Entries Tagged 'Best Practices' ↓

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.

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.

Based simply on the number of times we are asked “how do you measure knowledge value”, I think it is safe to say that we can all agree on the importance of measuring knowledge and its impact on the business. But if we all agree on the importance, why are so many of us NOT doing it?

We often hear things like “we don’t know where to start” or “we don’t know what we are suppose to measure” as the reasons why knowledge measurement is not happening. And it’s understandable; measuring knowledge can be difficult because it reaches across the entire organization from support agent productivity and interaction channels to customer satisfaction and revenues, knowledge IS making an impact.

Recently we explored the topic “The Importance of Measuring KM” with John Ragsdale, Vice President of Research at the SSPA, who provided tremendous insight into some of the easiest and best places to start measuring knowledge value.

“I definitely learned this first hand when I was running support centers back in the 80s and 90s. When I brought in our first knowledge management solution it really revolutionized the way we trained people, the way we hired people and definitely the way we delivered support.”

As a support expert and innovator, Ragsdale talked to us about his experiences with measuring knowledge including detail around which metrics (some of which you may already be measuring) are best to monitor knowledge usage and value and recommendations on where to begin your measurement efforts. Among his recommendations:

• Invest in metrics: Strong metrics and benchmarking programs are required to understand impacts of technology or process change.
• Look beyond ROI: The impact of KM is much larger than just an ROI, track impacts to satisfaction, loyalty and revenue.

To learn more watch “The Importance of Measuring KM”.

Note: This on-demand webinar is Part 1 of InQuira’s Knowledge Management Measurement series. Get more insights into the metrics that matter when measuring knowledge management. Watch Part 2: Basics for Beginners and Part 3: Advanced Knowledge Measurement.

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.