Many customer service organizations make irrelevant knowledge-base entries available to their customers because authoring is done by someone who is not on the front lines, interacting with customers. The content is written without an understanding of the language that the customer uses in explaining their problems.
Adopting a “just-in-time knowledge management” strategy or a KCS (knowledge centered support) approach can help bridge this relevancy gap. If a customer service agent is unable to find the right solution to a customer’s question within a knowledge-base, he or she is able to author a new solution on the fly, right after having helped a customer; the solution is captured with the customer’s point of view in mind, and in his exact words. In this same model, agents can modify existing solutions to make them more in-line with their customer’s words and phrases. The end result is that the knowledge-base entries are easier to find by customers in future searches.
Solutions are not subjected to an arduous review process, but are reviewed as they are reused by other agents. This ultimately focuses the agent’s energy in perfecting only the solutions that are the most frequently used and ensuring that they use the language and expressions that are best aligned with customer’s needs, while maintaining the knowledge-base constantly updated.
Another benefit to using your customer’s voice and words is to augment the company-generated taxonomy with an organically developed folksonomy – or collection of tags (think of the flickr tag clouds, for example). Users can tag useful content and the user community can browse these tag clouds. These folksonomies do not preserve the intrinsic relationship between objects, but they echo more closely how users interact with knowledge that they come into contact with. And, these tags help in making relevant content easier to find.
Are you using just-in-time knowledge? Folksonomies? Is it working for you?