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  John Chmaj 03:24:12 am on January 15, 2010 | 1 | # |
  Tags: best practices, content management, context, customer centric, search, user experience

  Let’s Rethink SEARCH, Shall We?

  The one constant in my support KM career has been working with search tools – I got involved in creating the CD-ROMs for support right from the commercial inception of that technology in the late 80’s, then in knowledge base search tools of all sorts, then on the web.  It’s something that’s been taken for granted as a core support capability, and one that’s now ubiquitous on the web.  So I’m as jaded as anyone else of PRESUMING that search is a core, if not THE core way we should be accessing knowledge.   There’s a kind of magic to it – I type in a few words and somehow the right info steps forward from a sea of stuff.  Cool!

  And yet, on the whole this experience has been far from satisfying in the support & service arena.  Search success rates on average hover in the 30-40% range, there’s all manner of hoops organizations jump through to figure out how to get the right content to show up, the tools are often complex or if not have very simple capabilities.  And when you DO get this all working, there seem to be interminable IT, website design, content issues that degrade or alter search and force maintenance of some kind or another to persist a meaningful search experience. All in all it can be a real pain to field and run a search application!  (I’ve blogged earlier about issues with search and support, see “Support Search – Why It Can’t ‘Be Just Like Google“.)

  (More …)
   

• John Chmaj 04:37:39 pm on August 21, 2008 | 1 | # |
  Tags: content management, CRM, customer service, field service, Knowledge Management

  Field Service KM: Web 2.0 to the Rescue!

  I had an interesting conversation this week regarding the practical limits to knowledge management. The discussion concerned how utility companies could employ KM practices to optimize their capabilities. The utilities services industry is aging; in the UK, for example, an estimated 45% of the work force will retire within the next 5 years. This work force has years of experience and tacit knowledge pertaining to their industry. It’s critical that utilities evolve a capability to reuse knowledge effectively. Yet the maintenance of power equipment has core practices that are inherently unfriendly to KM:

  1. The majority of work is done in the field, and requires use of schemas, specs and other materials not easily delivered via online technologies

  2. The critical knowledge needed onsite is largely tacit: it relies on experience and judgment of the specifics of the equipment and service area involved.

  3. There is a minimal central knowledge building capability – many utility organizations are primarily operationally oriented, handling customer service dispatch and routing.

  Given these challenges it might seem that there is minimal potential to leverage reusable knowledge. Many services organizations have similar characteristics. Is it possible that there are environments where KM is just not feasible or useful?

  These issues challenge us to examine what’s truly critical in leveraging knowledge for service. Let’s break down the fundamental requirements for knowledge re-use:

  1. WHAT knowledge is actually critical and re-usable?

  2. WHEN is that knowledge needed to be effective?

  3. HOW can it be delivered at the point of use?

  If we examine the utilities example from this perspective we can generate some creative ideas about how to leverage knowledge. If the goal is to empower support agents and reduce the amount of experience required to service equipment, then the key is to provide mechanisms for that experience to be shared. Further, if tacit knowledge is critical to service success, then the point of sharing must be in the context of each use. Finally, assuming that this type of field service cannot accommodate online tools, there must be a mechanism to field and address questions asynchronously. The requirements for knowledge delivery, then, are that it transfer experience in context of each issue, provided offline of the service activity itself.

  Sound impossible? Actually it’s a common support scenario, provided in most places by online forums, wikis and communities. The strengths of these environments directly address these needs: forums can allow participants to post questions offline of their activities, engage in threaded dialogue with experts to refine the context of their issues, and participate asynchronously in contributing and using the information. Newer agents can learn and apply best practices more quickly and over time a wiki can be formed from these interactions. Web 2.0 to the rescue!

  Thus field-focused operations can consider new ways to develop reusable knowledge, share experience as the workforce shifts, and benefit from the best answers from the most experienced people.

  By examining what, when and how knowledge is delivered KM can be employed in situations that would not be immediately obvious or even considered.
   
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  Keith Holt 08:00:43 am on July 1, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: content, content management, knowledge, Knowledge Management, recognition, relevancy, search

  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.

   
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  Kate Leggett 09:50:27 am on June 19, 2008 | 6 | # |
  Tags: Communities, content management, CRM, customer service, users, Voice of the Customer, Web 2.0

  Customers today pull information they need to make purchase decisions and for customer support from web sites, expecting higher quality of information. Unfortunately, support organizations have been caught unprepared. Researching how to better adapt to this new world led me to try to understand what has worked for other companies:

  • Wikipedia’s success rests with its user community taking collective responsibility for the accuracy of the content
  • eBay realized that users trust the collective voice when rating suppliers
  • Amazon understood that purchase decisions where based on customer reviews and their reputations
  • Facebook, saw their success tied to an ease for forming communities

  
  We can use these principles to help shape successful customer service interactions.

  • Think about loosening the strings around your content. Let your agent community take collective responsibility for the accuracy of knowledgebase information. Let agents flag inaccurate content or author new content
  • Reach out to your user community and integrate your knowledgebase with discussion boards. Let users recommend information to be added to the knowledgebase, ensuring that it organically grows with customers changing demands
  • Expert users who know the product as well as their customer service agents exist. Let these experts post content directly to your knowledgebase, and use ratings and reputation for author ranking
  • Let users rate solutions, vote on important content, append comments and use their feedback to optimize the information delivered during the service experience
  • Let users subscribe to content and receive it in the format they prefer
  • Be proactive with communication to your users. Push knowledge and alerts out, even before customers experience a problem

  
  All these strategies help you engage in a two-way conversation with your customer base and your agents. Which ones do you think work best for you? Can you tell us why? Do you use other strategies?

   

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