Create a knowledge Base

[tgr430]

Hi,
I have a client that has a ton of manuals and books. He is in charge of a call center where his employees answer telephones and help callers with questions.

The employees have no computers in front of them and they have to put the caller on hold and then walk over to a book case to look up the info from a book or manaul.

My client wants to get rid of these manuals and books and wants to create some kind of knowledge base for his employees that stores this info, in order to increase productivity. Does anyone know any kind of software that can be used to implement such a system? I kindly appreciate it.

Thank you!

 

[randysmid]

Hi,
There are two main questions that need to be answered before proceeding:
1) Is the customer willing to invest in computers for each of the call center employees? Obviously, one computer for all of them would not work, in case the call center was overloaded with many calls at one time.
2) Are the manuals and books available in electronic format? If they are not, the pages can be scanned into the computer using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), but this is extremely cumbersome, and not all that reliable.

If money is tight, the current method is probably better. But for each employee to more productive, I would consider getting a set of books for each of them.


HTH,
Randy Smith, MCP
California Teachers Association

 

[tgr430]

Thanks Randy,

I am doing a project for non profit organization that wants to go for a grant and buy new computers. Currently, they have a huge library of books and manuals. When someone calls they put the caller on hold and walk up to the book case and lookup the problem from a book.

I wanted to know how they could build a knowledge base. Would I need to build a database first and then link it to some kind of user-friendly interface?

Thanks again!

 

[randysmid]

Hi,
If the books and manuals were in electronic format, it might be possible to set up an Access database to retrieve the information. I said "possible", because some electronic data formats are proprietary, in that only their programs will access the information. As you probably know, Access has a tool called Queries that will retrieve data from one or more tables. Inside of Queries is a powerful function called "like". This is useful in that it will search entire fields (imagine this paragraph being a very large field type of "memo", which holds up to 64,000 characters versus 255 characters for a text field). With the "like" function, you could search this paragraph for the word "proprietary", and your Access form would find and display it, if necessary.

HTH,
Randy Smith, MCP
California Teachers Association

 

[tgr430]

Hi Randy,

Thank you. I see what you're getting at. I like your idea using the "like" to retrieve matching candidates from an Access database.

The books are not electronic. They are physically in a bookcase and there is about I would say a 100 books. I think I would need to go along with scanning the books with an OCR.

Thanks again!

 

[randysmid]

Hi,
I have seen instances where it will be necessary to physically tear the pages out of the book or manual so that they will scan properly. One of the key elements to watch for is the OCR software. You will definitely want to insure that it can read the various typefaces/fonts from the various books and manuals. Even so, a human being will have to proofread the scanned copy to guarantee that it matches the printed word exactly. This will be a time-consuming and costly process. If you feel that a reasonable estimate of 4 months is sufficient, you should immediately double or triple it. Murphy's law will apply to this project!!!!
As a preliminary test, photocopy pages from each and every book/manual and run it against every OCR program you can find. This way, you shouldn't encounter too many surprises when scanning (exceptions might include obscure heading and subheading fonts).

SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS - this would come under document management. You may want to perform a search on Yahoo or Google for these keywords: +"document management" +"software"


HTH,
Randy Smith, MCP
California Teachers Association

 

[tgr430]

Thanks Randy,

Yeah I agree that it going to be a tiring process to scan all those books with OCR. He's just gonna have to find the most important section(s) of each book and then balance the tradeoff.

I'll follow your advice about looking into some software solutions on the web, either google or about.com Thanks again!

Terry

 

[tgr430]

There are some tradeoffs that I have to address to my client and he's just going to have to deal with them I guess.

 

[randysmid]

Hi,
Again, depending on the vendor, you may find the books in electronic format. For instance, I know that the HP 3000 and HP9000 manuals are on cd-rom. Good luck with this project!!!

HTH,
Randy Smith, MCP
California Teachers Association