Information Management as a Response to a Need
- Sivan Arar Reuven
- Sep 1, 2007
- 9 min read
Written in collaboration with Karen Trustler
Daily life presents us with countless interactions with service-providing organizations - from banks and credit companies reflecting our financial situation to the television we watch, the phones we use for conversations, the newspapers we read, and the packages we send to our loved ones. We expect the same things from all these companies - friendly service and reliable information provided quickly and during the first conversation.
However, who among us hasn't experienced calling a cable or satellite company, a large government organization, or a bank, asking a question, and receiving different answers from each representative we spoke with?
Information management comes to solve this problem (and additional ones).
What is Information Management?
Information management is the heart of a service organization. It is the entity that transforms knowledge into a usable, efficient, uniform, reliable, and relevant work tool that helps organizational employees become more professional and faster.
Information management has two components. The first is a technological system for displaying and managing content. The second is a team responsible for feeding content into the system, updating it, maintaining it, adapting it to users, and identifying additional user needs.
It serves as an information and knowledge hub in the organization and is responsible for collecting, processing, and transferring information from all company divisions to service and sales departments. The goal is to create uniformity in information delivered to customers and the message conveyed, shorten response time to questions, reduce the number of questions transferred to professional headquarters staff, and minimize repeated inquiries. Due to its centrality, the management system is an integral part of the organization's cross-organizational initiatives and processes.
Target Audience, or - Who is Information Management Suitable For?
Information management is primarily suitable for units in organizations responsible for providing service to a large number of people, such as telephone service centers and face-to-face service centers (service stations where service is provided in person). In such organizations, the service representative must be a "superman" and know the answers to many diverse questions. They must deliver immediate responses in the best and most comprehensive way to any customer question, whether operational, marketing, account status, or more—all according to the "one-stop shop" principle.
The volume of information the representative in the service center needs to know, its level of diversity, and the need to ensure up-to-date answers at all times have caused a shift in the focus of the representative's role. If in the past they were expected to memorize information and retrieve it when needed, today a professional representative knows how to quickly locate information in the system. The diversity of information is influenced not only by the many contents included in it but also by the need to address the needs of a diverse target audience (such as individuals and business organizations). Hence, there is a need to adapt the information to the characteristics of different populations and present each population with relevant information.
It's important to note that the amount of information organizations must provide has increased significantly in recent years as most service organizations operate in a competitive environment. Competition affects the frequency with which information is updated (the need to respond quickly to competitors' actions), the flexibility the organization needs to provide to differentiate itself from others, and the complexity of the information.
The change in the representative's role and the competitive environment in which the organization operates sharpen the need for a process-supporting information and knowledge system. Information management is the most appropriate solution.
Roles of Information Management
Information management connects company units and serves as the sole information channel, conveying the professional information customer service representatives need to perform their duties. Its role is to improve the flow of information from headquarters to the field and back, facilitate information retrieval, ensure its currency, improve service quality, and shorten customer handling time. Information management enhances the professionalism, speed, uniformity, reliability, and credibility of information transferred between various entities.
Since information management systems are most suitable for service-providing organizations, one of their central roles is representing the "field" in organizational processes. The "field" consists of customer service representatives and, through them, the customers themselves. Information management team members participate in planned organizational initiatives, from addressing proposed actions and providing professional opinions to raising potentially problematic issues at service centers that might create customer resistance. In the reverse direction, they process new initiatives or instructions, translate them into field language, distribute them to users, and update them in the system (information management) for representatives' use. An example of such a process is when the marketing department launches a new promotion, the operations department updates it in the operational systems, and information management updates the supporting system with an information item that includes all relevant information and guides all representatives about it.
The Power and Advantages of Information Management
Through its role in supporting cross-organizational processes and disseminating information to the field, information management holds tremendous power. The entity determines how service representatives see information and how it is passed to customers. It can identify trends and requirements among customers, diagnose failures in information flow, and keep a finger on the pulse at every stage, representing all partners who produce or need information.
In addition to their integration into organizational work processes, the information management team is responsible for developing the technological system and improving knowledge distribution in the organization. The team's role is to examine new user needs and how to streamline the representative's work in the system to create a service leverage. Examples of streamlining include using templates to present information, linking operational systems directly to the information management system, and creating integration between data for the benefit of the representative.
Advantages of Information Management
Information management has two advantages —for the employee (service representative) and the customer.
The employee receives all the information they need in one place - work guidelines, linked forms, frequently asked questions, relevant images, contacts involved in the subject, and any additional information required. Unlike a portal, this usually involves processed, concise, and selective information that can help provide an immediate response to customers in real time. Presentation templates are often used to achieve uniformity in information and make it easier for employees to understand the information before them. These templates are characterized according to organizational needs and allow processed information to be presented uniformly and quickly, providing a familiar feeling and enabling fast understanding and orientation even on pages containing unfamiliar information items.
Organizing information in a user-friendly way, an advanced search engine and a sophisticated permissions mechanism shorten the time it takes for representatives to locate information, thus reducing the time it takes until customers receive responses to their inquiries. The system's ease of use and the ability to find answers to all questions encourage representatives to search for information within it. Another important tool is the feedback mechanism - any user who encounters unclear information or struggles with a professional question can directly contact the relevant content editor. This creates a win-win situation because the representative receives an answer to their question from the authorized source while the system is updated and adapts to their needs.
From the customer's perspective, the fact that every question asked receives a single unified answer from any representative in a relatively short time improves their perception of the organization's professionalism. The ability of any representative to locate information in one place increases the percentage of inquiries resolved on the first support line, thereby reducing the number of repeated calls to service centers. Additionally, the management system increases the variety of tools available to representatives for resolving customer inquiries, improving customer satisfaction with the service provided.
The organization has many advantages beyond customer satisfaction and the professional image created. Some of the things we've mentioned above (uniform information flow, currency, etc.), but there are more: the management system reduces the training period for new representatives. It provides management and control tools that allow administering knowledge tests, analysis of content usage and system utilization patterns, and concluding continued improvement.
In conclusion, information management embodies many inherent advantages for both the customer and the organization.
Characteristics of Information Management
Information management is a unique solution in the landscape of existing information and knowledge management solutions. In a community or portal, the role of the content expert is part of the ongoing work; in management systems, however, the model of a dedicated team responsible for content updates is more common (see article in 2know journal September 2005 - "Information Management, Centralized or Decentralized?"). This represents a significant investment, sending a very strong message from the organization to its employees about its importance to knowledge, management, and contribution to daily operations.
Previously, the management team comprised technological people (see article in 2know journal December 2004 - "From Information Management to Knowledge Management"). With the strengthening of service companies, the need increased for a core professional team (familiar with the field of activity) with process emphasis (knowing which entities to check questions with) and an understanding of content organization (how to provide the right answers quickly). The management team members speak the "organizational language" of operational factors on the one hand and representatives on the other, and they know how to bridge the gap between them to present complete information to the customer.
Since the content editor or information specialist (as management team members are called) participates in distributing information to the field and is in contact with all relevant entities, they constitute an important junction through which all information passes. As they receive many questions, they can "raise a red flag" regarding overloads of new updates or existing gaps.
Knowledge Management Principles Are Sharpened When Dealing with an Information Management Solution
One-stop shop - Information is presented as a complete work process from A to Z, which includes all the information and knowledge the representative needs in one centralized place rather than as separate independent information units.
Adapted to knowledge audiences - Content is adapted to the user profile; they see only what they need, tailored to their requirements.
Technology-based - The system is usually based on a technological tool that enables the management of content items, often a dedicated tool developed to support service centers.
Based on organizational culture - The management system presents information adapted to the organizational culture in terms of language and jargon (organizational taxonomy) and work processes related to how information is updated in the system. These require cultural sharing initiatives between different units.
Prevention of information duplication - Information is entered into the system once and, from that point, linked to every relevant location.
Information Organization
These types of systems consist of an enormous quantity of items (small management systems include tens of thousands of items, and larger ones in Israel include hundreds of thousands). It is critical to allow the service representative to "find their bearings" quickly at any given moment. Intuitive orientation can be achieved on two levels:
External information design - Navigation in content pages: arranging items according to distinct content domains, aided by a system of characteristics and values that catalog each item. The guiding logic is the user's perspective.
Internal information design - The organization of content pages containing information items. This is facilitated by using consistent templates and building them uniformly (regarding content, location, and graphic design).
The two central characteristics of information management are flexibility and templating. Flexibility is designed to adapt the system as much as possible to the needs of the diverse target audience (what is professionally termed customization). Templating is designed to create a clear and uniform framework that helps representatives navigate between different items.
Resources Required for the System
So far, we have detailed the advantages of information management for organizations, but our work would not be complete without detailing the resources required to establish such a system.
As mentioned, one of the characteristics of information management is employing a full-time team (centralized or decentralized) dedicated to establishing and maintaining the knowledge management solution. There are organizations where a team of 2 employees might suffice. Some organizations will require a team of 10 employees or more. There is no dispute that such a dedicated team costs the organization significantly, a cost that must be considered before investment. Often, organizations establish knowledge management solutions to reduce various costs. In the case of information management, not only is the initial cost high, but it is also difficult to measure the immediate ROI (Return On Investment) that comes with it. While it is possible to see that call times are shortened and there are fewer repeat inquiries about the same topic, it is difficult to quantify this into a clear numerical assessment.
An additional resource is the cost of the dedicated tool that must be purchased to implement the solution. Several dedicated tools exist, but information management can be implemented with non-dedicated tools. This is recommended only for some organizations, depending on the nature of the information, stage in the lifecycle, and existing work habits.
Summary
In this article, we reviewed the activities of information management, the organizations for which this type of solution is suitable, the roles of the management team, the characteristics of the solution, and the resources involved. This solution is becoming increasingly popular as more organizations understand the importance of service and the importance of management as a tool for providing professional and reliable service. From our experience in knowledge management, organizations that have chosen this solution indeed require resource investment, but they are definitely reaping the benefits!
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