Upskilling Customer Service Agents: Part One, The Knowledge Curator

Yes, AI is replacing customer service roles in many organizations. It’s an “adapt or die” moment for the contact center space. I’m excited to adapt.

The work is becoming richer and more strategic than ever before, and the positive impact CX leaders can have inside of the organization has never been greater. Now is the time to elevate the customer experience in a distinctive way.

But what does this “elevation” path actually look like? I had the honor of delivering a keynote on this topic at the most recent ICMI Expo. The feedback was significant — service leaders are ready to equip their teams for a positive future.

This three part series will highlight several of the most critical skills for customer service professionals over the next five years and offers guidance on how to foster them within your team.

• Part One: The Knowledge Curator
• Part Two: A Personal Guide
• Part Three: A Community Co-Creator

So, let’s turn that curiosity meter to 11 and buckle up for this brand new rollercoaster ride in the land of must-read content!

Part One: The Knowledge Curator

A “knowledge curator” is a person who:

• Goes deep to truly understand the customer, the business and the industry.
• Effectively shares knowledge beyond themselves, making those around them even more capable.
• Helps to identify to resolve “friction points” in the customer journey, making the overall experience better.

As with any major change in the employee experience, this shift begins with team culture. Effective services leaders foster a mindset of generosity related to knowledge. This leader shifts what is a natural tendency to horde information, to instead elevating those who are quick to share. This has strong implications in both our performance management and our quality assurance programs.

I have a favorite saying when working with service teams: “Let’s get smarter with every customer interaction.” Think about all the incredible conversations happening daily in the service center. It’s easy to focus solely on resolving issues — and to forget about actually learning from them.

A major bonus? Fostering this skill makes future AI implementations more likely to succeed. Research shows the top reason AI projects fail is poor organizational data. Having an in-house force of capable knowledge curators is the best way to remedy this challenge.

Let’s look closer at the specific skills involved in effectively centralizing knowledge across stakeholders:

Active Listening: Mining for Gold

There is so much more to a service interaction than a simple resolution. Why did the customer have to engage customer service? What are they (really) looking to achieve beyond their stated intent? Once this is resolved, what is the next challenge they are likely to experience?

Knowledge curators go beyond the surface-level interaction to extract valuable insights. As you can tell from these questions, the information gathered here is incredibly useful to a smart organization. But asking insightful questions is a skill that must be trained for most people. This article from Tammy Palazzo on “the art of asking good questions” is an excellent starting point.

Reading between the lines and inferring great questions is a natural outcome of active listening. While active listening is by no means a new skill, it is becoming harder and harder to find people with it. Being fully present and helping to guide a meaningful interaction takes talent. Ximena Vengoechea’s course on LinkedIn is a helpful primer. Build this into your coaching and quality review process.

Special Note: Consider how agents are actually graded for their performance. This may or may not be different from what leaders give lip-service to. For example, if what shows up on a quality scorecard are things like how long an interaction takes and use of canned language, an evolution to “knowledge curator” is likely impossible. In order for agents to create elevated experiences, the way they are held accountable will need to be elevated first.

Effective Capture: Smarter Together

Once the “gold” has been drawn out of an interaction, it’s time to cash in.

The Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) methodology emphasizes the quality and accessibility of information. Knowledge curators actively work to improve both, making the organization smarter as a whole. Linda A. Hill’s work on “Collective Genius” illustrates this concept beautifully — teams that build on one another’s learning can design remarkable experiences.

But these benefits are dependent on the service worker’s ability to capture and centralize information. Leaders have a responsibility to provide the right training, as well as implementing processes that ensure consistency.

From a training perspective, Leslie O’Flahavan’s Writing in Plain Language course is a great resource. Deepen your service workers’ ability to capturing the interaction in clear, concise and consistent manner.

When it comes to process, the more straight-forward the better. When the expectation is for service workers to navigate to a separate knowledge base and re-write information that was already captured, you are setting yourself up for failure. Make knowledge capture a natural outflow of case or ticket documentation. This could be as simple as a flag that can be enabled in the same CRM where the case is documented. When the interaction has a “knowledge capture” opportunity, the agent can specify this and include a note. Rules can ensure it makes it from there to the right person for review and inclusion in the larger knowledge base.

Positive behaviors like the example above should be reinforced in the performance management and quality assurance programs. This will demonstrate that you are serious about the sharing of knowledge, and those who do will be successful.

Ownership: Making It Scalable and Making It Stick

This is where the role of knowledge curator becomes even more exciting. In some contact centers, it can be difficult to extend autonomy to the front-line service agents. Evolving the team from “ticket takers” to knowledge experts is a wonderful opportunity to do just that.

Your centralized knowledge collection is made up of a variety of categories or knowledge types. Map these out visually to show how the categories relate to each other, and identify any gaps. I’ve used Trello to do this personally, but there are many ways. 

Next, encourage your agents to take responsibility for a specific knowledge category. Start by pairing agents with their strongest knowledge categories, but don’t stop there. Rotate category ownership on a quarterly or b-annual basis. This gives people a chance to greatly accelerate their learning in specific areas, as well as ensuing knowledge base integrity through collaboration.

As part of this ownership, agents review suggestions from the team on how to improve information in their category. They are actively identifying any gaps in the knowledge, while reviewing the entire body of information for any quality issues. They are also working to improve search terminology and any other barriers to the accessibly of knowledge.

There are so many benefits to an action like this. The autonomy fosters pride and curiosity for the individual. The entire organization benefits from the culminating impact of significantly improved knowledge and smarter employees.

In Conclusion

Brad Cleveland spoke about a “new wave of work” transforming the service industry at the ICMI Expo. With the right skills, your team won’t just survive this wave — they’ll thrive with it. Let’s build them a “surfboard” with the required skill and knowledge to do just that! The evolution to knowledge curator is a huge step in this direction. You’ll not only safeguard their careers but create meaningful, lasting success.