Knowledge Innovation and Learning - Literature review Example

Download file to see previous pages This is applicable to employees in organizations in various industry sectors, where knowledge or the collected data may play a key role. Call centers are becoming a key industry sector of their own, operating independently or in association with organizations from other major industry sectors like Telecom. With the development of advanced communication technologies, Telecom companies are proliferating and are impacting the people’s lives in various ‘spheres’. Organizations in the Telecom sector are optimally using call centers as an extension of their functioning, and important to manage the knowledge and provide customers apt services.

Call centers, or their contemporary successor's contact centers, are the preferred and prevalent way for many companies to communicate with their customers. However, perhaps the greatest challenge of running a call center is to ensure that the customers are provided with the right information in a timely fashion. This is where the KM comes into the picture, and aids the companies to do that exactly. Although, KM has a number of practical tools and strategies to meet this challenge but to leverage the potential of these tools organizations must understand how to implement KM, especially in their call center department. In telecom companies, knowledge in any form is indeed valuable and so managing these ‘knowledge entities’ or information are important for the success and even the survival of the organizations.

Call centers could do it aptly if a framework of best practices is formulated. These best practices could aid in the management of knowledge or information about the company’s products as well as the about the customers. So, the aim of this report is to develop a KM system or framework of best practices to support the call center in a Telecom Company in order to improve its customer service performance and the company competitiveness. In that direction, this report will do a literature review on the topic of KM in a general manner, and focus on its applications in the Telecom sector as well as in call centers. Then the report will discuss the proposal for KM in the call center, by coming up with an optimal framework of best practices.

Literature review
KM- A background
As Tiwana (2000, p.7) states “Knowledge management enables the creation, communication, and application of knowledge of all kinds to achieve business goals.”
Seiner (2000) further expands on this aspect of KM by stating, “Knowledge Management envisions getting the Right Information within the Right Context to the Right Person at the Right Time for the Right Business Purpose”. Thus, when viewed from an overall perspective, KM is a discipline that aids in the process of knowledge creation or accumulation and thereby helps the employees to access that knowledge, when there is a need. This access to knowledge can positively impact the employees’ performance, thereby improving the service provided to the customer, enticing them to become long-term customers. As mentioned above, this form of knowledge creation and access at right time is also applicable to the Telecom companies, particularly to their call center department.

When focusing on KM, the word knowledge has to be focused on and understood from various perspectives. ...Download file to see next pages Read More