Updates from Keith Holt RSS
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07:00:00 am on August 5, 2008 |
Not My Job
One very interesting thing about we few and proud in the customer service and support industry is that we all lead a double life. Not only are we analysts or directors or designers or engineers or marketers of customer service software solutions; we are also customers, the beneficiaries (or victims as the case may be) of our own efforts to improve customer service. As such we have an almost limitless supply of experience and anecdotes, based on being a customer, to draw from for inspiration and insight.
Just yesterday, I was attempting to fill my car with gasoline at a self-service pump. No matter what I did with the nozzle and its associated pump mechanism the pump refused to dispense fuel. Instead, the display just kept flashing the message, “Lift Pump Handle to begin Pumping Gas”. After several attempts to convince the machine that I had already lifted the indicated pump handle it decided that I wasn’t really serious about my intention to get gas and cancelled my transaction. Time to escalate (using the terminology of our industry) and get assistance from the kind and eager attendant inside. Noting the number stenciled on the side of the obstinate device, I set off on my quest for help.
Now I wish I had video of what occurred next because at least as much, if not more, was communicated in facial expression and tone of voice but the brief conversation went something like this:
attendant: “Yes? May I help you?”
me: ”I just wanted to let you know that pump #9 isn’t working; it seems to be broken.”
attendant: (rolling eyes and sighing as if explaining something completely obvious) “You could move to a different pump.”
me: ”Well, yes, of course I’ll do that. But I thought you might like to know that it’s broken.”
attendant: (Doesn’t say anything but stares back at me, blinking, with a look of bewilderment that clearly says that she thinks this is probably the stupidest thing she’s heard all week.)
me: ”Maybe you could call someone to fix it. Or at least put a sign up so no one else wastes their time on it.”
attendant: (Now a look of concern like maybe she should call someone - like 911) “Ooookay.” (She had decided to humor me and hope I went away.)
I went away, filled my car at a working pump and left, pondering on what the world was coming to.
How could the concept of taking some action seem so totally alien to this attendant? Later I started thinking about the similarities this scenario had to other experiences I’ve had and heard about in other customer service situations. How much additional aggravation - and cost - could be avoided if agents had the ability and the direction to post a notice when they discover something isn’t working? The concept is at the core of Knowledge Centered Support’s (KCS) “flag it or fix it” doctrine. Most agents want to be as helpful as possible or they wouldn’t have sought a job in customer service in the first place. But too often they’re working under pressure to just get to the next call. They may have even been trained that it’s someone else’s job to fix unanticipated issues and that they are only to handle items for which they have scripts ready made. Call guides and scripts have their place but the bottom line is that customer service organizations won’t consistently see customer satisfaction rise and costs of repeatedly fielding the same issues go down until that most basic of KCS methodologies is adopted and agents can take a few seconds to alert their peers when they run into something new and, ideally, what they tried to resolve it.
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07:00:43 am on July 22, 2008 |
Have we found what we’re looking for? It’s similar to the well-known question, “Are we there yet?”. You can’t answer the latter until you know where you’re going and you can’t answer the former until you know what it was you were searching for in the first place. Of course I’m talking about knowledge management, specifically as it relates to customer support, in this case and not the meaning of life or a lost TV remote (by the way, if anyone has a tip on either of those please let me know).
What I’ve seen in my 13+ years of experience working with knowledge management tools is that there has been a lot of attention given to search - the “search engine”, indexing, processing of queries and rendering search results - but very little if any thought to what is being searched for. At this point you may very well be thinking or even poised over the keyboard to write the comment, “It’s obvious what we’re searching for - the answer to a question, the solution to a problem.” Really? That is, I agree, usually the goal of the search but it is not, can not be, literally what we’re searching for, the query that’s entered into the search field. After all, if we knew the answer or solution well enough to search for it effectively in the first place, we wouldn’t be going to the support site or calling the support center in the first place except for the special case of just needing the details to an already identified solution.
Now I’m not attacking search or trying to downplay its importance in knowledge management and customer support. But the best search engine imaginable will be of little use unless it is guided and targeted by consistent structure in the content. This structure must go beyond “tagging” content with topics. It’s not enough to say an article is “about Product X” or “about Installation”. The particular questions that an article answers or the particular problems that a solution addresses must be explicitly listed. Those lists must be given priority when searching because a match in such a list to a customer’s question or problem description will have the highest value. Then the features and capabilities of a great search engine - for example, the ability to give a correct match to a query even when an alternate way of stating a concept is used - will have the most positive effect on the outcome of the search.
Think about how search is usually tested and evaluated. The tester typically starts with knowledge of the content and has in mind a particular item that they want to try to retrieve. Then they enter a variety of searches that more or less specificly match that item’s title or some text in its description. If the item is ranked with a high score when the search is more specific, lower as the queries grow less specific and the item disappears from the search results list when there are no matching terms in the query then search is considered to be working properly. Instead, think about testing search strictly from the perspective of the customer - What questions are they likely to ask? What problems are they likely to describe? Search should be considered successful only if items directly addressing the problem or specifically answering the question are ranked highest or are the only results returned. Items that merely mention the query terms, even if they do so exactly - but do not specifically address the customer’s issue should be ranked lower if an item that does specifically address the issue is available.
It’s a higher standard of success and, yes, it takes more effort to markup articles for this approach but it is the only way to get better customer support results from a good search engine.
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08:00:43 am on July 1, 2008 |
And what’s the difference, anyway, between Content Management and Knowledge Management?
A little theory and some practical examples are needed to help define and distinguish between Content Management (CM) and Knowledge Management (KM).
First consider how CM and KM are similar. Both types of technology . . .
- Support the creation and maintenance of content of virtually any size
- Provide some means of controlling who may create or edit content
- Support routing new and changed content through an approval cycle
- Provide an interface to search for and find content based on some form of full-text index. (Some or all of various search methodologies may be supported – natural language, keyword, Boolean, etc.)
- Provide means of controlling who may view content
Other similarities may exist but those are enough to work with for now. So what differences are there?
- CM systems tend to provide more control over not just the content itself but the style of the content – style guides that streamline the creation of standard documents with business rules to enforce adherence to established styles over large quantities of documents and large groups of authors.
- CM systems typically include the capability to publish content in portable formats, such as PDF, and/or print in professional layouts. Content in and of itself is something of a product of the system and the content, once produced, can exist and be used apart from the system in which it was created and maintained.
While perhaps not obvious at first, this last difference holds a clue to the key argument for needing a Knowledge Management system. Once created, content can be used apart from a Content Management system because the system offers little or no assistance in using that content. In fact, we expect so little (and are offered so little in this respect) that we don’t even miss it. When’s the last time you read an owners manual or the safety placard in the seat-back pouch of an airliner and wondered, “What Content Management system was used to produce this document?”
So what’s missing? What is needed when “using” content that is not provided by the Content Management system that did such a good job in producing the content in the first place? One word sums it up – relevancy. Which document, and which part of that document, is relevant to my situation – and under what circumstances?
It’s time to take a closer look at some terms that we’ve been using without asking whether we have a good – or at least a full – understanding of their meaning. Words like “search”, “find” and even “knowledge” get used freely, especially in our industry, but what do we really mean and what expectations do we have when we speak, hear or read them? Now entire doctoral theses have been written on the meaning of knowledge, technical white papers weighing several pounds have been produced on various search methods.
There’s no intention to go to that level here. But all we need do to start is to develop an understanding of some key concepts that explains how a Knowledge Management system offers assistance not provided by Content Management in determining the relevancy of content. For our purposes, let’s start to think of these key concepts in a certain light and frame their definitions in such a way to draw out the importance of relevance.
- Search – to look for a piece of content with the intention of answering a specific question or solving a specific problem.
- Find – what happens when a search engine matches a piece of content to a user’s search and when that user recognizes that piece of content as relevant to their intent or need.
- Knowledge – what content becomes when it is able to be found when searched given the provided definitions of the terms “search” and “find”.
The importance of the highlighted terms in these definitions must be understood if we’re to build a compelling case for Knowledge Management providing relevancy and that relevancy being of value. Of particular importance is the term “specific”. The need for specificity is where Content Management starts to fall short. If the user wants to read everything available on the history of credit in commerce, or some similarly general topic, then a Content Management system with a basic search engine will supply the need quite well. But if that person needs to know what, if any, benefit or penalty there is if they payoff their credit balance early they had better be ready for a research project if all they have is the Content Management system that produced their Cardholder Agreement and a search engine.
In conclusion (for now) Content Management systems can serve as excellent sources of content for Knowledge Management but they can never deliver the same results and value - the turning of that content into usable knowledge - without the addition of a good Knowledge Management tool and methodology. They should never be considered as one versus the other but rather as different tools with different needs serving an organization in complimentary ways.
