Taming the firehose

Cognita Journal #27: Enhancing agent efficiency with AI; Leaky pipes; Texas Flood

Agent Proficiency: The KM Advantage

Quickly bringing new agents up to speed and ensuring their proficiency is a persistent challenge I’ve seen throughout my career in CX contact centers .

When you sign on to a company as a new customer service agent, you’ll typically go through weeks of training before your first interaction with a customer. Usually, these training programs feel like a "fire hose of information.” Agents are expected to retain vast amounts of knowledge, often without easy access to it when they need it most.

And when an agent inevitably falls short on their QA scores, they’re taken out of the queue and put through retraining.

This traditional approach—providing "just-in-case" knowledge during training—often falls short when agents hit the floor and face real-time customer issues. When knowledge is siloed, disorganized, difficult to access, incomplete or wrong, it leads to inefficiencies, unhappy customers, and can even hinder the effectiveness of AI implementations.

Custome…