The importance of coaching is widely known in every aspect of modern life. In sports, successful coaches help teams and individuals focus on strategies that will get them perform at their best level in competitions. Life and career coaches guide individuals to find the path that will deliver the results they are striving for. Whether it’s the NBA multi-championship winning coach Phil Jackson, the high energy life coach Tony Robbins, or a coach in your own organization, given the time and commitment, a coach can drastically improve results.

In fast-paced support operations where every second counts, leaders focus on how many agents are available to serve customers and the quality of the service they provide. These are the fundamental considerations to think about, not only for handling customer interactions but also for knowledge workers, and organizations utilizing Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) methodology.

The role of coaches is pivotal to the success of a knowledge management program.

In the world of KCS, you can see the importance the methodology places on coaching by the way it recommends selecting knowledge authors. Through a method called Organizational Network Analysis (ONA), leaders can start to find authors who have the trust of their peers and possess good coaching characteristics, a combination that can bring great results. In fact, industry research shows that training in combination with coaching leads to an average of 86% increase in individual productivity compared with 26% by training alone. You can learn more in our Let’s talk Coaching blog.

Once you have selected the right coaches, the challenge then shifts to maximizing the time these star players get to spend with others in their group to elevate the collective benchmark of quality knowledge.

This has been one of our key areas of focus when developing the Upland RightAnswers 2022R1.1 release: How can we make the lives of coaches easier? The answer is simple: Reduce the time looking for who to coach and increase the one-on-one coaching time. Below are some of the coaching-focused features now available.

Coaches can save time by finding articles from just their coaching group in one place.

Having a quick view of the articles that have been created by authors in their group is possible through portlets on the dashboard in Solution Manager, our best-in-breed knowledge authoring tool, at the heart of RightAnswers. Coaches can find information on their group, including articles created/modified/published, workflow activity, and types of articles created as well as articles that are sitting in work in progress or not published status, allowing them to investigate and help move to a validated state.

Being able to find the content from their coaching group allows coaches to give rapid support even outside of dedicated coaching time.

Coaching time should be focused on people, not finding reports.

From a reporting perspective, coaches can choose to see data that relates to the authors in their group instead of having to trawl through data from all authors. The time savings that can be achieved for each coach by doing this will mean that the time they get to spend with authors is maximized, which in turn should help you see improvements in the quality of articles in the knowledgebase.

Seeing how effectively Knowledge Quality questions are being adhered to can help you identify important coaching opportunities.

We have always had Knowledge Quality checks to help authors adhere to the content standards you set up. As well as having automatic and KCS specific questions out of the box, you can also set up custom questions, all of which you can apply weighting to, depending on what you feel is most important. Once set up, authors can respond to the questions as they create content in Solution Manager, with the option for the scores to be seen on articles for end users too.

The Knowledge Quality checks have been a part of RightAnswers from many years. In this release we wanted to give coaches and knowledge managers granular level detail to help with coaching and content improvement. To do this we added a report to track the individual responses to Knowledge Quality questions in Solution Manager from each author. From both the coaches and organizational views, this helps identify adherence to knowledge quality standards, even for any custom questions. Whether you want to use the data in a Content Standard Checklist or to identify coaching opportunities, the data is available to help make improvements to the quality of your content.

For those who don’t use KCS methodology, the benefits still apply. Coaching is universal and can make the difference in ensuring your knowledge management program is a success.

To learn more about RightAnswers or about how the KCS methodology can upskill your workforce , contact the team here at Upland and we will be happy to discuss your requirements further.