What is Knowledge Management in Telco?
Knowledge Management in Telco: Defined
Types of Knowledge in Telco
The telco/Communications Service Provider industry manages a vast array of knowledge assets that can be organized to drive operational excellence, innovation, and enhanced customer and employee experiences. Here are some examples of telco knowledge types:
Data
- What is my balance due?
- What is the discount on your promotion X?
- How many international phone calls can I make free of charge in my plan?
Insights
- Which customer segments have the highest churn risk and why?
- What network usage trends predict increased demand for 5G infrastructure?
- How do service bundling options impact average revenue per user (ARPU)
- Is there a penalty for a missed payment?
- What is the return policy on faulty phones?
- Can I change from one plan to another in the middle of a contract?
- Network security mandates and regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, FCC rules)
Procedures
- Customer identity verification process during SIM activation
- Onboarding workflow for new enterprise clients
- Steps to install internet service
Expertise
- Troubleshooting hardware issues
- Suggesting plans/bundles that are a win-win for the consumer and the telco
- Optimizing network traffic during peak usage
- De-escalating customer disputes/frustration
Knowledge Management in Telco: Challenges
Telecom operators face several KM challenges:
- Knowledge silos: Individual groups often build their own knowledge-base and over time, they proliferate into unmanageable siloes strewn across telco teams and business units. In fact, 59% of telco subscribers complained about receiving multiple answers to the same question across touchpoints or customer service reps, according to a Dimensional Research survey
- Technology limitations: In a BenchmarkPortal survey, a whopping 71% of telco contact center agents said customer queries are getting more complex while 53% do not have modern AI-driven knowledge systems in place to help them cope with the complexity.
- Cultural barriers: Organizational cultures that lack incentives for sharing knowledge and are resistance to change often have their KM initiatives impeded.
How AI Can Help
A centralized knowledge hub, paired with AI, can:
- Automate knowledge management: AI can help automate the knowledge management process every step of the way—source, create, curate, transform, publish, and optimize. Our clients see a 10X acceleration in knowledge creation and time to value.
- Centralize knowledge: Modern KM solutions can source trusted content from across enterprise silos through federation from or migration into a central knowledge hub, which serves as the single source of truth to deliver trusted answers.
- Personalize knowledge: Provide contextual knowledge, based on 360-degree context, including customer history, customer intent, in-band conversational context, employee skills and experience, and more.
Knowledge Management in Telco: Best Practices for Success
Proven best practices for KM in the telecommunications industry include:
- Identifying the knowledge you need: AI can be used to mine external conversations with customers and internal conversations among SMEs to identify the “star” questions (i.e., the most frequently asked questions) and the best answers for them to create the first draft of knowledge articles that the organization really needs
- Consolidate trusted knowledge into a hub: Consolidate vetted knowledge into a central hub to ensure correctness, consistency, compliance, and ease of access.
- Encouraging a knowledge-sharing culture: Foster an environment where employees are motivated to share insights and expertise.
- Leveraging AI: Our clients have been using AI to speed up the knowledge management process by 10X or more!
- Training employees on KM tools: Focus agent training on the use of the knowledge tool rather than the subject matter. After all, today’s GenZ agents have a “gnat” attention span of 8 seconds versus the short attention span of millennials, which was itself was a mere12 seconds! (Source: Sparks and Honey). While millennial agents may tolerate some formal training, 65% of Gen Z agents would rather just learn on the job, using AI Knowledge assistance tools.
Knowledge Management in Telco: Success Stories
A US telecom giant seeking to maintain market leadership through superior customer service saw an increase in their customer value metrics combined with increased FCR and a reduction in call handle time (saving them $1.53 million). Their consolidated knowledge base provided consistent answers to questions in multiple languages, reduced the need to train agents, improved morale and productivity, and empowered agents to answer increasingly complex questions.
The UK’s largest mobile operator achieved a 25-point improvement in NPS (Net Promoter Score) and a 35% improvement in FCR (First-Contact Resolution), while reducing agent time to competency by 50% across 30,000 contact center agents and 600 retail stores and enabling any agent to handle any call.
Another major telco reduced unwarranted handset returns (“No Fault Found”) by 38% through better knowledge-backed agent assistance at their contact center.
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