Implementing KM: Practitioners Share Best Practices

9. Keep the end goal clearly in mind. Periodically evaluate how well you are adhering to your original specifications. It is important to make sure that decisions on whether to expand the effort or to maintain the effort are based on your business needs and the timing you are trying to achieve.

10. Consider the impact on existing business processes. Identify and understand all the existing processes that will no longer work with the new system so that these can be addressed. A knowledge manager of a leading mobile communications company notes that, "you need to understand the processes that will change and what is going to break or be different as you go into the implementation phase of your investigation."

About InQuira

The InQuira 8 suite of business applications improves companies' Web self-service and assisted-service resolution processes. With applications for knowledge management, Web self-service, agent-assisted service, email deflection and customer experience management and analysis, InQuira 8 delivers a complete solution for resolving customer support issues online and in the contact center—applications that can infer the user's needs and intentions and provide the right information, tools, recommendations and assistance in an efficient, orchestrated interaction that will resolve more issues and deliver greater satisfaction and higher ROI.

Knowledge management. Many customer support issues require research to resolve, either by the agent in the contact center, or by the customer in the self-service channel. A core function of support organizations is to capture enterprise knowledge to create content designed to resolve customer issues. InQuira 8 provides full knowledge management capabilities, including:

• Capturing content and content requests from within the resolution process;
• Authoring process that removes the unnecessary tagging and increases content reuse;
• Full version control, with the ability to revert back to a previous version, compare versions or view versions side-by-side;
• Robust publishing workflow to ensure content is effectively managed through user-defined stages of development and publication;
• Task management to ensure that each task is being completed by someone with the right role and skill;
• Configurable email notifications for all tasks in the system directing attention to complete work;
• Multi-lingual content and translation workflow to update and distribute content in multiple languages;
• Embedded natural language search (InQuira Intelligent Search) for more effective and useful retrieval of information from within the knowledgebase and forum content;
• Discussion forums for community-based support;
• Embedded reputation models to support performance evaluation for knowledge engineers;
• Tokenization to secure content and sections of content for specific user audiences; and
• Configurable subscriptions to categories of content and specific content items, including newsletters and content from specific authors.

Web self service. Customers and companies increasingly demand more sophisticated and effective Web self-service capabilities to resolve customer support issues. InQuira 8 delivers that. Key capabilities include:

• Unique ability to determine user intent from search and navigation behavior, and use that insight to manage the customer experience intent-by-intent, empowering companies to deliver a personalized resolution experience based on an understanding of what the customer is trying to accomplish;
• Packaged horizontal and verticalized Web applications to accelerate implementation;
• Industry-specific "intent libraries" to map the resolution experience to pre-defined customer needs; u Intelligent search and retrieval capabilities based on patented natural language processing technology;
• Industry dictionaries to improve search effectiveness; and
• Diagnostic process wizards to troubleshoot and resolve customer problems.

Agent-assisted service. Contact center managers are under constant pressure to deliver effective, loyalty-inducing customer service at reasonable cost. InQuira 8 for agent-assisted service includes the following productivity-enhancing capabilities:

• Embedded intelligent search, retrieval and navigation from within the agent cockpit;
• Integration into leading CRM packages, including Siebel and Clarify;
• Ability to associate retrieved content to case resolution;
• Web self-service session history captured on service requests escalated to agents via email;
• Integrated links to trigger knowledge creation workflows from specific cases; and
• Collaboration.

Email deflection. When customers are unable to resolve their own problems from a company's website, they will often submit their questions to the company through email. InQuira 8 for email deflection:

• Intercepts Web-submitted emails and uses the subject line to search and retrieve appropriate information to resolve the customer issue;
• Deflects inbound service requests when a customer clicks through the offered solutions and abandons the submission process;
• Passes service requests directly into the ERMS when an appropriate solution is not found; and
• Captures Web self-service session history and passes it with the service request to the agent in the contact center, allowing the agent to pick up where the customer left off.

Experience management and analysis. Companies recognize that customer service is an iterative business process based on continuous analysis and refinement. InQuira 8 offers several capabilities to manage the customer experience and measure the effectiveness of the resolution process and the creation and use of knowledge assets. Capabilities include:

• Intent libraries for retail banking, telecom and automotive industries that automate the mapping of searches and navigation behavior to industry intents. InQuira enables targeted and managed responses at the intent level, resulting in a 10:1 reduction in the number of managed responses users would have to define;
• The ability to guide an interaction and present additional content and offers that result in higher resolution rates; and
• Out-of-the-box data warehouse, star schema and reports to analyze user interactions. InQuira Analytics includes full ability to drill into reports to look at relationships of data for in-depth analysis of results. The analysis that can be performed using InQuira analytics includes conversion analysis, case escalation and email ROI, navigation usage, content gap analysis, content usage, content authoring, customer feedback, surveys and process wizard usage.