The Top Five KCS Ditches, and How to Stay Out of Them
Ask your customers what they want—perfect prose in six weeks, or the resolution they need right now? The answer comes easy: people want resolutions. Everything else is just fluff. So, stay out of the perfection ditch: for normal solve-loop content, "sufficient to solve right now" is the right answer.
5. Allowing technology to become a roadblock. KCS is about what people do, not the technology they use. But too often, technology that's incomplete or cumbersome prevents people from following the KCS practices. This final ditch is trying to succeed at KCS in spite of technology that's not designed to support it. It's like competing at the Indy 500 in a minivan—an interesting experience, but dangerous and unlikely to lead to victory.
To support KCS, search must be able to return answers based on the concepts behind the words, not just keywords. Search should guide users through a dynamic drilldown process to get from the question to a resolution.
There must be pre-built connectors that make it cost-effective and practical to create a single integrated workflow across incident and knowledge management. And, it must be easy for analytics to report across incidents and knowledge.
The KCS Solution Lifecycle migrates content to a wider audience as it is being used. This is different from a traditional publication workflow, which hides content from users until it has gone through a lengthy publication process. KCS requires that all licensed staff can publish to their peers as soon as the incident is closed.
Most important, the tool must operate "at the speed of conversation." Because knowledge is captured, improved and reused during the resolution process, staff can't afford to wait for screens to load, and they can't waste time clicking from one activity to another. Everything needs to be brought together into a single, easy-to-use "resolution workbench." Asking a busy person to open a new tool and do duplicate entry of information is the surest way to take KCS into a deep, deep ditch.
What's Needed For KCS?
People, process and technology are all important, but of the three, technology is complained about the most, and is the easiest to fix with the right partner.
Capture: Capture in the workflow requires simple, fast authoring that keeps up with the conversation. It also requires seamless integration with the CRM or incident management so staff never have to retype their words.
Structure: The system must provide flexible templates that support different kinds of knowledge, from solutions to how-tos to FAQs. And users must be able to find content not just with keywords, but also by matching concepts in searches and content.
Reuse: Tracking knowledge reuse is an important driver of voice of the customer information, helping organizations understand the real customer experience and opportunities to improve it.
Improve: If an article needs to be corrected or updated, the system must make it easy for users to fix it right away, or to flag it so another subject matter expert can make the changes.
Content health: Look for ways to add value in the evolve loop with how-to videos, guiding customers through a resolution, and filling knowledge gaps. This requires sophisticated analytics, powerful tools for creating process flows and wizards, and support for rich media.
Process integration: Making KM part of the resolution process reality requires a deep, seamless integration with other systems such as case or incident tracking, defect tracking, single sign-on and site analytics.
Performance assessment: KM must provide real-time feedback in role-based dashboards for knowledge managers, line managers, and executives. As one question leads to another, analytics must be fast enough to support ad-hoc "what if" questions.
Knova Knowledge Management from Consona 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, ensuring our products meet their high standards. Learn more about Knova and find additional informative whitepapers in the resource library at www.consona.com/knova.