Knowledge Management in Call Centres

Abstract

Call centres, or their contemporary successors contact centres, are the preferred and prevalent way for many companies to communicate with their customers, but perhaps the greatest challenge of running a call centre, is to ensure that customers are provided with the right information in a timely fashion. Knowledge management has a number of practical tools and strategies to meet this challenge but to leverage the potential of these tools organisations must understand how to implement knowledge management especially in their call centre department. This research paper focuses on five main roles of knowledge management namely; knowledge acquisition, utilisation, adaptation, dissemination and generation, while knowledge management is achieved by identifying and managing these roles efficiently in an organisation. The primary data comprises interviews with managers of the call centre department of two largest car makers in Iran. Using case study approach, this research tries to describe and illustrate how participating companies are managing their organisational knowledge in their call centres, which items are supported under their supervision and which items have not been covered.