Knowledge-Centered Support Best Practices May Drive KM Software Adoption in Customer Service   By Peter Dorfman Principal Consultant IHS Support Solutions   Customer service and support have provided some of the clearest and simplest value propositions for Knowledge Management. Resolution of service incidents is a process that leverages the knowledge of the agents who provide the service, and the successful adoption of knowledge sharing has a direct impact on performance metrics already maintained by customer support organizations, including: Speed of problem resolution or customer satisfaction; Reduction in escalations of issues from lower level to higher tier experts; Consistency of answers provided (reinforced by reuse of documented solutions); Breadth of problems that can be resolved by any given agent, or by the team; and Reduction in time required to train new agents. Because the benefits are easy to articulate, KM software vendors have long focused on customer support and help desk operations as targets for implementation. But the choice of tools is only one of at least four different classes of issues the support organization must weigh to build an effective KM initiative. Process, cultural and content issues come first; if management fails to address these considerations, it is likely to choose an inappropriate software tool. Or worse yet, the support team is likely to adopt a KM approach dictated by the features of the tool and the vendor’s prescribed KM process, as opposed to designing the initiative around rational business requirements.   With so many ways to fail at the people and process level, it is no wonder that knowledge tools have had a reputation for failing to live up to the return on investment expectations of customer support executives – until recently. A survey conducted in the first quarter of 2005 by the Help Desk Institute and the consulting firm KnowledgeFarm found managers of support organizations surprisingly satisfied with their KM investments.   Of 144 respondents from a wide variety of support organizations in the US and Canada, almost two thirds said developing, using and maintaining a knowledge base fits reasonably well or very well into their support workflow. About 56% rated their relationships with their KM tool vendors from “adequate” to “excellent.” And 40% indicated they had met or exceeded their ROIs.   Meanwhile, a growing number of support organizations have begun to adopt a framework of knowledge management best practices called Knowledge-Centered SupportSM, or KCS(sm), developed by a California think tank called the Consortium for Service Innovation. Developed and nurtured over a decade and adopted by more than 80 companies, KCS offers a common-sense roadmap to KM success. Its principles are simple and rational. They are not tied to any specific platform or software tool. And with published endorsements and case studies from major support operations at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Legato, KCS is, by objective standards, proven to work.   At the heart of KCS is a set of principles, including: Capture in the workflow – Knowledge is captured as a natural by-product of solving a problem, as opposed to a separate, engineered process Knowledge structured for reuse – Content follows style and metadata conventions to increase its “findability” and readability Structured problem-solving – Understand the issue before trying to resolve it The process of searching is also the creation process (i.e., if you search and don’t find a satisfactory answer, create it.) Manage solution quality through use – Instead of investing in “complete” knowledge bases that cover all eventualities, spend time creating and improving solutions only to the problems that actually happen Migrate solutions to new audiences based on demand – Modify the context to be relevant to a new audience based on demand Measure and monitor performance Engage senior management leadership and align KM objectives with those of support and of the enterprise. Has KCS begun to drive management satisfaction rates for KM higher? It’s difficult to say, although a number of respondents to the HDI survey indicated they have adopted KCS and value their vendors’ help in complying with the methodology. It is clear, however, that broad acceptance of best practices like KCS can make it possible for managers who have hesitated to sign off on KM adoption to make these decisions with greater confidence – especially the expensive and highly conspicuous decisions involved in adopting tools.   Many decisions related to the management of customer support are left up to the stakeholders closest to the support team and process. Adoption of support automation technology, however, usually is an exception, because it involves a highly visible investment of scarce funds.   The support team may report to a senior stakeholder who is quite remote from day to day customer interactions and is unfamiliar with the specifics of support. It is a great comfort to the hands-off executive to know that an operation like a service desk is following accepted best practices. Several organizations (including HDI) train and certify support organizations and their people on best practices – processes and standards for service excellence, and it is conventional for such best practices to include the adoption of technology.   HDI has been a champion of knowledge-based problem resolution for many years, and has partnered with the Consortium for Service Innovation (San Carlos, CA – www.serviceinnovation.org) to promote adoption of KCS. Adoption of KCS enables the executive to feel comfortable that knowledge management can be “done right,” that there is a way to ensure that processes that maximize the ROI for knowledge processes and tools are being followed, and that people can be accountable for the quality of the work they do in managing knowledge.   While it is mostly concerned with people, process and content issues, KCS prescribes certain minimum requirements for knowledge based problem resolution technology. The Consortium has developed a program to verify the capacity of commercial knowledge tools to support KCS best practices, and in July announced that it has verified five vendors’ solutions as effective in supporting KCS best practices: ATG KnowledgeCenter Release 6.0, from ATG (www.atg.com) Knova Contact Center Release 6.5 from Knova Software (www.knova.com) GetAnswers Release 4.2 from Peregrine Systems (www.peregrine.com) Intelligent Assistance Suite Release 6.5 from SupportSoft (www.supportsoft.com) Knowledgebase.net Release 5.0 from Talisma (www.talisma.com) Other vendors have made clear their intentions to seek KCS Verification.   To be verified, the vendors were required to demonstrate that they enabled at least 90% of the specific “KCS Verified Criteria” (see http://www.serviceinnovation.org/included/docs/library/programs/KCS_criteria%20v3.01.pdf). Among these criteria, the Consortium specifies: The system must provide a way to provide Solutions as reusable objects such as searchable documents. The system must allow the user to distinguish between problem content and environment content – There must be a way to describe the symptoms experienced by the customer, and a separate way to capture the features of the environment (e.g., operating system, network environment, version). Ability to search – The system must provide a repository of solutions and a way to retrieve content specific to the case at hand. Further, the retrieval method must allow the user to evaluate possible problem descriptions in comparison to other problem descriptions – not to features of the environment. Ability to link, point and relate incidents to solutions, and vice versa – KCS does not specify how the knowledge base should be integrated with an incident management system, but it does require that there be a way to link a specific incident to a reusable solution that was relevant to that case. KCS also specifies that there be a way to retrieve a list of past incidents in which any given solution was useful. Solution visibility management – The solution must recognize that a solution may be appropriate for one type of user and not for others to see, and must provide a way to assign rights to users or classes of users to see a given solution. Solution states – There must be a way to distinguish “draft” solutions, solutions awaiting technical or style review, and other pre-approval content from solutions that are “published” or “in production.” Search arguments preserved as the basis of a new solution – When a search fails to locate a solution in the structured knowledge base, new content must be created. The new solution must include, either as explicit content or as metadata, the search or query path that the user who needed the solution followed in trying to find it, so that future users can retrace those steps. Reporting and metrics – The system must include analytics to allow management to evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge base content, the people generating that content and their adherence to best practices, and the processes they follow. “Function at the speed of conversation” – The system must show that it does not get in the way of effective, customer-friendly dialog that reinforces a satisfying customer relationship.   So KCS Verification can be problematical for some vendors considering it. The KCS Best Practices suggest enabling agents to generate new Solutions in the workflow, and this implies that Solutions should be available as soon as they are created. Most commercial knowledge tools in their “out-of-the-box” configurations automatically route new Solutions into an engineered workflow for review, revision and approval. KCS Verification allows some of its requirements to be met through customizations, and through the integration code that enables the knowledge tool to exchange data with an incident management platform.   Some teams implementing KCS may interpret this default workflow as too rigid and too time-consuming to support the “capture in the workflow” objective, and system customizations may be required to enable agents to bypass the workflow.   Even among KCS Verified tools, some will fit a given organization’s culture and workflow better than others. The Verified tools are “compliant” with KCS methodology in different ways. So teams evaluating KM tools for support have a useful new way to narrow down the range of options if they choose to adopt KCS, but Verification will not guarantee that a given tool is suitable. Tools that have not yet been Verified, and even some “homegrown” knowledge solutions, may still be adapted to support KCS best practices.   But despite this ambiguity, the existence of the KCS best practices, backed up by 10 years of real world investment, experience and documented results, reduces the risk of KM adoption in customer support. It provides a framework to monitor the contribution of knowledge to service quality and productivity, and it has begun to drive KM initiatives across a broad spectrum of industries.   #   Peter Dorfman is a Principal Consultant at IHS Support Solutions, based in New York, NY. He is a certified instructor in Knowledge-Centered Support. A KM expert and practitioner for 16 years, he formerly was the founder and chief consultant at KnowledgeFarm, a New Jersey-based consultancy. His first book, “Tools for Support Knowledge,” an analysis of KM tools and processes in customer support, was published in August 2005 by the Help Desk Institute, Colorado Springs, CO. Mr. Dorfman can be reached at peter.Dorfman@ihssupport.com.