Knowledge Workers: Today's "Resolutionaries"
When your customers or support agents encounter issues, they are looking for resolutions. But a resolution isn't just answering a query by serving up pages of search results or locating a long manual that agents or customers have to sift through. Usually those answers aren't good resolutions.
At Knova we define resolutions as the result of solving customer problems based on context and intent. Resolutions add value to your business by improving customer satisfaction, loyalty and perception while lowering costs. Resolutions occur when the right combination of KM tools and people are brought together for a common goal.
What is a resolutionary and why do we need them? Resolutionaries are knowledge workers-people focused on resolving complex product and support issues, in evolving and ever-improving ways. Resolutionaries are critical in using knowledge management tools to address pain points, which often include:
- "Information is everywhere but resolutions are impossible to find";
- "We need an easy way to resolve customer issues fast and accurately using the knowledge we have"; and
- "Our knowledgebase reporting is terrible".
Resolutionaries add value by making knowledge work the focus of a world-class support organization. It is accepted practice today that a current, well-maintained knowledgebase is essential for a support function to fulfill its duties. No knowledgebase, however, can maintain itself. Staffing is a mandatory component of a KM organization. Building teams with the right skills addresses pain points, improves resolution times, decreases escalations and raises customer satisfaction scores.
Who should become a resolutionary? Knowledge work implies some group of workers who identify and assemble valuable knowledge in distinct roles and responsibilities for a target audience. Resolutionaries lead this effort.
An organization's unique needs drive the number of knowledge workers and precise roles required, and a strong implementation team with KCS certified consultants will help you determine your needs when the time comes, but the table below outlines the primary roles we've seen time and again in our customer base.
Where do we find resolutionaries? Here's some free advice: look inside. Most companies find that KM superstars already work for them. The knowledge author function, for example, is frequently filled by support agents themselves who realize their potential while authoring in the workflow, a key component of KCS.
Questions to think about:
- Do we currently have a dedicated knowledge function and team?
- What are our goals in both implementing KM and developing people to support it?
- Are there career paths we can develop to retain our best people?
What results should we expect? Done properly, companies reap important benefits from a qualified staff of resolutionaries—benefits such as improved first call resolution, customer loyalty scores, profitability, brand recognition and more.
A recent ICMI report stated that moving from average to best-in-class first-call resolution (FCR) can improve satisfaction with the customer service rep by 20%, sales conversion by 20%-33%, and costs by 20%. And customer likelihood to switch to a competitor or competitive product drops to just 3% with high FCR. While improved FCR is just one possible goal, it is a common objective of many support organizations.
How do I become a resolutionary? It's important to understand the multiple angles or viewpoints that drive KM goals. From the knowledge worker's perspective, goals vary and require diverse roles and skill sets to achieve. For example, those with strong writing backgrounds may align well to roles like knowledge author and publisher, and those who wish to take on these roles should consider enhancing their writing skills. Similarly, those with strong technical skills naturally align to a subject-matter expert (SME) or technical reviewer role. So we find that strong writers may benefit from adding technical capabilities, while technical people can add value by strengthening writing skills.
From a management perspective, several outcomes of a KM initiative are generally important—among them are cost savings, improving customer satisfaction and increasing revenue. As a result, those looking to take on leadership responsibilities in a KM initiative should ensure that business-case development, tracking and reporting skills are polished. Benchmarking within and outside of the company to set a baseline is important, while goal alignment driving results beyond that baseline is key.
KM initiatives have proven over time to add value through increased customer satisfaction, lower support costs, faster and more accurate resolutions, and increased loyalty. Designed properly, companies can leverage their own people to drive KM success, while individuals benefit in parallel by growing personally and professionally.
Resolutionary Roles in Service and Support
Role: Knowledge Manager
Functions: Drives the vision to the entire organization, analyzes results and defends resource commitments
Benefits: Sustains executive sponsorship while steering knowledge workers and tools toward desired output
Role: Knowledge Administrator
Functions: Manages front-end configuration of KM application, taxonomy, templates, custom dictionary, reports and users
Benefits: Enables a KM system usable by the masses and maintains it so that effort is focused on knowledge input
Role: Recommender or Contributor
Functions: Suggests candidate articles for the knowledgebase
Benefits: Ensures that issues are addressed accurately and practically
Role: Knowledge Author
Functions: Writes and maintains content, attaches metadata, files and links
Benefits: Ensures that resolutions are easy to find for increased first-call resolution (FCR) and call deflection
Role: Technical Reviewer or SME (Subject Matter Expert)
Functions: Validates articles for technical accuracy
Benefits: Minimizes escalations and increases resolution rates
Role: Publisher
Functions: Gatekeeper who gives final review to articles. Owns the style standards
Benefits: Maintains consistent review and publishing standards
Role: Reports Specialist
Functions: Gathers metrics from KM, CRM and Web portal
Benefits: Identifies trends gaps and strengths
Knova Knowledge Management from Aptean is an enterprise-class KCS Verified solution, especially designed to deliver resolutions for even complex queries across channels. We work with the world's most demanding, high-volume service and support organizations. Learn more about Knova and find an expanded version of this article in the resource library at www.aptean.com.