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.

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.

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.
   

If you were one of the thousands who descended on San Francisco for Oracle Open World, you probably heard that Oracle has selected InQuira to integrate its knowledge management capabilities with Oracle’s eSupport applications. The addition of the InQuira solution has a profound impact on key strategic areas such as “Customer Experience” and “Web 2.0 Social Collaboration”.

How is InQuira working with Oracle?

For end users, InQuira provides “answers”. Unlike a Google-approach to self-service, InQuira truly understands customer intent with online search accuracy often exceeding 65%. Additional benefits include reducing online escalations by 40%, improving shopping cart conversions by 20%, and having a dramatic increase in overall customer satisfaction.

For customer service agents, InQuira provides knowledge. Integrated into the Siebel desktop, InQuira’s intent-driven resolution approach guides agents to best possible answers in the shortest amount of time. By improving Oracle’s knowledge delivery on the agent desktop, organizations can expect to increase agent proficiency, reduce call research time by as much at 44%, and provide a collaborative knowledge network to exchange valuable service information.

For service executives, InQuira provides operational insight. Most organizations do not have the analytical intelligence to really know how to optimize the online customer experience. InQuira couples deep analytic understanding with an agile knowledge platform to intentionally optimize every customer experience. Knowing what customers want is half the battle. Intentionally acting on this is a unique experience the InQuira & Oracle partnership provides.

To learn more visit: http://solutions.oracle.com/partners/inquira

To keep up with the latest trends in customer service, collaboration and search tools, I am always scouring the Web to soak up as much information as I can. In no particular order, here are just some of the blogs that I read on a regular basis – the list is a combination of knowledge management, customer service, collaboration, search, and CRM sites, because the nature of our business means we need to stay on top all these issues. This is only some of the great information that is available from some of the smartest people who are working in the trenches every day. Let me know what sites you read to stay informed and I will add it to my growing list!

1. KM Edge: The American Productivity & Quality Center’s (APQC) Knowledge Management blog- Carla O’Dell and Lauren Trees and some insightful commentary to news and trends.

2. John Ragsdale’s Eye on Service: VP of of Technology Research at Service and Support Professionals Assocation (SSPA), the Association for Services Management International (AFSMI), and the Technical Professional Services Association (TPSA), shares information, news and analysis on the latest technologies intended to improve customer service.

3. Content Management Connection: George Dearing’s blog combines insight from content management experts with an emphasis on collaboration tools. The blog touches on content management through various aspects including customer service, Wikis, social networks, search engines, and Web services.

4. Bill Ives’ Blog: Bill Ives’ blog discussing practical applications of portals, blogs, and knowledge management.

5. Enterprise Search Practice Blog: This blog hosted by The Gilbane Group offers analysis and the latest news on enterprise search technologies and implementations