Latest Updates: knowledge RSS

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  John Chmaj 09:16:12 pm on October 16, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: best practices, knowledge, Knowledge Management, search, Self-Service

  FINDING Depends on How you SEEK –

  One of the most important things to think about in making knowledge delivery systems work is HOW users will find what they’re looking for.  At first glance it may seem simple:  type in a search, find your stuff.  But is it really that straightforward?  Do you really know what you’re looking for?  Do you really know what the right query is?  Do you even know what content exists in the system you’re using?

  One of the main reasons we all engage in building and managing support-focused search tools and portals is because we are trying to create a series of efficient, intuitive user experiences that lead people to the right answers to their questions.  However, my experience is that all questions – and all users – are not created equal.  Sometimes we know exactly what we need and how to ask, other times we haven’t a clue.  The same person, who may be expert on one issue, may be totally lost just looking for a slightly different issue in their own KB.

  In this context always think of one Christmas morning spent huddled over my sister’s computer, trying desperately to get the Disney Aladdin DVD to install and run properly, my little 4 yr old daughter wailing and pleading with me as I, the great computer expert in the family, struggled to figure out what query to enter in the Disney knowledge base to address the failure of this $5 DVD to load!  One is only as smart as the next problem, really —

  One of the most critical yet unrecognized features of a knowledge base is its ability to teach users about the terms, taxonomy, and content that is available to solve their question.  Most searches aren’t a one-shot deal – the user progressively browses to learn about an issue, scope the content, tries different queries to see what’s in the KB, and finally decides when to browse through titles and content for the best fit.  I find it useful to boil the types of interactions one needs to have based on how much one knows about an issue, and what one needs in terms of guidance from the knowledge base to get to the answer. A simple way to think about it is as follows.

  Three types of navigation

  1. I Know What I Know – Lookup

  This is the stereotypical “Google-esque” query – I know the data I want, I know the terms that should bring it back, I type in “error 99” and voila!  There’s my stuff.  Support experts usually expect this type of behavior, and in fact the weaker a KB is the more they memorize special terms, document ID’s and keywords that will give them what they want.  But in the end they’re not really searching as much as looking up known content.  This is an important capability that must work well, but it’s far from the only interaction people have, ESPECIALLY in self-help systems.

  2. I Know What I Don’t Know – Guided Search

  In this scenario users know the TYPE of information they need, perhaps also the topic or potential terms, but don’t exactly know what content is out there.  They may browse to scope the issue, then type in a query or two based on what appear to be the common topics.  KM systems assist here by providing potential additional browse and filtering options that are relevant to the current query scope.  The user can go back and forth, examining the options provided by the system, to find the right fit of topic and query detail.  These systems work well when the user has some idea of what the right solution is and just needs assistance getting to the right area of the knowledge base.  But that’s not the final area, nor perhaps the most important…there’s still:

  3. I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know – Browse and Filter

  Many users, especially those new to a particular domain, don’t really know how to think about the information that’s in it, what terms or topics are relevant, maybe not even what they’re supposed to ask.  In my Disney DVD problem, I had some smart ideas but none turned out to be relevant.  Was it the display driver?  The computer RAM?  OS version?  Plug-in requirements for video?  And how should I query a simple Disney DVD for this kind of stuff?  These scenarios are where a good browse experience can shine.  Not only can it help users figure out what the key components of a product are, the topics and known problems, but should also quickly point up common questions the user is likely to have.  By seeing common issues and how they are organized users can get insight into what their questions are, or likely queries should browsing and filtering not bring back the answer immediately.

  At the end of the day we’re all just looking for ANSWERS, aren’t we?  If we think through what the process of acquiring knowledge entails, we can trace these patterns of inquiry and do our best to model them for particular audiences, users and issues.  When this is well done for all three query types, users experience the ‘magic’ of knowledge bases.  They DO indeed seem to ‘know exactly what you want’, yet you may not even be aware of how seamlessly the system allows you to move between these modes of inquiry and still get the scent of the answer you need.  As KM system builders, we just have to give a little THOUGHT to how people THINK….!

  John Chmaj
  “The Knowledge Advocate”
   
• 

  Keith Holt 02:01:41 am on December 4, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: customer expectations, customer service, knowledge, personal touch, service experience, value

  A Work of Art

  I got to see an artist at work today. He wasn’t a “statue” performer at Fisherman’s Warf in San Francisco. He wasn’t a street musician in Central Park in New York City. He wasn’t a mime in Covent Garden in London who offered for sale a CD of his performance. (I’m still trying to figure that one out.) He was a customer service rep for a rental car company at Atlanta Hartsfield Airport.

  Like all the great customer service experiences I’ve had or witnessed, this one caught me totally by surprise. I don’t know how many hundreds of times I’ve boarded the shuttle bus at the terminal, ridden to the rental car site, looked for my name on the board, hunted for my car in its space, (sometimes) found the car and driven away. This time there was an agent in the company uniform greeting customers when the bus arrived at the board.

  He had one, very specific job to do. You see at this site the layout is such that there isn’t room on just one level of the garage for all the spaces serving the premium member customers. So the premium spaces were split between two levels of the garage with two boards listing customers’ names. Not exactly rocket science but a situation quite likely to cause confusion and create problems. So the company had implemented a very elegant solution – they placed this individual there to proactively deal with the potential problem before it could develop into a customer service issue. In effect they provided the canvas on which this artist would work his art.

  And he went to work following three fundamental principles for all great customer service experiences. The first of these is . . .

  Give clear directions up front.

  He met the opening door with a smile on his face, got everyone’s attention and briefly and clearly communicated the situation and our instructions – “This facility has two name boards. The one in front of you is the first one. If your name is on it, please step out of the bus and tell me your number. If your name is not on this board it will be on the second board at the next stop. In less than 15 seconds he told us what the situation was, what to do and what to expect to happen next.

  The second principle is . . .

  Provide assistance based on accurate and timely knowledge.

  As each person stepped from the bus and told him the number next to their name on the board, the agent gave them simple but specific and usable directions to help them find their car. “3rd row that direction.” “Along the back wall.” This was all the more impressive because there were not an easily multiplied number of spaces in each row. He knew his area and had handled about sixteen customers in less time than it took me to write this paragraph.

  So far so good. Impressive? Enough to get my attention when I’m used to encountering similar situations where no help has been provided with the result being a regular stream of customers queuing up to complain to an overworked, stressed out desk clerk that they didn’t find their names on the board. But the icing on the cake and what made me certain of what I was going to write about in this blog entry tonight was that he also followed the third, and I think most important, and I’m certain most difficult fundamental principle of great customer service . . .

  As the last of the first group took their directions and went off to their cars, the agent had one final word for those of us left on the bus waiting for the second stop. “I’ve got another board downstairs with your names on it. Have a great day.” It was such a subtly different way of saying it but it made a huge impression. “I’ve got another board . . .” It was his board. He was taking personal responsibility for me finding my name and being on my way.

  It is often those very subtle – and sometimes inexpensive – touches that add the “wow” factor to great customer service experiences, that turn everyday customer interactions into art. Customers are hungry for a personal touch and will often go out of their way or even spend more to experience it. Great service is so rare that a business that practices these fundamentals can stand out from the crowd and dramatically improve their competitive edge – all the more important in this tough economic environment. My challenge to any readers of this post is to measure any process improvement or technology initiative against whether it better enables your organization to follow these fundamental principles:

  • Give clear directions up front
  • Provide assistance based on accurate and timely knowledge
  • Make it personal

  Consistently great customer service is attainable and it is worth the effort – both for the serving organization and the customer being served.
   

• Keith Holt 04:22:08 pm on August 26, 2008 | 3 | # |
  Tags: agents, assisted service, call center, case management, customer service, knowledge, multi-channel, replacement, Self-Service, service experience, warranty

  Sometimes it works

  “Don’t panic.  Just breathe.”  That’s what I told myself when the most unthinkable, darkest, most desperate of situations descended on me without warning:  My BlackBerry® died.  One minute I was master of my domain – making and receiving phone calls, handling e-mails from three different accounts – the next I was completely cut off from both my personal and business worlds.  Was the next draft of that whitepaper ready for my review?  Was I supposed to pick up my daughter from her Taekwondo lesson or was it my wife’s turn?  Was the band practicing on Wednesday night or Thursday night this week?

  It was already past 8:00 pm so I huddled into my pre-technology cave, built a fire against the dark and waited for the next morning when I could seek assistance at my provider’s local store just a few blocks from my home.

  Another day dawned and I wasted no time getting down to the store.  I was hoping they could fix the failed device but would have been perfectly happy with a replacement, even if I had to purchase it myself.  I went to the customer service desk, handed the BlackBerry® to the agent there, described the symptoms I was seeing and hoped for the best.  He took my phone number, opened my account on his computer and spent the next few minutes alternating between prodding different parts of the BlackBerry® and typing notes into the open session on the computer.

  “I have some good news and some bad news,” he said about five minutes later.  In that short amount of time he had:

  • executed a series of front-line troubleshooting protocols to rule out problems with my charger or the battery – causes that would have been easily addressed

  • examined the device for signs of abuse – crushing, cracking, chewing or dunking in liquids – and recorded his observations in my account record

  • been given a determination based on the first two steps and the purchase date that the unit was under warranty and eligible for free replacement (part of the good news)

  • checked his own store’s inventory as well as every other location in the city and determined that there were none available in stock (part of the bad news)

  He apologized that there were none available for immediate replacement on the spot but getting this news up-front and in so little time was infinitely better than calling around to the dozens of stores in the metroplex area and checking them myself.  He tore a sheet off a notepad on the service desk and wrote two numbers on it.  The first, he explained, was a direct line to the company’s handheld technical support call center.  The second number was my case identification number.  I accepted the piece of paper with all the care it deserved as my last and only hope to reconnect to my life.

  When I got back home, I dusted off the “land-line” phone on my desk and dialed the toll-free number he had given me.  “Hello, my name is Steven.  How can I help you?”  What was that!?  No IVR, no canned request to press a number for service?  I explained that I was calling about a warranty replacement and gave him my case number.  “I’m sorry to hear that you had trouble.  Please give me just a minute to read the notes on your case . . . I see here that our service agent has already verified that the phone wasn’t damaged and is eligible for free warranty replacement.”  There were really notes on my case!  And he was reading them to brief himself on my situation!  I didn’t have to repeat anything to this phone agent.  I didn’t have to convince him that I hadn’t somehow caused the problem myself.  It took only three or four more minutes to confirm that the physical address on file was where I wanted the replacement sent and to give me instructions on activating the new device and returning the faulty device.  I was to expect the replacement by expedited shipping early the next morning – at no charge.

  I thanked Steven and hung up.  Moments later an e-mail popped into the in-box on my desktop computer’s monitor with a complete record of the transaction and detailed instructions on how to activate the new device when it arrived.  The next morning, a well-known white van pulled up in front of my house and my daughter signed for the package containing my replacement BlackBerry®.  And you know what?  The activation process worked exactly as described in my instructions.

  I’m a little unsure why I had to make the call instead of the store agent triggering the replacement while I was there but given the level of coordination and smoothness of the whole process – spanning and linking an in-person visit, a telephone call and an e-mail follow-up to avoid the need for a second call – I’m more than happy to overlook one possibly extra step in the process.  Visiting the store service desk and giving them the chance to examine the device saved a major delay that would have been experienced had technicians had to determine warranty eligibility after I shipped the inoperative unit.  So I was rewarded for my effort and the seamless connection between the two events in the service experience made it completely painless to me.

  So sometimes, service does work right – even when something breaks or initially goes horribly wrong.  But what made it work in this case was the seamlessness of the process, the obvious connectedness of the steps in the experience from one to the next and the complete lack of need to ever repeat myself or deal with a clueless participant impeding the process and service like this is extremely rare.  You know what I did next?  Within an hour of successfully activating my replacement, I went to their on-line self-service site and ordered the new smart phone my daughter wants for her 16th birthday.  There are natural and direct rewards for outstanding customer service.

   
• 

  John Chmaj 08:00:51 am on July 8, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Customer, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer service, Customer Support, Experience, KM, knowledge, Knowledge Management, support

  Most support organizations have resources related to knowledge management: webmaster, KB administrator, and content manager among others.  They are the ingredients of a well managed program, not the recipe for success.  Ask yourself a few simple questions to expose where you may need to improve:

  • Who OWNS all the content on internal and external knowledge bases?
  • Who UPDATES all that content? (Not necessarily the same!)
  • What is the process for communicating new product information forward to support, both prior to major launches and during the ongoing support life cycle?
  • Who owns the schema (metadata, keywords, etc.) for all content? Is there someone responsible that it all fits together when it hits the search and browse websites?
  • Who ensures all the content available is relevant, up to date, and consumable?
  • What is the agreed-upon mechanism for resolving conflicts between new and old content?

  If the answer to any of these is “no”, “I’m not sure” or “we figure that out on a case by case basis” then you’re probably spending too much time managing your KM initiative without really managing your program!  Count up the number of meetings, disconnects, customization and one-off projects you need to keep things in line.  You will see that coordinating content, schema and tools REQUIRES time even if your organization chooses to manage these areas as separate functions.  The results of not managing your program are at best incremental, time-consuming improvements, at worst a continual stream of errors, adjustments and just plain bad user experience for your sites.

  Developing an effective KM Program starts by thinking about the WHOLE objective: a great user experience, driven by an intuitive UI, effective user interactions, and quality content.  With that as your guiding goal, consider organizing around the core processes, including:

  • Identifying, prioritizing and normalizing content from across the organization to a common, high-quality user experience
  • Managing policies and communications from the ‘front’ (websites & tools) to the ‘back’ (product and content groups), and all constituents in between, to achieve a common set of rules and standards around how information is developed and organized.
  • Establishing a Steering Committee or Center of Excellence that can serve as a clearinghouse for all ongoing questions and issues around content ownership, commitments, policy and deadlines
  • Developing a ‘product life cycle’ view of information, that engages everyone from products, support, and IT to commit to a common process for evolving KM tools and capabilities

  A KM Program is not a ‘nice to have’ – you have one already, the question is:  do you know it?  And if you don’t, what is it costing your business in time, effort, money and customers?  There IS a better way, just commit to KM as a critical business process and the approach becomes clear.

  Are you committed?

   
• 

  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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