Let's face it, there is tremendous pressure on BPO companies to have trained employees hit the shop floor from the word GO. But the available talent has no orientation about the ways of the industry. Their training takes place at two levels: pre-process and process related.

While the former relates to orientation, and voice and accent; the later is more specific and is an ongoing process. Ongoing training becomes an expensive proposition but is a necessity nonetheless.

At the same time there is a lot of stress handling irate customers and working at odd hours, resulting in high attrition rates. During attrition, it is important to realize that it is not just the employees who walk out of a company, but also the learnings that they carry along with them. There are many unique situations that arise out of these interactions and it makes immense sense to record such interaction for the company's knowledge base.

Under the circumstances, initiating a process by which knowledge can be captured and made accessible as well as introducing self-help, e-learning processes can contribute significantly to enhancing employee capabilities.

However there is a need to structure the rollout carefully to ensure its success. One can start by installing a learning management solution and introduce generic off-the-shelf content like stress management or customer management. Create a library and ensure that employees use its content.

After this, the company can focus on building its customized content, such as company-specific information about rules, procedures, and guidelines. Once these processes are in place, it is time to start the formal process of capturing the knowledge and disseminating it internally.

Knowledge capturing is a very significant part of this initiative and must be done with the involvement of senior operations people. This information must be stored and presented in a manner that appeals to employees. And, it must have extensive indexing and easy retrieval mechanisms in place.

Knowledge management can help companies improve productivity and accelerate growth because it compresses the knowledge of its collective employee base and drastically reduces the learning curve of each individual.

Suren Singh Rasaily, executive VP and head enterprise learning solutions business, NIIT