McAfee Shares the Secrets to Its KM Success

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.