2018 International Conference on Information Technology Systems and Innovation (ICITSI)

Bandung - Fadang. October 22-25,2018

ISBN: 978-1-5386-5692-1

Knowledge Base Model for Call Center

Department: A Literature Review
Nadia Nur Annisa1, Dana Indra Sensuse2, Iik Wilarso3
1,2,3pacuity 0f Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia
Depok, Indonesia
1
nadia.nur63@ui.ac.id, 2dana@cs.ui.ac.id, 3iik@cs.ui.ac.id

Abstract—Call center officers need to be knowledgeable to be
able to give accurate information and fast service in terms of
solving customer's problems. Various knowledge in the call
center needs to be processed and stored to make a call center
officer's job easier. Therefore, knowledge base is needed as a
knowledge storage media for the call center. Thus, this research
aims to design a knowledge base model that can be used by call
center officers by summarizing and combining several literature
data from previous researches. Using Kitchenham's method of
literature review, sis publications from two search databases
were chosen in relation to the topic. The result of this research is
a proposed knowledge base model that can store and combine
various knowledge in call centers, namely experts' knowledge,
standard operational procedure (SOP) of the call center,
products knowledge, training materials, frequently asked
questions (FAQ) and frequently escalated questions (FEQ). By
using this model, various knowledge in a call center can be stored
and reused by all call center officers who have access to the
knowledge base.
Keywords— knowledge management, knowledge base, call
center, literature review
I. INTRODUCTION
Within a customer-oriented company, customer service is
needed for the communication between the company and
customers in order to assist customers to solve problems they
may have. One among many services of customer service that
companies can provide is call center. Call center is the main
way to interact with customers effectively, efficiently and
more flexible [1], Call center is a customer service in the form
of inbound call from the customer or outbound call to the
customer. Its aim is to help solve customer's problem or to aid
with the company's business process.
In solving customer's problems, call center officers need
to be able to give accurate information as well as fast service
[2]. Thus, every call center officer should have the
understanding of company business process knowledge. For
example, if a company works in the banking sector, the
knowledge needed to be understood may include product and
service knowledge, or sales promotion offered by the bank.
Knowledge of a company will continually increase and be
developed. Hence, all call center officers are required to keep
up-to-date with the development of the company knowledge.
Therefore, to help improve the performance of call center
officers, the existing knowledge in a company must be
developed accurately. Knowledge management is a way or
strategy to effectively and efficiently capture and distribute
knowledge to employees within a company, which allows
more accuracy in developing company's knowledge [2],
Moreover, the use of knowledge management in a call center
can increase productivity of call center officers in handling
calls and service quality by distributing information and
knowledge related to the company [3].
The implementation of knowledge management must be
appropriate with the call center's existing knowledge.
Therefore, in order to knowledge to accurately implement
knowledge management, it is primarily important to know the
call center's existing knowledge. The knowledge that exists
within a call center are consist of various types of knowledge
and they are widespread [2], [3]. Due to this, many different
knowledge within a call center should be collected and stored
in a digital storage called a knowledge base. Knowledge base
stores a wide variety of knowledge in the call center which is

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useful in helping call center officers to answer questions and
solve customer's problems quickly and accurately.
Based on the above, this research is a literature assessment
of previous researches related to knowledge base. A
qualitative approach and literature review methods are used in
this research. The aim of this research is to design a model that
will be applicable for creating a knowledge base in a call
center. The rest of the paper discusses the methodology and
data used in this research, the results of data used, the
discussion of results, and the proposed model, as well as the
conclusion of the research by stating the main findings of the
current research and suggestions for future research.
II. RESEARCH METHOD
This research uses literature review approach based on
previous researches on knowledge base in call center areas.
The literature review method used in this study is
Kitchenham's method. This method consists of several steps:
planning, implementation, and reporting [4], Figure 1 shows
the steps of the Kitchenham's method. The identification,
evaluation, and interpretation of all sources collected relating
to the research question were able to be done using all the steps
in the Kitchenham's method.
Planning the review
• Identifying the objective
•Developing the review protocol
Implementation
•Identification of research
•Selection process
•Study quality assessment
• Data extraction and monitoring
•Data synthesis
Reporting
•Reporting the review
Fig 1. Steps of the Kitchenham's Method
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The first step is planning the review. This step consists of
two phases: identifying the objective of the literature review
and developing the review protocol [4], The first phase is
formulating the main objective of this research, which is to
draw the knowledge base model of the call center. The second
phase is developing the research question which corresponds
to answer the research purpose.
The next step is implementation. The implementation step
consists of several phases to find literature data on knowledge
base and call center. Data gathering was conducted in several
databases, such as Scopus, ScienceDirect, Google Schoolar
and IEEE. Database selection was decided based on the most
popular database and databases that have vast range of studies.
These databases include; ScienceDirect and IEEE. A part from
selecting database, keywords used are determined in order to
find literatures in the database. Keywords selection was
adjusted accordingly to the research question because the
findings of the literatures found must be relevant for answering
the research question. A few that was used to find the
literatures are "Knowledge in Call Centre" "Knowledge
Management Call Center", "Knowledge Base Model",
"Knowledge Base for Call Center", "Call Center", "Call
Center System". These keywords are linked using AND
operator. The data findings through online database and the
usage of the keywords were done in October 2016.
After the identification of the literature data, the next step
is selection process. This step is to include papers which have
relevant keywords and correspond to answering the research
question. This is done by reading the abstracts to assess
whether the literature is related to knowledge in call center.
Also, the time limit of literature was set at 2012 to 2017. Then,
the selected literatures were analyzed and synthesized through
reading the content of the article. This was done to ensure
every literature possesses knowledge related to call center. In
addition, this step also includes finding the correlation among
the literature data to produce information suitable to create a
knowledge base model.
The last step is reporting. This step is done by combining
and synthesizing literature data to create a model that can be
propose based on previous literature data.
 III. RESULT
Based on research done through literature data analysis,
there are two components required in designing a knowledge
base model, which are knowledge within call center needs to
be stored inside knowledge base and knowledge base model
used in previous studies.
A. Knowledge within Call Center
According to Beccera and Sabherwal [5], knowledge is
classified into several types of knowledge; two of them are
tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is
unstructured knowledge that has not been documented because
it is still inside someone's mind. Tacit knowledge can be in the
form of thoughts, understanding, experience and expertise of
someone or experts. In contrast, explicit knowledge is
structured knowledge that is systematic. Usually explicit
knowledge is knowledge has been documented in the form of
words or numbers through books, data, video, etc.
knowledge base, which include standard operational
procedure (SOP) of a call center, product knowledge of a
company, training materials, as well as frequently asked
questions (FAQ) and frequently escalated questions (FEQ) [2],
[3], [6].
SOP of a call center is a procedure or guideline for call
center officers when handling calls from customer. For
example, procedure of how to speak clearly or how to greet
customers. Next, product knowledge of a company is about the
products sold by the company or the services offered by the
company to the customer. For example, a bank has debit and
credit cards as their product. Each product has its own
differences with different purpose. Further, training materials
are the learning materials for call center officers who are new
to handling customer. In addition, training materials can be
considered as in-call training for call center officers. FAQ are
questions that customers frequently ask, while FEQ are
questions frequently escalated to experts. These knowledge
can facilitate call center officers in solving customer's problem
as well as answering calls in a quick manner.

Call center contains knowledge that is highly complex and Based on the results above, this research combines tacit
widespread [1], Knowledge within call center also consists of and explicit knowledge, including various knowledge to be
both tacit and explicit knowledge. Therefore, in creating stored into knowledge based that can be used by call center
knowledge base model, it is required to know kind of tacit and officers.
explicit knowledge and critical knowledge should be stored
inside the knowledge base to be used by call center officers.
Therefore, in this research, the following research question TABLE 1. Types of Knowledge in the call center
was made: Types of
Kind of Knowledge References
Knowledge
Knowledge of
Research Question 1: What kind of knowledge is required Tacit Knowledge [1], [6], [7]
Experts
to be stored in the knowledge base? Standard
Operational
[2], [3], [6]
Procedure of a Call
Shown in Table 1 is the types of knowledge to be stored
Center
inside the knowledge base for call center. The knowledge is Product of a
classified according to the type of knowledge, tacit and [2], [3]
Explicit Company
explicit. For tacit knowledge, knowledge of experts is the only Knowledge Training Materials [2], [3]
knowledge that can be stored in the knowledge base. Through Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ)
knowledge base, users can escalate questions to experts and and Frequently [2], [3], [6]
then the system will find the right expert to answer the given Escalated Questions
questions [1], [6], [7], (FEQ)

For explicit knowledge, knowledge that can be stored into

the knowledge base is more varied, depending on the need and
the company's business sector. Therefore, the result indicates
the knowledge used in the call center to be stored into

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B. Knowledge Base Model Used in Previous Studies
After knowing which knowledge is required to be stored
in the knowledge base, how to implement the obtained
knowledge into the knowledge base model need to be
understood. Hence, the second research question is:
Research Question 2: How to implement previous
knowledge into the knowledge base model?
Results from literature data shows two knowledge base
models can be used as reference on implementing previous
existing knowledge into knowledge base model. The first
model shown in Figure 2 is the knowledge network system
model used to find experts in a company [6]. This model can
help to solve problems that have not been documented but are
still in the mind of the experts. Other than that, this model can
also store solutions of previous problems solved by experts.
Subject matter experts
Expert Expert Expert
1 - 3
Figure 3 shows the second model based on the literature
review. This model is called the Medical Automatic
Diagnostic System, which is used to store knowledge related
to medical [7]. The implementation of these models can turn
information into medical data and expert can validate or
provide feedback for the data.
Therefore, the results of this research combines the two
models mentioned above to propose a knowledge base model
that is able to both implement and store knowledge within the
call center. The proposed model will be discussed in the next
section.
IV. DISCUSSION
There are two outcomes from the result of the research,
one is the knowledge within call center and two is the
reference model for the application of knowledge in
knowledge base. Therefore,fromthe result of the research, we
can propose a knowledge base model to store the various
knowledge in the call center to help the call center officers
handle customer's questions and problems. The proposed
model of knowledge base is shown in Figure 4. Knowledge
base model can combine tacit and explicit knowledge in which
tacit knowledge is experts' knowledge and explicit knowledge
includes standard operational procedure (SOP) of a call center,
products of a company, training materials andfrequentlyasked
questions (FAQ) and frequently escalated questions (FEQ).

Data Processing System (a) Expert Q& A Platform (t) L«n

9
Browse
search Data Input

t
Share with others
Data Cleaning k Profiling Admins
Crowd Sourcins

Entity Relationship Entity

cT Q&A module Doctors
Extraction Extraction
Previous Solutions
Best Practices
Lessons Learned Data Analytic (b)
Majority Voting
Patients
Association Rule Minim

Knowledge Base
^Documen^ Other
Figure 3. Medical Automatic Diagnostic System based on Lin, Wu,
Figure 2. Knowledge Network System based cm Laudon and Laud on [6] Wang and Pan [7]

245
 usage for all call center officers to answer customer queries
and solve customer's problems quickly and accurately. Other
Tacit Knowledge findings include, this knowledge base can be used as training
material for new call center officers to be able to learn
Expert 1 Expert 2 Expert 3 independently or in-call training for each call center officers.
Q V. CONCLUSION

A This research summarizes and combines several literature

Call Center Officer data to design knowledge base model that can be applied in
s/
A call centers. The result of this research is a proposed
knowledge base model that can store various knowledge in call
Knowledge Base center. The knowledge stored in the knowledge base model
Reuse
consist of tacit knowledge, namely knowledge of experts, and
explicit knowledge in the form of standard operational
procedure (SOP) of a call center, products of a company,

I training materials, FAQ and FEQ.

By storing knowledge into the knowledge base that can be

Explicit Knowledge reused by call center officers, it helps the officers to solve
customer's problems faster and more accurate. Aside from
Product of SOPinCill Training FAQ and
Company Center Materials FEQ that, this model gives a structure to the knowledge which can
be used as training material for call center officers.

Figure 4. Proposed Model of Knowledge Base

In this model, experts can input knowledge that they
possess to be stored in the knowledge base. Therefore, call
center officers will get the solution to problems immediately
(e.g. searching using keywords) without having to escalate the
problem to experts or waiting for the expert to solve the
problem. Certainly, the company needs to encourage experts
to share their knowledge and document the knowledge by
storing them into the knowledge base. For example, by making
a policy or giving incentive to the experts who are willing to
share their knowledge and store them into the knowledge base.
Aside from that, documented knowledge, such as SOP of
a call center, products knowledge of a company, training
materials, FAQ and FEQ, is also stored in the knowledge base
to more accessible for the call center officers in order to give
solution and information in a more structured way to the
customers.
Thus, the finding of this research is a knowledge base
model that combines tacit and explicit knowledge to be stored
into the knowledge base system, which allows access and
The limitation of this study is that the model suggested is
not yet validated. Therefore, for further studies, the model can
be implemented by developing a knowledge base system for a
call center, then the system should be tested with call center
officers to validate whether the system is appropriate for use
in call center areas.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by the research grant for
publication named Hibah Publikasi Internasional Terindeks
Untuk Tugas Akhir Mahasiswa (PITTA) in 2018 with contract
number: 1880/UN2.R3.1/HKP.05.00/2018 funded by
Universitas Indonesia.
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