Take Off the Training Wheels
and Let Your Customer Support Agents Fly

When I was 7 years old, my father took me to the park to teach me to ride a bike. At one point he let go and I kept pedaling--straight into a tree. Although he had best of intentions, my father forgot to make sure I knew how to steer. There are certain skills you aren’t born with that you need to be taught.

The same can be said for customer service. Most organizations have some type of knowledge source (the bike) where they store company knowledge, and they want to provide a great customer experience (learn to ride). They just haven’t set up a methodical way of getting there so the ride can be great (avoid the tree).

Successful knowledge management quickly resolves customer issues. Choosing the right solution is very important. You need a sophisticated tool that can incorporate new, proven thinking and processes. But that is only part of the equation. When undertaking any process with variable steps and many people, success requires a systematic way of working and tying all the pieces together. Through a structured, repeatable process, you can apply the same approach each time. You know which tasks are required, when to perform them and how to complete them. And a standard approach can be measured, which allows for continual improvement.

Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS)—An Empowering Methodology

Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) is a proven methodology and set of practices for consistently capturing information in a way that allows it to be useful and dynamic to suit the rapidly changing environment of customer support. The way I see it in practice is that KCS maximizes the ability of knowledge management to drive the customer experience.

KCS principles maintain that the best people to create the knowledge are the ones who use it every day: the agents. According to the Consortium for Service Innovation, the organization that developed KCS, when agents are responsible for creating the knowledge, they will quickly capture 70%-80% of what’s known, versus capturing only 20% when done by others. After all, possessing the knowledge that can successfully answer customer questions is vital to providing a great experience.

Here are the main goals of KCS:

• Create content, or knowledge, that is useful for customer service
• Evolve the knowledge to keep it current
• Develop a knowledgebase of the organization’s collective knowledge

KCS offers guidelines on how to write the knowledge articles, for example, use a consistent layout and a writing style that is easy to understand. KCS also applies an article quality index (AQI) to measure the quality of the knowledge.

While processes and people are an important part of KCS, having the right tools and functionality is essential in achieving KCS success and a high level of adoption of your knowledge initiative. Knowledge management software that easily enables and automates KCS processes and workflows yields the greatest and persisting results.

Even more valuable is when technology supports people’s behaviors within the natural workflow of their role. Then management can be confident that the key parts of KCS are being implemented. Some elements where technology can drive KCS proficiency:

• Providing a central repository to store all company knowledge for easy, universal access
• Offering gamification that automates KCS rewards, to keep users engaged and to drive the desired behaviors
• Calculating the article quality

Keep KCS Going Strong

Our world keeps changing, new projects compete for attention and key staff move on. Before you know it, what was a very successful KCS implementation starts to stumble and standards drop. So how can you maintain the momentum of your KCS journey?

Here are some important steps you should take to sustain KCS long-term:

• Management buy-in is a pre-requisite for a sustained KCS initiative
• Trusting people to do the work is a very empowering approach to creating and maintaining knowledge. Give your team the responsibility and accountability and they’ll take ownership of the knowledge
• Since we’re changing the way people work, KCS coaches play an important role in KCS adoption
• Explain the big picture and benefits of why you’re asking people to change their behavior; they will feel like a part of the process
• Assemble a small group of agents to determine workflows. KCS works best when you involve the people who will be doing the work
• Change the way you measure people’s contributions. Value people who share, are willing to learn and help others learn. Reward people for quality (e.g., publishing useful articles), not for quantity

They say you never forget how to ride a bike. That may be true, but you have to learn to ride in the first place. Simply owning a bike and wanting to ride doesn’t make it happen. Most people need someone to coach them—to teach them how to balance, how to brake, and of course how to avoid crashing into a tree. Likewise, creating a good customer experience through knowledge requires training, strategy and tactics. The work of a team all aligned to achieving the same goal will win you customer service worthy of the coveted yellow jersey of the Tour de France—KCS is a strategy to get you there.

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