Transcript

Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Connected Knowledge from Upland Software on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright. How do you know your knowledge management system is getting a bit long in the tooth? Are your people complaining about too many emails covering the same things? Are they struggling to keep their knowledge current as the organization changes around them? This week on the show, one of our own leaders is back to help us out. Keith Berg is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Contact Center Productivity Solutions, and he’s going to get us tuned to the red flags that point to your organization’s readiness for the KMS upgrade. Keith Berg, welcome back. It is so good to see you again.

Keith Berg:
Thanks for having me back Pete.

Pete Wright:
What’d they have to do to twist your arm to come back and talk to me again?

Keith Berg:
They just asked me some knowledge management questions and I said I’m in.

Pete Wright:
All right, easy mark. Easy mark. So, we’re talking about the overall thesis of the conversation is how do you know your KMS is ready for an upgrade. And a guy like me, any day is a good day for an upgrade. Tech nerd, right? I love new systems. I love new things that let me do more things. But we know that the knowledge management systems upgrade is a significant thing. So, let’s talk about what we need to know as we navigate change and how we need to be attuned to the things that tell us it’s time for change ourselves.

Keith Berg:
Well, I think one of our colleagues, I think who’s done a podcast with you before, Stin Mattu, likes to say “it’s about trying to reduce the cognitive load on our agents.” Agents have a lot of tools and a lot of processes and information that they have to ingest throughout their day. Every time an organization changes those tools or adds a new step or an exception, that job gets just a little bit harder and a little bit more complicated. And the downstream effect of that is the risk to those key customer metrics that you’re measuring—average handle time, first call resolution, hold time, those sorts of things—can make it or break it with your customers.

Amongst all that information that’s being pushed down to those people, then there’s the question of what’s the quality of the information that you’re providing to the agents? And we can talk about this more as we go through today, but a lot of what we see is there may be tools in place, but that doesn’t mean they’re effective. And if they’re not effective, they’re distracted. And if they’re distracted, then they’re negatively impacting agents and customer experience.

Pete Wright:
There are a couple of things going on here. Number one is what I’m hearing you say is that it’s not often that your agents are going to revolt against a system, right? The first sign that agents are struggling is in the data. So, talk to managers. For me, you’re a manager listening to this in a call center environment, what should I be looking for as a manager that provides me that red flag starts with what?

Keith Berg:
I think a lot of it has to do with getting feedback from your agents about what it is that’s positive, negative, helping them do their job, inhibiting them from doing their jobs. And a lot of our customers have started with frankly just surveying the agents and the output of that oftentimes is they realize they need to upgrade their KM solution when they’ve asked for that sort of feedback. Unhappy or frustrated agents are risky for your business and agents can revolt. I joked about that, but if I spend more time working around my knowledge management system as an example or whatever other tool it is that we’ve got in our call center, that’s a lot of wasted time. So, you really got to look at these tools like the knowledge management tool and get that feedback from the agents and other people that are involved in it, see if it’s working. If it’s not working, what do you do about that?

Pete Wright:
Well, it’s interesting. That’s an interesting way to sort of pivot the question, which you’re right, it’s kind of a joke, kind of not. But my hunch is that most organizations are not sitting there in open like pitchfork and torch revolt. They’re languishing in that liminal space of things aren’t working, things are suffering, but we don’t necessarily understand what a KM upgrade looks like. We have a culture of stagnation or stasis. And things are working enough, but degradation is slow and long until all at once. So, to those organizations, how does this culture affect our awareness and readiness for change and upgrade? Does that make sense?

Keith Berg:
Yeah. Yeah, it does. Knowledge management is a tough one. If it’s not working for you, it’s simply not working for you. And you’ve got to do something about it or else you might as well just shut that system off because your agents are going to stop looking for it. They’re going to go back to talking to people over the cube wall or I guess nowadays they’ll be using Teams or Slack or something of that nature.

Pete Wright:
Slack. Right. Yeah.

Keith Berg:
To try and say, “How do I fix this?” So, we really got to… And when we encounter prospective customers, that’s really the stage where they’re at—their knowledge management system is broken. They’ve tried to duct tape a few things together to make it work, but it’s not working and they’ve got to kind of start from scratch. Now, starting from scratch by no means means start from scratch right? It means bring in a new tool, figure out how to get what’s good from your knowledge base into that tool, and start working through that new experience. A lot of the times, either the knowledge that the customer has hasn’t been properly maintained. So, it’s gotten outdated, and that’s part of what makes it ineffective, works the toolset itself, and that’s what we hear from a lot of our customers, “Well, we’ve got good information in there, but our people can’t find it”.

Pete Wright:
That’s the curse, right? And I think you said it. They’re using Teams or Slack or whatever. Your call center adapts around the holes in the system, and that seems to be the cultural sort of target. How do we provide a system that fills the hole that our teams have adapted around because out of necessity?

Keith Berg:
Yeah. Well, and culture’s a funny thing. You can have anti-culture too, right? So if this culture has naturally created itself around, “Man, these tools are bad, let’s figure out how to work around those,” that’s a bad situation to be in because knowledge in and of itself requires a lot of collaboration and teamwork. You have to have a good knowledge culture in order to be successful. You could have the worst tool, but lots of culture. And like I said, you tape that together, but ultimately that’s going to fall apart. It’s going to become toxic. Ideally, what you want is a strong tool and a strong culture, which tends to be conditions that work together to kind of support one another.

One of the methodologies that we are closely aligned with is KCS, Knowledge Centered Service. And many of our customers do some KCS, not like full KCS, just picking up on the key components of KCS that revolve around creating that collaborative culture. Because in order to make that knowledge management system work for you long-term, there needs to be a culture. People need to be bought in. They need to feel like they’re part of it or else you’re just going to implement a new knowledge management system and it’s going to die like the last one did.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Because of all the culture that you have. You have so much culture. Just your cup runneth over with culture and your systems don’t align with your culture.

Keith Berg:
Exactly.

Pete Wright:
Which is fair. So, we’re also at a point—well, I guess I need to phrase this better as a question. To what extent do you see in the market, organizations that are, how do you say this generously, ready for change? These are the organizations who might be listening to this and think, “Do I know if my knowledge management system is broken? Are we in the liminal space of the culture gap where we’re ready for change and we don’t quite know it yet?”

Keith Berg:
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s two things there. One, either you’re getting feedback from your agents or if you ask for it, you would get the feedback and they’ll tell you whether it’s working. And two, what is the next step that you want to do? In a perfect world, you would also make that knowledge available to other channels, other support channels. It’s a chatbot. It’s email response. It’s real-time agent assist type tools that are out there. You can’t even begin to think about moving to those kind of next generation technologies if you’ve got broken knowledge management. So yeah, there’s a current day problem that broken knowledge management creates for people, and then there’s a future problem. How do you get to that next level of effectiveness? How do you implement new tools when you’ve got a shaky foundation?

Pete Wright:
Say you’re ready for change, what is the first metric 8:00 AM day one that you’re telling call center managers to start looking out for? What is the behavior change that you’re looking at when you implement a new knowledge management system to know that change is happening in the workplace?

Keith Berg:
You’ve got to rely on your reports. What are the reports telling you? How do you work with the vendor that you’ve gotten that system from to interpret those reports? And come up with a program that says, “Hey, we’re going to look at this on day one. We’re going to look at it on day 30, 60, 90, and what are the metrics that we want to see that’ll tell us whether we’re being successful or not in this journey?” And we have lots of customers who’ve been customers of ours for years that have come back and said, “Hey, we need a reboot. We want to look at where our metrics are at today. We’ve gotten a little distracted and can you help us,” and that’s a big part of knowledge management. There’s a life cycle and sometimes you get off path and sometimes you need to get back on. But it’s really about looking at those kind of key metrics around knowledge creation, around maintenance approval and review queues. And then on the usage side, what’s actually being consumed by users, whether it’s fellow agents or it’s your actual customers.

Pete Wright:
From your perspective, 30, 60, 90 feels like a solid launch evaluation. We’re looking at this as we adapt to it. What is the recommended sort of best practice for ongoing maintenance check-ins to keep the system from languishing or falling into that liminal space?

Keith Berg:
I think there has to be some sort of monthly process at a minimum that’s going on, and managers are looking at that data. Because it doesn’t necessarily move from one day to the next unless there’s something systemic that’s occurred within your organization—system failure, new product launch, something of that nature. But yeah, there needs to be a monthly cadence. I think there needs to be an annual kind of business review that looks at all the metrics that are important to you, and also starts to think about what are those next set of metrics that we haven’t even thought about yet.

Pete Wright:
The last time you were here, we were talking about AI. AI’s you might say a big deal this year, this current market cycle. Can’t AI just fix all this stuff, man?

Keith Berg:
Yeah, I’ve heard-

Pete Wright:
I mean, that’s the big question. What’s the impact of AI on our knowledge management systems and what should we be able to expect from these tools?

Keith Berg:
Yeah, no, that’s a very good question. I’ve heard a few things about AI this year, but AI is not a cheat code. I mean, if you think you’re going to use AI or generative AI to magically give you the answers that you haven’t actually put the time into creating, I think you’re going to be disappointed. Also, not to get too crazy on this concept of hallucinations, but the tech is great, but it’s not foolproof. The notion that you can ask the same question to one of these models five times and get five slightly different answers kind of reinforces the idea that we still need that process side of knowledge management to exist. This isn’t the Wild West. Call centers aren’t asking basic general ed… they’re not getting general ed questions that you could go out to Google and find, right? It’s usually very specific things. They’re specific to the products or services that that company supports. So, there needs to be some people in the middle of this process to help the AI. And like I said, it’s not kind of a magic cheat code.

Pete Wright:
It actually brings up, we have a listener question that has come into the show, and I wonder if I could give it to you as a bit of a bonus here. This comes from listener Rithu who says specifically to this point, “The tech is great, especially the AI, but how do you train around human behavior? We have relied on the information accessibility in our knowledge management system, but we’d like to up our game around call center agents and their ability to handle complex task and improve memory.” What do you think about this idea? How does knowledge management play in the arena of human behavior, memory, complex task completion, those sorts of things? Any insights?

Keith Berg:
Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely a personalization aspect. I mean, I think that part of training the model or any model for artificial intelligence is knowing what people are asking and knowing what’s happening over time. So, there’s a machine learning aspect to AI in general that says, we get a lot of questions around this time of the year. Or these types of agents get these types of calls. So, we definitely need to make sure that the AI is taking into account that kind of personalization and the trends that are learned over time in order to be the most productive.

Pete Wright:
This whole idea that just giving access to the information and helping agents feel more confident in knowing that the information that they’re getting out of the system might go a long way to help them behave in a way addresses Rithu’s question. It’s that they have greater retention, greater ability to complete complex support tasks and remember more along the way to respond more quickly to new support requests that come in.

Keith Berg:
Yeah. There’s also a trust factor, I think, right? When you implement some new AI technology, those agents need to see and start to trust the things that are being thrown to them. Imagine if you’re on a phone call and you had the whisper in your other ear with somebody talking to you about something that had nothing to do with the phone call that you’re on. It’d be very hard to keep your thoughts in line. But if that person was spot on every time and they’re learning the behaviors more and giving you better answers more quickly over time, you’ll then become more trustworthy of those sources and they’ll become more… your AI will become a more effective partner.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, and I think it goes to the bottom line question of this episode. How do you know your KMS needs an upgrade? Well, one of the significant ways that you see the benefits is your agents learn to behave differently because they are given better more timely resources at their fingertips. I mean, that’s what we’re striving for after all. Whether it comes from AI or comes from the tools that we built, whatever you want to call it, this machine learning aspect, AI, whatever it is, it’s making them feel better about their jobs.

Keith Berg:
Yeah, it definitely removes a lot of friction that folks answering calls put up with a lot of stuff, man. And just the people that are on the phone and dealing with different personalities. If they’ve got to also fight the tools during the process, that just makes that job exponentially harder. It increases attrition rates because it’s driving frustration with those agents. It’s already an industry where attrition rates are high. So, anything you can do to drive down those rates—giving people the tools they want, asking for feedback and then delivering and executing on that feedback are all things that can help drive down those attrition rates.

Pete Wright:
I’ve tried really hard, Keith, since we’ve been talking about doing this show. Every time I have to deal with a support rep, I always tell them, “I know your job is hard. You are wonderful. Thank you for doing this.” Just being as a consumer, it makes me feel better to just tell them how great they are, and I think everybody should do that because they’re great, great, great people doing a hard job.

Keith Berg:
It’s surprising sometimes when you thank somebody at the end of an interaction that they react so well to being thanked and you’re kind of like, “Huh, maybe that doesn’t happen very often.”

Pete Wright:
I was supposed to tell you to have a great day.

Keith Berg:
Exactly.

Pete Wright:
Well, let’s talk about what the Upland team is gearing up for, DestinationCRM’s 2024 CX Megatrends to Watch. What is going on. We’ve got this expert predictions webinar coming up January 17th. Give us a sneak peek.

Keith Berg:
Well, not to anyone’s surprise, it’s going to be a lot of AI speak.

Pete Wright:
I’m shocked there is AI happening in this establishment piece.

Keith Berg:
It’ll be unique speak, hopefully not things just generative AI. We’ll have real people talking on it. But yeah, no, we’re excited to be part of this panel to talk about some of the predictions. We’ve been doing a lot of stuff this year around AI, the buildup to it and doing a lot of releases in this month and next month to really get that out for real people to start really using to solve real problems, so we’re excited about that.

I think there’s going to be a lot of swerves in the road to navigate for vendors like ourselves next year around AI. I don’t know if you saw, but last week the AI Act was passed by the European Union to impose regulation against how you can use AI.

We’re going to see a lot more of that, and it’s going to curtail what we can do or force us to think about how we can use these things in responsible ways across the globe. But I feel good about our strategy. I think we’ve focused on real-life applications of the science around this that I think are going to weather the storm. We didn’t go out on a limb to try and do crazy black box sorts of things. We know how the AI is working in the situations that we’re delivering to our customers, and we feel really good about it and really good about its ability to actually provide real value to those customers.

Pete Wright:
We’ll put a link in the show notes. Where else can… We’ve got some other links that we’re putting in the show notes, some other knowledge management resources. Anything else specifically you really want to make sure people check out as they think about what comes next for their KMS?

Keith Berg:
We’ve done a number of releases this year for our knowledge products and had some really compelling webinars, again, around this topic of AI. And I invite people to take a look at our website and look at some of those other past webinars that we have that we went through not last year and get a sense for what our tools can provide. Like I said, most of our customers at the onset of our conversation here, most of our customers are coming from a broken system. And we’ve got lots of information about how our system excels and a lot of the things that we’re doing around AI and increasing just the general kind search capabilities in our solution are really kind of battling against what it is that we’re hearing and seeing, or kind of the failures of a lot of the products that are out there in the market.

We’ve got information in there, we can’t find it, right? That’s a broken search engine. That’s a broken way of thinking about search, and we’ve got answers for that, and we’ve got even newer answers with neural search and other sorts of things coming out in our product that really changed the game.

Pete Wright:
Links in the show notes everybody. Please check these out. They’re fantastic, fantastic resources and we hope you get a lot out of them. Thank you so much, Keith, for hanging out and talking to me about what’s coming up, particularly as we gear up for the expert predictions webinar January 17th. And thank you all for downloading and listening to this show. We appreciate your time and your attention. We would love to hear what you think. If you, like Rithu, want to send us a question, you can do that. Just swipe up in your show notes and click on the link that says, “Hey, ask a question.” We’ll get it to our guests as they come through the show here and get your questions answered. On behalf of Keith Berg, I’m Pete Wright. We’ll see you next time right here on Connected Knowledge.