A Brave New Way of Looking at Knowledge
1 Sep, 2007
By: Kate LeggettMy husband is a gamer. We have an Xbox 360, a Wii to play g-rated games with our three year old, and the PS3 is on his shopping list. His last-generation Xbox props up the TV in our bedroom and I just donated his PS2 to Goodwill. It is now midnight, and he has been playing hard for the last three hours – a habit he’s adopted since he brought the Xbox 360 home months ago.
Recently, I set out to surprise my husband with a new Xbox game for his birthday. Not being a gamer myself, I initially did a Google search on popular Xbox games, but this overwhelmed me with too many results. So, I narrowed my search to sites that had a large online community of gamers who I thought could help find something my husband would like.
One site stood out in my search. It asked me to enter some basic information up front – like his age, the types of gaming consoles he had, other games he liked. By answering these questions, I got a clear listing of suitable games, ordered by price and with embedded consumer ratings. The site even recommended the best game for me based on my husband’s past purchase history.
It also included links to a searchable discussion board where additional product information and peer reviews were posted. I read through all the material available, asked a couple of questions that were immediately answered and was able to quickly choose the perfect gift for him.
I often think about this experience when I’m at work - not because I have an interest in gaming, but because I work at a knowledge management company and I’m frequently called to recommend best practices for the deployment of these products.
These knowledge management products must be implemented in such a way to be successful with this new generation of customers who rely on online social networking and tribal knowledge of others instead of expert advice to guide them through their lives. They use sites like myspace and YouTube to connect to others, blogs to read news, customer ratings to purchase new products and discussion groups, forums or wikis for first-line customer service.
One of our marquee customers initially implemented a traditional customer service solution that we were asked to modify to address these exact issues.
They used a knowledgebase as a repository of all expert advice and a traditional authoring workflow for submitting and approving new content for the knowledgebase. They had also coupled a reporting solution to their knowledgebase so their administrators could understand the types of questions customers were asking and to pinpoint the most frequently used solutions as well as existing knowledge gaps that exist within the knowledgebase. These are found by looking for questions that were asked that yielded no pertinent solutions. Administrators then recommend that authors write topics to fill in these knowledge gaps.
The challenge this organization faced was the relevancy of knowledge their customers had access to as knowledge authoring was being done by someone who was not on the frontlines, constantly fielding questions from customers. Also, their linear authoring flow introduced a time delay between when solutions were written and when they were available to customers.
We recommended several steps to create dialog and a sense of community between their customers, agents and knowledge authors, with the aim of providing more timely and relevant content to their customers. The hope was that this approach would ultimately make their customers more trusting and more loyal, as it is only when you have a receptive customer base that you can be successful at marketing and selling to them.
As a first step, we appended feedback forms to all their solutions, asking their customers whether the solutions helped solve their question. The knowledge solutions were then reworked to make them more in-line with user demand.
We then opened up the knowledgebase to power authors so they could publish directly to it without needing the content to be routed through a review process. In this way, information was made instantly available to their customer base which they found especially useful when, for example, new hi-tech products were released where agents fielded repetitive questions for which answers did not yet exist within their knowledgebase.
Once “instant publishing” was working smoothly, we asked them to push the knowledge management envelope just a bit further by adopting a “just-in-time knowledge management” philosophy. If a customer service agent is unable to find the right solution to a customer’s question within a knowledgebase, the agent is able to author a new solution on the fly, right after having helped a customer. This allows the solution to be captured with the customer’s point of view in mind and in his exact vernacular. Agents are also able to modify existing solutions to correct mistakes or to make them more pertinent to their customer base.
In this model, solutions are not subjected to an arduous review process, but are reviewed as they are reused by other agents. This ultimately focuses the agent’s energy in reviewing and perfecting only the solutions that are the most frequently used. What also happens is that agents collectively take responsibility for the quality of solutions within their knowledgebase and if an error is found, it is instantly corrected. And appending the name of the agent who last modified a solution helps recognize agents who contribute to the knowledgebase. This adds an additional level of peer pressure in ensuring that solutions are the best they can be.
This organization went a step further in reaching out to their user community by integrating their knowledgebase with a discussion forum. This allows users to recommend information to be added to the knowledge base, ensuring that it organically grows with customers’ changing demands.
This organization also realized they have groups of expert users who know the product as well as their customer service agents and now allow their expert users to post content directly to the knowledgebase, in effect, turning each knowledge solution into a wiki. Expert user contributions are identified and can be rated so poor contributors can be restricted to adding knowledge content, and star contributors are recognized and encouraged.
Knowledge management solutions like these are not suitable for all industries, but in the verticals where this model makes sense, like hi-tech or retail, collaboration between users and agents helps evolve and perfect knowledge content in parallel with customers’ needs. It also helps build a sense of community around your brand, allows you to differentiate yourself from your competitors and keeps customers loyal by providing accurate and on-topic answers to their questions.
