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/.

It’s not often that I come across ‘free’ e-books that are even worth reading, but this is an exception. Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research created a short 11-page ebook from a series of blog posts he wrote to explain each of the 6 laws of customer experience.

Though not written expressly for the customer service audience, the lessons are directly applicable.  Here’s my take on Bruce’s laws:

#1. Every interaction creates a personal reaction. So many customer service initiatives focus on deflecting calls to the web purely as a cost-saving tactic. Publish content and push people to it. Every customer has the same experience, in complete violation of this fundamental law of customer experience. The bottom line, according to Temkin, is to ‘understand your customers, personally.’ Deliver an experience designed for the individual. Technology like InQuira can help companies engage their customers through the web channel, and deliver a customer service experience specifically suited to each individual customer.

#2. People are instinctively self-centered. What resonated with me here is that customers “don’t generally know or care as much about how companies are organized.” In other words, the customer’s interaction with your company is entirely motivated by his or her personal need - in customer service contexts, that need is generally to solve a problem with your product or service. Help them do what they set out to do. Think of the interaction from the customer’s perspective, and don’t make them “jump through hoops” to resolve the issue.

#3. Customer familiarity breeds alignment. Organizations both large and small struggle with alignment. Temkin proposes that companies focus on customer needs to align decisions and actions that cross organizational silos. I’ve often argued that the most effective and satisfying customer service experience happens in person because dialogue occurs - a customer is engaged to articulate his problem, a service provider is there to hear it, ask clarifying questions, diagnose the problem, and propose a solution. This act of listening can take on many forms. Customer feedback mechanisms, call monitoring, customer surveys, even semantic search technologies that can derive customer intent from search and browse behavior - all can contribute to a better understanding of customer needs and align action to improve the customer service experience.

#4. Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers. Another take on ‘happy employees make happy customers,’ but one that is often ignored by companies.  How many call center agents are in situations where, to solve a customer’s problem, they must often alt-tab back and forth between different applications, thumb through printed manuals,  find a specific sticky note, or consult a colleague over the cubicle wall - just to find the information they need?  Focus on the agent first, and empower him with enabling technologies that make it easier to “accomplish tasks that help customers.”

#5. Employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated. The InQuira point of view is that the customer service experience is heavily dependent on engaging the customer, understanding his need, and applying that insight to connect the customer with relevant knowledge content that will enable him to do whatever it is he set out to do.  This completely depends upon a strong knowledge management culture and processes to harvest the relevant information at the point of demand - be it on the phone, on the web, or through a discussion forum - so that knowledge can be properly applied the next time that issue arises with another customer.  For the model to work though, the knowledge capture process must be easy to trigger from within the agent’s normal workflow, and the employee must be recognized and rewarded - not for participating - but for when the employee’s contributions can be directly attributed to helping resolve customer problems.

#6. You can’t fake it. I consider this somewhat self-explanatory.  A focus on a better customer service experience must be a top priority - you can’t do it half-heartedly.  Customers will see right through it, and it will only exacerbate the problems at hand.

Download the full ebook here.

Seriously, NLP is about to have its day in the sun, and we expect it to be a long day at that.

Any company operating in this information economy can benefit from natural language search solutions. Think about it. Knowledge workers today are confronted with a proliferation of information (which at least one firm believes contributes to a $650B drag on the economy), and it just gets worse with every new day. At the same time, it has become harder for the worker to find and apply the critical knowledge they need to do their jobs. Numerous studies show the average knowledge worker spends at least 15% of their time searching for the knowledge they need to be productive. Why? Because that critical enterprise knowledge tends to exist in unstructured form that makes it hard to harvest without technologies like natural language search solutions that can understand the intent behind the worker’s search, and indexes the searchable information sources for their actual meaning. Keyword-based search tools often fail in an enterprise environment because the searchable content is not nearly as disparate as you might find on the Web. With higher keyword frequency and density, keyword-based searches return results lists that are too long to be meaningful.

Natural language search on its own, though, will not be the panacea to increasing productivity. Search is only as valuable as the content it searches. Companies that have had the greatest success with natural language search solutions recognize that search informs content strategy, and an integrated analytics mechanism is needed to determine if the search technology and content management tool are working in concert to deliver the expected value to the knowledge worker. We have customers that apply natural language search to applications for web self-help, call center support and internal knowledge management. Companies like Serena Software and Mentor Graphics radically changed their service models on the back of InQuira’s platform to emphasize a changing customer profile. The integrated platform allows us to build applications for a wide range of business needs. The Ministry of Defence in the UK deployed InQuira’s natural language search and knowledge management solution to the agents staffing its HR call centers. 

Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Powerset has a lot of people talking about search.  Will natural language search take over the Web?  How will this acquisition affect the enterprise search market?  Edwin Cooper, InQuira’s co-founder and chief scientist, weighs in on the debate:

The enormous potential of natural language search on the web is matched by the enormous difficulty of pulling it off successfully. The sheer scope of information on the web, the wide variety of contexts and concepts and different intentions of use, all combine to make this extremely complex. Humans have an extraordinary facility with learning, inference and language. Just watching a toddler acquire and use words to great effect is proof. In fact, language is so easy for humans that we sometimes assume that it can’t be terribly hard for computers to master, either.  If nothing else, the long history of natural language processing has demonstrated just how hard this problem is.  Natural language search across the entire web implies that a system will have a human-like language ability corresponding to every available subject, and that’s an extremely tall order. Will it happen someday? Probably. But HAL-like capabilities (“I’m sorry Dave, I cannot do that?) certainly didn’t happen by 2001, and if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say they probably won’t happen by 2101 either. 

With enterprise search, on the other hand, we have several unfair advantages in incorporating natural language processing in our product. 

 

• Unfair advantage #1.  In the context of an enterprise website or intranet, there is a much smaller set of intended actions than you get on google.com.  For example, visitors to a banking website generally want to complete one of about 20 different transactions.  If we can understand very thoroughly how those users ask to complete those transactions, then we’ve carved out a large and useful chunk of natural language understanding, which can make a real difference in how easy the banking site is to use.
• Unfair advantage #2.  On an enterprise site, there is a specific industry vocabulary used.  We don’t have to recognize names of US presidents or hybrid minivans for a typical banking site.  If we invest in understanding the specific vocabulary that is used in the context of an enterprise-specific search, we have taken another step forward in making natural language processing genuinely applicable across that particular industry vertical.
• Unfair advantage #3.  For a search engine that works across the entire web, the relationship between search and content is more or less antagonistic.  People make web pages which try to bully their way to the top of the search results, by employing a whole grab-bag of tricks.  With enterprise search, on the other hand, the people who make the content are on our side.  They want the right content to be shown in the right context, to the right user.  They understand what the content is trying to say, and they are willing to revise content or write more if that turns out to be useful.  A virtuous cycle that includes automated analysis of content needs as expressed through search queries, which in turn triggers a workflow process for content changes, is a big advance, and one whose effects we will be witnessing in the next several years.

As pervasive as email remains in our personal and professional lives, it’s hard to believe that in some applications, its days are numbered. I’m talking about email as a channel for support, and as I was reading John Raggsdale’s recent post “The Death of Email Support”, I started to wonder why its demise hasn’t come sooner.

In the posting you’ll see that email is slower, less efficient, and less effective than phone—and only a small percentage (7-10%, depending on demographic) of consumers prefer the channel.

While companies have long latched onto the idea that email support would provide cost savings, the results delivered make clear that, even if some incremental savings are realized through call deflection, the degradation in the customer experience and in customer satisfaction far outweigh any gains.

So what’s next? In a word: forums. The companies John spoke with did away with email support completely (with nary a whimper from the customer base), and the bulk of that support volume went to forums. Why? In short, forums represent the logical evolution of institutional knowledge management, where not only the knowledge inside the organization, but the expertise of customers, partners, and other stakeholders can be fully leveraged for the good of all involved.

As we’ve been seeing in our customer deployments, these forums can pay off in terms of internal efficiencies, improved customer satisfaction levels, and reduced costs. When it comes to achieving these results, however, a foundation of knowledge—having the right information and making it easy to find—is key.

Interested in learning more about forums? See some previous articles below:

• How can companies leverage collaboration technologies to increase customer satisfaction with online help?
• How Do You Manage Your Organizational Memory?