Smart Technology News, Trends and More… by InQuira

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Is your organization fully leveraging its knowledge? How does your company’s proficiency stack up against the competition? How can you tell?

InQuira recently announced a free online knowledge assessment tool co-developed with IBM that makes it easy to get these answers, and get practical, customized insights into areas for improvement. Click here to visit the knowledge assessment tool.

The tool features an interactive survey of knowledge management skills, cultures, and implementation methodologies.  Taking the survey allows users, administrators, managers, and executives to see just how their knowledge initiatives stack up to their competitors and the entire market in general.

Even those people who feel their organizations are leading the pack when it comes to knowledge management proficiency may be surprised by their results, and benefit from best practices that enable even greater usage across communication channels.  Even more surprises could pop up when respondents see how their results compare to industry and global standards—benchmarks that the tool also provides.

I expect many people will find some significant revelations in the areas of Creation and Maintenance and Communities and Collaboration. Even though knowledge management is being utilized in many call centers and self-service environments, its use is not keeping pace with the advancements in collaborative approaches such as wikis, forums and discussion boards. Enabling your users and customer communities to add, edit, correct, and publish new knowledge entries can provide a wealth of intelligence and loyalty unseen in previous incarnations of knowledge management.

If you are involved in the practice of knowledge management, you should definitely participate in this survey.  As results are compiled from respondents around the world, you’ll be able to see how your implementation compares, so be sure to check in frequently at http://www.myknowledgeiq.com/.

If you’re looking for some practical pointers on how to do knowledge management successfully in a large global enterprise, it would be hard to point to a better organization to learn from than McAfee.

In recent years, the company’s support organization has received virtually every service award that matters: They’re a three-time winner of ASP’s10-best support sites award, they won the SSPA Star Award for the best use of knowledge, and they twice won the LISA Award for being one of the ten best international Web support sites.

Beyond all the awards, what’s most impressive to me are the bottom line gains they can point to: they’ve been able to build effective automated help and online self-services that successfully resolve more than 65% of their customers’ support inquiries. This nets them savings of over $45 million a year.

Greg Sanders, McAfee’s Director of Global Online Services, gave a talk at an SSPA conference, outlining how they’ve been able to automate much of their customer services, much to the delight of both their customers and their executive staff. Fortunately, for those of us who weren’t able to attend in person, the talk is available in a nice recording. (While we’re extremely proud to point to McAfee as a customer, the presentation isn’t a product pitch, in fact the talk was delivered before they completed the InQuira implementation.) The talk gives a very nice overview of some core strategies that have made McAfee so successful.

To view, click here. (Note, if you’ve never registered on InQuira’s site, you’ll get to a brief form to access the presentation. For those who have registered in the past, you’ll just need to resubmit your email address.)

Following are a few nuggets I gained:

• Culture. Fundamentally, this was about changing the culture, which is never an easy thing to do. They were able to move from a climate in which knowledge was power, something to be put in silos and protected, to something that is shared, and developed collaboratively. This is fundamental to their success. As a result, they’ve been able to improve consistency, efficiency, and results.
• Content development. While some advocate making solution generation part of every agent’s job description, McAfee has created a model in which dedicated writers, who are also product experts, take on the bulk of new solution development. It is also important to note that they leverage analytics and direct interactions with customers to guide new content development.
• Cross-channel integration. McAfee has implemented an online diagnostic tool, the “McAfee Virtual Technician”, which can automatically and remotely diagnose a user’s system to identify a host of common issues. What’s most striking to me, beyond this tool solving 45% of customer’s issues, is that if the tool doesn’t succeed, and customers ultimately go to chat with an agent directly, all the diagnostic data generated from the tool is fed immediately into the chat session, so the customer doesn’t have to start from scratch. Rather, the platform, OS, reported issues, etc. are all there for the agent to refer to.

Those are just a few of the key points, but there’s a lot more Greg covers. I’d encourage you to check out the presentation, titled “The Evolution of the Automated Contact Center”, for yourself. To view the presentation, click here.

IT Pro recently featured an article on enterprise search that brings some welcome clarity to an otherwise often muddied topic. Entitled “Why enterprise search is not internet search“, the article points to distinctions that we’ve been talking about for a while: namely, that the requirements for search within an enterprise are very different than the needs of a user searching the Internet. (For a couple additional reports on the topic, check out “The Google Bamboozle,” an article we penned in iMediaConnection.com a few months ago, or “A Fork in the Road: Why Enterprise and Web Search are Going Their Separate Ways“, which was published recently on DMReview.com.)

The article leads with a common question:

“…Google is where most of us turn when we need to find something on the web. Wouldn’t it make sense to use the same techniques to make it easier to find information within the enterprise?”

Given the broad usage of Google today, if that were the case, enterprises would today find themselves much better off when it comes to serving employees’ knowledge needs. But the article goes on to feature the following stats, which demonstrate that’s clearly not the case:

“Depending on which survey you look at, businesses waste the equivalent of 10 per cent of salary costs (says the Butler Group) or information workers waste around three to four hours a week – a total of five weeks a year - because they don’t find the information they’re looking for a third to a half of the time (IDC and HP).”

These stats point to a fact that knowledge management folks have been clear on for some time: For all its benefits and ubiquity, Google can’t address an enterprise’s need to equip users with fast, easy access to corporate resources. To give just one practical example, when a customer agent requires quick access to solutions that help a customer address an issue, that information needs to be available immediately—and a Web search tool won’t cut it. Plus, search is just one important piece of the knowledge management ecosystem, which requires capabilities for developing, collaborating, and delivering corporate knowledge.

While this may be common knowledge to many, a lot of confusion around search remains.  For many, “Google” has become synonymous with “search”, but it is clear there are a whole host of uses, audiences, technologies, and purposes within this broad category. It’s nice to see IT Pro shedding some light on the topic, which will hopefully help foster more productive discussions around search in the enterprise.

To read the full article, which also includes a quote from InQuira customer Serena Software, here’s the url:

http://www.itpro.co.uk/608925/why-enterprise-search-is-not-internet-search

Recently, while attending the Service Strategies conference in Las Vegas, I spent a day in an executive forum, listening to the concerns and suggestions of people who run large support operations. Two interesting topics were raised, and others weren’t, to my surprise. Here they are…

Interesting topics
(1) Adding value to a new CRM system
(2) Translating content into multiple languages

Missing topics
(1) Knowledge capture
(2) Web self-service

What was interesting
The first interesting topic was raised by a company that had recently invested in a new CRM system, and wanted advice on how to get the most out of it. Unanimously, the answer was “Add a quality third-party KM (Knowledge Management) system, because none of the CRM packages do that part well”. Although that’s a message my company, InQuira, has supported for some time now, and was the basis for our recent partnership with Oracle, I was (pleasantly) surprised at the strength of the reaction. Particularly given how much CRM vendors have advocated that they already have KM covered within their products.

The second interesting topic on multi-lingual content could have many angles, but was posed around the problem of content translation, presumably from English to other languages. That got me thinking about companies that follow methodologies such as KCS (Knowledge Centered Support) from the Consortium for Service Innovation. KCS empowers front line agents to author content, as opposed to a central group on the back lines. What if those front line agents aren’t native English writers? Many-to-many language translation seems like a necessity in that case. It seems like global companies have two choices for content languages. Have duplicate copies of all content in all languages needed, or have one base copy in a common language (most likely English), and local content in local languages. An interesting topic for another day.

What was missing
Since InQuira is in the business of Knowledge Management software, we naturally believe that having quality and timely content is the foundation for all successful multi-channel interactions, whether via a web self-service portal or an agent. After all, resolving support problems isn’t about tracking them in a CRM system, it’s about closing them with the right answers. Does anything else really matter? And yet, not a single executive in the room asked about having the right knowledge base in place, and processes for keeping knowledge current and accurate. Admittedly, these were mostly managers of large call centers. You’d think they would be under pressure to reduce headcount through productivity and knowledge sharing. It didn’t feel that way.

The other missing topic was web self-service. I asked an attendee who ran a call center what his role was in self-service, and he said that some of the content from the call center was used in self-service. Clearly he didn’t own the self-service experience, nor was he concerned about the customer’s transition from the web to the agent. In fact, call center personnel probably benefit if the web experience isn’t great, so they can be the heroes. Why would any company not have the service executives all compensated based on the total support infrastructure? It makes no sense to me, but it appears to be the norm, rather than the exception. Apple is one of InQuira’s customers that does it right, and it shows. Check out the Apple web self-service area, all powered by InQuira.