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Article : How to Implement Knowledge Management And Web Self-Service Tools

There are a multitude of issues and options enterprises need to consider when evaluating a strategy for customer self-service and knowledge management. Knowledge management (KM) and Web self-service can increase customer satisfaction and improve support operations while reducing costs – if and only if they're implemented properly. This article outlines the dos and don'ts of implementing a KM and self-service tool based on my experience and hard lessons learned. Overall, my hope is to help guide you in the search, implementation, and customer use process.

What To Do:

  • Know your needs – Do you need to communicate effectively with customers via Web self-service, or do you need to give your agents the means to answer questions effectively? or both? Whatever the need, the tools that are currently on the market have strengths and weaknesses in these areas. When you make your buying decision, knowing what you want to accomplish will help you choose the product that can lower costs and provide the highest ROI.


Jason McDonald
Product Manager
Skywire
 

  •  Also, consider your long-term strategy and discover if the planned roadmap for the product matches your needs. Based on my experience, enterprises choose call deflection as the single most important reason of offering a Web self-service channel and shared knowledge between agents as the number one reason for implementing a KM platform. Does the product do one or both of these well enough to fit your needs?

  • Market the self-service portion internally and externally – Before you install the product, you should start your internal marketing campaign. Let agents know that it will make everyone's job easier by providing timely information, easing their call/email/chat loads and make answer's to typical questions much easier to find. But, Make sure you install the product so that it will deliver on those promises. Marketing the solution to external customers means giving them information about where to find your self-service site, and how to use it. Access to Web support needs to play a prominent role in your Web site, your telephone answering systems and in your product documentation/literature marketing efforts. Make Web self-service a priority and you can make your service a selling point.

  • The software is only as good as the knowledge you have in it – Give incentives to your knowledge-entry personnel. Pay well for the knowledge and it will reward you ten-fold. Customers with quality content can see upwards of 90% success rates on web self-service visits (90% of customers using self-service don't call, email or chat). The only caveat: You need to oversee the content and make sure it's well-written and the knowledge must answer definable, repeatable questions your customers are asking. Utilize your case logs for defining your initial knowledge load and use the metrics provided by the tool to understand how articles are performing within your customer base. Reward authors who constantly create knowledge articles that are hit often and have high success rates.

  • Commit to the product and make sure the product commits to you – Commitment can mean a lot of things. In this case, it means: thoroughly evaluate possible tools, make your selection, and commit all the necessary resources recommended by the vendor. The vendor should have plenty of implementation experience with clients and should smartly guide you along the way. Make sure you ask vendors questions like:

  • How many resources will I need to manage this?

  • How do I get up and running quickly?

  • Does IT need to be involved?

  • Can you help me market the solution internally and to users?

Some of the questions are dictated by the software you choose. For instance, some vendors can take as many as six months to install a solution, while hosted systems may be able to do it in less than 30 days.

 What Not To Do.

  • Don't put off integration – One of the keys to putting good content into the system is integration - so don't wait. Many companies put off the integration between their KM/self-service system and their issue-tracking systems, document management systems and many other support channel tools. Waiting can cost you time and money. By integrating with your issue-tracking system, content can easily be created any time a case is closed – without an agent ever touching the KM application. The solution to the closed case can be routed to your KM/self-service system and managed through a workflow until it becomes a customer-consumable document. You can also allow support agents to look up knowledge in the system that isn't yet available to customers.

  • Don't count on knowledge management and Web self-service to alleviate all your customer care woes – KM and self-service are cost-reduction, service-improvement tools. They don't eliminate all cost. It allows you to become more efficient by using additional channels and improves your agent's knowledge and speed during calls. In many cases companies deploying large to medium scale KM and self-service projects expect calls to slow dramatically. While it's true that they must slow to have an effective self-service initiative, they will never stop. Of course, how much costly support channels slow depends on the knowledge quality within the tool and customer awareness, but there will still be calls to answer, emails to write and chat sessions to type. Many of your customers require person-to-person communication and this will always be the case. KM and self-service helps speed the resolution process during hands-on sessions by providing knowledge to your agents in a timely fashion, makes it easy for low-level agents to answer more difficult questions and speed "time to plug-in" for new agents.

  • Don't roll out customer self-service software without good/extensive content that answers customer's most frequently asked questions – The main reason enterprise companies offer a self-service channel is to reduce incoming calls, therefore, do a thorough evaluation of your top 20-100 customer issues that are definable and repeatable. Then create detailed, step-by-step content to answer those issues in the KM/self-service system. After launch, you must test the content, keep it up-to-date and be prepared to rollback dated content – the tool you select should have the reports to help you with this. This way, the content can be used by your customers immediately and can get new agents up to speed on the repetitive issues that take up support agents valuable time at all levels.

  • Don't assume good self-service and knowledge management software is going to be cheap – Knowledge management/self service software can be expensive, and rightfully so. It can take months to develop features around knowledge workflow, multi-lingual interfacing, and customizable self-service front-ends. To manage cost, prioritize what you need the most. Do you need a highly customizable customer experience, an extensively-featured KM tool, or a solid mixture of both? Also consider the advantages/disadvantages of hosted and in-house options. While in-house implementations have always been thought of as the most "customizable" choice, many ASP offerings are just as customizable these days. While in-house installs can be more flexible if you have resources, hosted options can offer another way of reducing costs and lessening the hassle of using the IT department. Once chosen, the software is only as good as you are willing to make it.

Bottom Line:
When tackling a Web self-service/knowledge management initiative know your needs, commit to those needs, market the initiative, and invest well in knowledge entry. Don't be cheap, build an extensive knowledge-base before you launch, integrate with existing systems, and don't count on knowledge management and Web self-service to answer all of your customer care woes. Follow these simple edicts and you'll have an easy launch, well-trained agents, and happier customers. In the end KM and self-service will help you deflect calls, organize and share knowledge between all of your agents and decrease the time your agents spend per case.


About Jason McDonald:
Jason McDonald is the Product Manager for Skywire Software, a provider of enterprise software including knowledge management and self-service solutions. He's been in the customer support business for over five years and has learned the ins and outs of the business from implementing, managing and developing Knowledge Management and Web self-service products.

About Skywire:
Skywire Software is a provider of enterprise software applications. Our integrated suite of products and services includes online customer service and support, business intelligence, integration applications/adapters, and professional services. We enable companies to solve key business problems while significantly reducing costs. Our commitment to "building customers for life" is matched by our dedication to providing software products that enable our customers to recognize both a documented return on their technology investments and a competitive advantage.

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More Editorial From Skywire Software

Published: Friday, November 12, 2004

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