The Knowledge Experience
How and Why to Make Knowledge Management Easier
People naturally want to share what they know. Customer service and support teams share knowledge every day, with email, shared drives, instant messaging and by just popping their head over a coworker's cubicle. Best practices like knowledge-centered support (KCS) make knowledge sharing a simple and effective part of the job. So, doing knowledge management right should be easy... but it's not.
When we ask the front-line staff why they don't share knowledge in the official systems, we often hear that their tools get in the way of doing their jobs. We think they're right.
Today's tools have more features than ever before. The question is, how well do users implement them? Often, the answer is, dismally.
The right focus isn't features, but the knowledge experience:
- Is the tool intuitive? Does it do what you expect?;
- Are features laid out in a workflow that makes sense? It should always be clear what to do next;
- Are there no wasted steps in the process? In a good knowledge experience, there is no screen toggling, copy and paste, or retyping;
- Does it perform well? Technology should "function at the speed of conversation," according to the KCS Practices Guide; and
- Does it actually work? Features must actually operate the way they're supposed to.
Our conclusion: features are useless unless the knowledge experience is right.
Knowledge Experience Moments of Truth
The knowledge experience has moments of truth: the big tasks that users need to accomplish. We call these the capture and improve experience, the reuse experience and the management experience. If we make these experiences easy and rewarding, users are hooked.
The capture and improve experience. The most basic best practice for KM is "capture knowledge in the workflow"—that is, write down what you're learning while you're solving the problem or answering the question. But almost no tools make this easy! Support staff end up re-typing their notes into a separate knowledgebase tool, after the case is closed.
Also, if content needs to be updated, a user shouldn't have to go to a separate application, log in, find the document again and then edit it. This is an annoyance that makes it less likely that teams will keep their content fresh.
The reuse experience. Knowledge delivers value when it is reused to solve problems and answer questions quickly and consistently. If users can't find knowledge, then it's really "game over."
Search marketers coin feature names like question intent processing, case-based reasoning, self-learning and semantic analysis. But to the user, it all boils down to typing a query and looking at the results. All the marketing buzzwords in the world won't help if the results don't answer the user's question.
Performance is also critical. Users are impatient. If it takes several seconds to see results, they'll be less likely to use the knowledgebase next time.
The management experience. Know-ledge managers require industrial strength tools for administering and measuring operations. Tasks that never show up on a demo script can become tedious time-sinks in real-world environments. For example, if you must act on an entire category of knowledge articles, the tool must let you take action on content in bulk, because it's impractical to make these changes one at a time.
The most important part of the management experience is reporting. Every KM tool provides some charts and tables, but what do they mean? Customer service leaders need to see not only the activity, but what the activity means to the business: what articles are being frequently reused and highly rated; which articles drive successful service interactions; and how articles score in QA checks. This translates into performance assessment dashboards for teams and employees.
Analytics must also keep up with the scale of transactions on a high-volume support website. If your support site is on the Internet, make sure that the tools were designed to scale to the Internet—departmental solutions won't cut it.
Consona recommends that you look beyond the features—look at the whole knowledge experience. If you're writing business requirements, augment (or even replace!) your standard feature checklist with scenarios that cover the knowledge experiences you care most about, using capture, improve, reuse, and manage as a starting point. For each of these, write down the characteristics most important to your users: no double entry of text; rapid and precise search results; and management dashboards that show value, not just activity.
By focusing on experiences, you'll make sure that your tool is really doing its job supporting the people and their processes, giving your customer service initiatives the best chance of success.
Consona Knowledge Management is an enterprise-class KCS Verified solution, especially designed to handle even complex service and support queries across channels. But Consona's philosophy has always been about creating value for customers-not just features. Our differentiator comes from understanding our customers' businesses. We work with the world's most demanding, high-volume service and support organizations, ensuring our products meet their high standards. Experience it for yourself at crm.consona.com.