people standing at your desk, why are they waiting to ask you questions when you could have documented those things and made it available not just to them, but to your end user customers as well.

So, having a cultural shift from a culture that rewards hoarding knowledge to a culture that rewards sharing knowledge can be a big challenge. It can be disruptive to have to capture everything when you first start capturing knowledge and get used to that. But there is a stepped model with clear expectations. The KCS or Knowledge-Centered Service Standard, which I’m a trainer for, lays a lot of that out as well. So, I might be a little biased towards their methodology, but it really is that concept of storming, norming, and performing.

Where you have disruption at first, you get to at least as good as you were, but then the processes and methodology you have in place allow you to gain efficiencies that you would not have been able to do without the tools and the processes in place.

Pete Wright:
Is there ever, and I recognize as I ask this question, it is loaded. Is there ever an end to a knowledge management implementation?

Alex Baker:
Implementation? Yes. An implementation is a project, I’m also PMP, sorry. But yeah, so a project by definition has a beginning and end. So, the implementation must end, and sometimes the people who are doing the implementation are not the same people who are serving as KDE’s or Knowledge Domain Experts as coaches, as content authors moving forwards. That’s okay. Ideally, you have the implementation team stay on into production, but not always. But a project also has clear goals and once those goals are achieved at the end of the project is over and you have milestones.

So, the implementation should be complete and if it’s never complete, you have failed and your implementation planning and your implementation project. But knowledge management is never done, it’s not like you installed an alarm system you’re like, “Well never have to worry about that again.” It’s not set it and forget it. It is a life cycle discipline. So, you are signing up for software that enables your work the most efficiently, but it’s enabling work, still work. You have to put the work in to get the benefit out of it.

Rosemary Kirk:
Yeah. We’ll often refer to it as an ecosystem to help people think about it as how it’s constantly changing and growing and modifying. Honestly, when somebody asks me, how long does the [inaudible 00:20:11], I typically will say, “No, it never ends.” Because it is always one of those things where as you’re building it, then it could be three, four months down the road where you’re like, “Oh, if I had known then what I knew three months ago, so all right, let me back up a step. Change something a little bit, maybe the taxonomy or the structure,” or something like that.

Because now you’re getting feedback from your users about, oh, you know what? This icon doesn’t really, I don’t really understand what it is or those types of things. So, you’re constantly tweaking and improving, but it is also helping break down those silos because that review and approval of now content, you can expand that out to say, “Okay, who are those stakeholder departments that help the call center?” Because that cultural shift, like you talked about before, a lot of times it’s maybe the directors of those departments that talk to one another, but nobody else farther down the chart does.

So, it’s that idea of, “Hey, your Excel spreadsheet that you made in your department helps me in my call center, so let’s work together to try to find a great way to present that and share it and improve on it and make it a living, breathing thing.”

Pete Wright:
Sure. Well, and that’s what I think is so interesting about that question in particular that the project, I doff my hat to you, Alex, just a thank you for the PMP correction. But the project implementation project ends, but what you’ve cultivated are new domains of expertise for maintaining and cultivating your knowledge management system. And that can be a radical change to your organization.

Alex Baker:
Even though it’s scary at first, it can be a good change too. We’ve had some customers where they have a very flat call center environment where they have 100 agents, but now you introduce what’s called a licensing model where everybody starts off as a candidate author of content, and once they prove they know how to write stuff, they become an author. And then from there, they can go to an approver and they can go to a knowledge domain expert or they can coach other people. So now, rather than 100 Tier 1 agents, this person’s like, “Oh, I’m a Tier 1 agent, but I’m also a coach.” And it gives you a little bit of extra career pathing, it gives you something to help you get involved and feel like you’re contributing to the business.

And people don’t want to be victims of a process, they want to be contributors to the work that they do. They want to feel good about the work that they do, and allowing them to contribute positively gives you a chance to let them do that more.

Rosemary Kirk:
And you’re scaling and growing with the organization as it’s building, you’re able to reuse and repurpose content, so nothing’s duplicated. You don’t have one team managing a website, one team managing a chatbot one team. It’s all coming from the same spot. So, there’s that consistency in that single source and enabling things like self-service. And we all know that four years ago it was blatantly clear when everybody sent people to work from home who was prepped for that sort of thing and who wasn’t. Who relying on that wall of sticky notes? And then all of a sudden, they’re sitting at their dining room table and they’re lost and they feel like they’re a new hire all over again.

Where those that had a knowledge management system that was structured and functioning, it was like, “All right, once your phone works sitting at your dining room table, then let’s go. Let’s pick up and don’t even miss a beat.”

Pete Wright:
It’s amazing how fast the nightmare scape of chaos comes back when you say, “Four years ago you didn’t have your stickies, remember?” Oh, my goodness, oh my goodness. Let’s talk about some of our products. We’ve got right answers in Panviva we want to talk about, because these can certainly help on the journey. Which one would you like to start with? I think we’ve already name-dropped Panviva, maybe we start there.

Rosemary Kirk:
Yeah. So, Panviva we like to say that Panviva ensures that agents are experts from the first day. It’s that idea that it’s a training manual, but also a process guidance tool. So, it helps that new hire who, like we said before, has no idea what their name is when that phone rings for the first time, and they’re scared and they’re nervous and everything. It helps them with that scripting and can, whether it’s an integration or not, walk them through every scenario and every situation and rule and reminder and script that they could need in an end-end call.

But it also lets those that are more experienced and skilled just quickly find that phone number or that code or something along those lines. So, it streamlines things, it ensures things like compliance. We work with finance, healthcare, energies, utilities, those kinds of companies that are getting audited all the time. They need to see things like version history, they need to know who touched what and when, who looked at what and when and all of that sort of thing. And there have strict SLA is often, we have a lot of government contracts and that sort of thing as well.

So, it’s all about delivering that exceptional service, but having it very more probably locked down compliant. It’s very specific as far as who can do what, because it’s all that role-bender screening, but again, presented in an intuitive and easy to follow manner.

Pete Wright:
There you go, compliance, competence, confidence. There’s the three Cs. If there aren’t three Cs, then it didn’t happen. I feel pretty good about that.

Rosemary Kirk:
Exactly.

Pete Wright:
Alex, you want to talk about RightAnswers? How does that fit?

Alex Baker:
So, for RightAnswers, it’s true enterprise knowledge management. So, one of the, probably starting around 2019, 2020, one of the catchphrases we started hearing all the time in the industry was the moment of need. It’s where is the user? Whether they’re somebody sitting at a desk in your office, whether they’re just one of your employees sitting at home trying to solve their own problem. Whether it’s one of your end user customers or somebody standing in a hospital hallway trying to figure out how to use their software before they walk into an operating room.

It’s where is this person? What are they doing when they want to use knowledge, and how do we get the knowledge into that spot? We have our own user interface for RightAnswers where you can go directly to our portal, whether you’re an end user or some kind of support agent or somebody who’s working just as an employee within a company, trying to do self-service for your own problems. We have APIs where we can plug knowledge into existing pages and applications, we have a browser extension. We’ve also got a lot of integration, so a lot of times if you call somebody up and they’re trying to solve your problem, they’re already in a ticket in Salesforce or they’re in Zendesk or they’re in ServiceNow.

They don’t want to have to go open a new tab and click on a bookmark and log in and pull out their phone and type in the authenticator app. And by the time you do that, you’re like 20, 30 clicks in, and then you have to copy and paste what you were searching for. So, you want to take the knowledge and just have it right there. So, in the ticket form, you type in, what is this person calling about? You hit enter, and then all the knowledge base just results just show up right there within the ticket they’re already working on. So, enterprise knowledge management that tries to deliver knowledge to people in the moment of need for large enterprises, people that have a need for multilingual content.

And also, people that want to be on the cutting edge of things like AI, because we have what’s called an AI knowledge assistant that helps you edit and author content when you’re creating the content. So, it’ll edit stuff for you, it’ll rewrite it for you. If you have a content standard, it’ll rewrite it to your standard. And then from the front-end perspective, we also have what we call generative answers where you can ask a question and it’ll actually give you an AI summary of, okay, in the knowledge base, rather than having to click through articles and open them. It’ll just give you that summary at the top and then also just a search.

The one thing we didn’t really talk about a lot is in the call today is the search, but that’s really the king. Because if you go and search for something and you get bad results or no results, you have one of two problems, your search doesn’t work well or you’re missing the content. But you need a good search engine because people won’t give you a lot of chances if it doesn’t work.

Rosemary Kirk:
I was just going to say, Alex had mentioned AI knowledge assistant. Panviva is utilizing AI Knowledge assistant as well, but it’s for curating snippets of information. So, we were talking about making sure that the content’s appropriate for the audience, but also for the channel that they’re using. So, it’s that idea that I, as a contact center agent, I might want that end-to-end process with all my scripts and my rules and my guidelines. But if I’m asking it in teams or if I am an external customer and I’m interacting with a website or a chatbot or something like that, I don’t need a whole thing, I just need snippets of it.

So, our AI knowledge assistant is able to then find those answers, present them in snippets, and have it again, customized for that channel and that audience as well. So, we’re again, keeping that consistent message.

Pete Wright:
So, it sounds like there is a Venn Diagram between these two products where there is overlap. How do you two see their use cases as different? Do you have any flagship customers that demonstrate why you want to go with RightAnswers versus Panviva and vice versa?

Alex Baker:
So, I’ll say without naming names of customers, people that have a need for multilingual content would want to go with RightAnswers because it’s really strong in that space. People that need to primarily consume content via API or have a lot of control over their own user interface, or if they want to plug the knowledge management into an existing all-in-one agent dashboard tool or in page that they already have created. Those are some of the strong use cases for RightAnswers. And Rose, you talk about the Panviva ones.

Rosemary Kirk:
Ours would be that compliance, like you talked about before. We’re looking at the hospitals finance things that are looking to, that have that one single source of truth that can have that consistent message regardless of the channel, but it needs to be locked down. It needs to be easily auditable, if that’s a word today, but also showing-

Pete Wright:
Today for you, yes.

Rosemary Kirk:
Excellent, I’ll take it. But also again, available for that version history, being able to have all those clear analytics about who’s doing what and really locking down the aspect and creation of the content. But still allowing users to send feedback and let them know that this is empowering me to say that back to what we said before. I have a tool that’s helping me do my job, but then also being able to see how it’s impacting the digital channels of the chatbots and things as well.

Pete Wright:
Amazing. And just as a final note as we wrap up, you both talked about the AI knowledge assistant. AI is a complicated area in our space right now. Can you just talk briefly about how it’s working and what success rate are you having? Are people loving it or are they using it?

Alex Baker:
Honestly, it’s amazing, and we introduced our first one at the beginning of last year. We have a summary field where when you do a search, you want to get a title and a summary, you don’t want the whole article displayed. I haven’t written a summary since the beginning of 2023, it writes it for you. You click on the right summary button, it just does it and it does a good job. We’ve got customers where we have one insurance company where they added their own prompt that says, rewrite this at no higher than an eighth grade reading level. Because their auditors say, “You can’t publish something for the public. If it’s too hard or too confusing to read, we’ll ding you for it.”

So, they just click on the button, rewrite this, and it’ll rewrite it at no higher than eighth grade reading level, you can add in your own prompts. So, from the writing, the rewriting, the ability to add your own prompts about how you want it rewritten, it blows my mind. It’s really amazing in terms of what it can do. We have this human in the loop philosophy, but a lot of times I feel like it needed me to check it, but it didn’t need me that much. And then from the front-end user perspective, just the search results that the users get. If you do a search and it gives you the answer to the search, if you go on Google and you search what is two plus two, if you have to click on the results versus if it just says four and then it gives you results, you’re a lot more likely to interact positively with that content.

So, we’ve seen huge results, even just from my own use. Obviously, we use our own products internally, but it’s really some amazing results we’ve seen also in terms of just things like culturation, the quality of the knowledge that’s getting put out, it does have a huge impact.

Rosemary Kirk:
Absolutely. We’re seeing increases in things like productivity. Rather than eliminating the human, it’s making that human better. So, it’s that idea of I can curate those snippets a heck of a lot faster. Like you said, I just have to click a button and it does it for me. Now, I don’t have to rifle through the information to find it manually and such. But also integrating with things like teams and using things like Microsoft Copilot to then go look through all the snippets, find the most appropriate one based on who that person is and how they’re asking the question in teams.

We’re integrating with things like telephony systems that have real-time transcription. So, then we’re combining our superpowers, if I could use that marketing term to be able to then say that, “Okay, based on what that caller is saying, here’s some suggestions about knowledge that can help you out.” But still, like Alex said, keeping the human in the loop where the agent at any point can say, “You know what? Even though the knowledge management source might be telling me these things, my gut says something different, so I still want to be in control.

But it’s just that that’s so much faster than probably back when Alex and I started working in contact centers when dinosaurs were roaming the planet. We had probably binders and things sitting in front of us.

Alex Baker:
We bring binders on our desks.

Pete Wright:
Bring binders, for sure.

Rosemary Kirk:
Absolutely. Yes. So yeah, it’s just making everything just that much better.

Pete Wright:
Rather than getting rid of humans, we make humans better. On behalf of humans, Rose, thank you for that.

Rosemary Kirk:
You’re welcome.

Pete Wright:
We need that. We need that. All right, so we want to send people to check out these products. First of all, RightAnswers, Panviva, we’re going to put the links in the show notes. Check it out, everybody listening to this, check it out. If you’re on the fence, check it out, book a demo. Let’s give you a walkthrough of what it actually looks like, what it means to start seeing some of the results that Alex and Rosemary are talking about today. What would you want to say as we wrap this up to people who are on the fence? Where do you send them? Alex, you first.

Alex Baker:
I’ll say we’re nice people. So, really most of the people that work in knowledge management are nice. I’ve had customers where they’ve left their organization, they keep in touch, they’re willing to reach out and help new people. And most people that work in knowledge do it because they care about keeping people informed and helping people learn things and do their jobs well. So, I’ll just talk shop with people all day if they want to know. “Hey, here are some of our challenges. Is this something you can help with?” To our own detriment, probably not very salesy, but we will talk about best practices and listen and try to understand what your problems are.

And then if we have something that we think can help you, we will just jump right in and show it to you. And we love the work that we do, so we really enjoy getting a chance to show our products to people because we’re proud of them.

Rosemary Kirk:
Especially because we’ve been there. We’ve sat in those cubicles, we know what it’s like, we’ve done the job. And personally, I know I used Panviva as a, because I was a customer for almost four years before I joined the Panviva team. So, like Alex said, we might not sound so salesy, but people appreciate the stories and knowing that we’ve lived through those implementations, so we can tell you how it really is and what those red flags are, but more importantly, what those green ones are too.

Pete Wright:
It is a lovely beneficial cycle that you don’t have to be salesy because honestly, you start looking at what the products can do and see the potential and it just gets opportunity gets unlocked. It’s really lovely, and so please check it out. Thank you everybody for listening, we appreciate your time and your attention. Make sure to swipe up to see all the show notes that we’re sending. I will get any additional resources that Rose and Alex want to throw my way. We’ll put them in the show notes, and we hope that you will check those out. On behalf of Rosemary Kirk and Alex Baker, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you right back here next time on Connected Knowledge.