Collaboration Nation: 6 Principles for Success

Collaboration initiatives offer real promise of furthering the evolution of customer service. Today, leading companies are leveraging collaboration to transform their service desks into knowledge hubs, central points in which knowledge is gathered, shared, and made actionable—so users and agents can solve issues and proactively keep problems from arising at all.

Based on our experience, here are some words of guidance as organizations consider harnessing collaboration to bring this reality to fruition:

• Embrace. Let go of your misgivings: an open discussion can help you create a learning infrastructure. Spot issues early and minimize their impact. Empower your users and make them feel included, which in turn makes them more loyal.
• Launch. As you deploy a new application or technology, consider deploying a dedicated discussion forum. Seed it with questions, have experts answer them and build up momentum.
• Participate. To keep up with change, encourage your staff to join external online communities dedicated to associated technologies, applications, and industries. Get feeds from these communities using RSS and notifications and feed these into your knowledge portal. You can benefit from others’ knowledge and they in turn can benefit from your experiences.
• Incent. Put incentives in place to encourage usage by users and your staff. Build a network of experts with a reputation model based on the usefulness and frequency of knowledge contributed.
• Harvest. Don’t let the knowledge being generated disappear into the ether. Put a capture process in place to mine the most useful posts, and structure them into solution briefs, FAQs, tips, and the like. Route these to the experts to review and approve them where needed. Secure them, give them context, and then deliver them back to the user community, via your knowledge portal.
• Learn. Continually measure and improve the entire process. Assess how knowledge is being captured and routed. Track the overall usefulness and timeliness of knowledge.