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Using KCS principles to improve
Self Service
This whitepaper shows how support organizations can use KCS (Knowledge
Centered Support) principles to improve their self service and keep up with
increasing demands on the service desk.
Principle 1: Create content
as a by-product of solving
problems
Across industries and geographies, companies are
asking the same questions: How do they scale and
extend their support capabilities, with limited staff
and budget resources? How do they continue to
provide world class customer service to existing
customers while being asked to do more? How
can they keep up with the increasing demand on
their support staff?
Fortunately, a set of best practices called
Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) is gaining
traction in the technical service and support world
and provides a process driven solution to these
questions. KCS originated in 1992, through the
efforts of a non-profit alliance of customer service
organizations working together to capture and
share best practices for Knowledge*.
Discovering the service potential of
knowledge driven support
As many companies grow and expand, they turn
to KCS as a framework for capturing and sharing
organizational information, among both their
technical employees and their customers. While
Knowledge Management is commonly recognized
as a “must have” for practically any company,
as an industry, we are just starting to embrace
the business and customer service potential of
knowledge driven support. Studies have repeatedly
shown that KCS adoption can lead to a 60%
improvement in resolution time and up to a 50%
increase in self service rates.*
Revolutionizing customer support
Taking a closer look at each principle can provide
a knowledge centered view into how customer
support can be revolutionized. For example, the first
principle simply states that as an issue arises and a
customer contacts support, if a knowledge article
(or knowledge guide) does not exist for that specific
issue, the analyst or technician should create
an article at the time that they solve the issue.
Immediately. Right Away. Without Delay.
*www.serviceinnovation.org/kcs
At a high level, the core principles of KCS are:
• Create content (knowledge) as a by-product of solving problems.
• Evolve content based on demand and usage.
• Develop a knowledge base of an organization’s collective experience.
• Reward learning, collaboration, sharing and improving.
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Meeting customer needs
The importance of immediate content creation
becomes critical as companies experience the
typical spike in support contacts soon after a
new product, service or version is rolled out to
its customers. As any IT support professional can
attest, the need for support is often short lived,
with the calls and emails tapering off as the issue
is resolved. Because of this spike and subsequent
taper, the “old” method of waiting to develop a
knowledge article until the demand was high
enough rarely meets the customer’s need, often
generates a knowledge article “after the fact”, and
ties up support staff with repetitive calls that could
be resolved by the end user through self service.
Of course, the Knowledge tool must support this
“author immediately” function, and must be easy to
use, with one-button publish so that customers can
easily find the solution online. Forward thinking
companies are setting up alerts with their tools
so that as the Customers search for words and
phrases, technicians are alerted and a knowledge
article can be created on the fly.
Principle 2: Evolve content
based on demand and usage
Our work environment and its content are in
constant change. For service desks and support
teams it is a very time consuming job to keep the
content up to date, if even possible at all. But if
every use of an article provided an opportunity to
edit and refresh the information in it, would that
stop the bottleneck effect and result in updated
information? In this second part of our KCS series
we get to know about the second core principle of
KCS- how to handle and evolve the content.
One problem, two scenarios
Two common scenarios that service and
support teams often encounter revolve around
maintenance and upkeep of their knowledge base
articles. What may not appear to be a large issue,
can take on herculean proportions as environments
constantly change and information evolves.
The first scenario can happen frequently, and
often occurs when someone in IT notices that
a knowledge base article is out of date. Usually,
changes have occurred in the environment, and the
steps listed to resolve the issue no longer apply. On
the other hand, often, the solution is still partially
correct, however, there are more details that need
to be added so that IT employees and customers
alike can have up to date information.
The second scenario occurs when organizations
are moving to a new knowledge solution, and
many times are combining multiple repositories
into one consolidated information source. In this
case, the question is asked, should we review and
‘clean up’ every article (often numbering in the
hundreds or thousands) before migrating them to a
new knowledge solution?
The Solution – KCS core principles
As the previous chapter illustrated, there is a
solution to both these scenarios, which countless
companies and organizations around the world are
adopting – Knowledge Centered Support (KCS), the
set of best practices, which enable organizations to
support more customers and handle more issues
without adding more resources.
Drawn from the KCS Best practices, the core
principles are:
• Create content (knowledge) as a by-product
of solving problems.
• Evolve content based on demand and usage.
• Develop a knowledge base of an
organization’s collective experience to-date.
• Reward learning, collaboration, sharing and
improving.
The introduction to the KCS first principle was
covered previously (creating the knowledge article
as the issue is being handled), which leads into the
second principle, and how it addresses the two
scenarios (articles that need updating and ‘cleaning
up’ articles before migration).
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Avoiding the bottleneck
This principle states that as knowledge articles
are used (searched for and viewed), they should
be updated at that time, providing “just in time”
updates. In other words, every use of an article
provides an opportunity to edit and refresh the
information in it.
When companies first start their KCS journey, this
principle is often difficult to embrace, as historically,
knowledge articles are often routed through
a subject matter expert (SME), who validates
submitted material, correcting any errors, ensuring
consistency and providing oversight to their area of
expertise. Unfortunately, this legacy process creates
a bottleneck, as the SME must interrupt their work
to review, edit and update articles submitted to
them. Often, this is accomplished by scheduling
specific time to work on the ‘knowledge queue’.
However, this may only be once a week, or even
as infrequently as a few times per month. For the
service and support teams waiting on updated
articles to be approved and put into the knowledge
solution, this wait time creates further delay in
assisting the customer, who also suffers from the
lag time in providing updated information via the
knowledge solution.
Taking control of the content with
KCS roles
Adopting this KCS principle provides a solution
to this bottleneck, by allowing anyone to edit
an article as they use it, crowd sourcing the
responsibility and speeding up a process by
distributing the work among many, depending on
the environment, both employees and customers.
Naturally, parameters must be set so that correct
information is captured and made viewable, not
letting ‘wrong solutions’ be seen by everyone.
This can be set up by using the KCS roles, such
as allowing anyone to suggest an edit, however,
only allowing edits made by a senior role to be
published as “the official article”. Using these
processes, the customer end users will only see
the approved, official knowledge articles, while
internal support employees may be able to see the
“suggested edits” and decide for themselves if the
edit yesterday may be a good choice versus the
approved article from last year.
Focusing on the needed material
While this addresses the first scenario, the
second is perhaps even more time consuming, as
organizations consider moving onto new platforms
periodically, and combining multiple repositories
is discussed. While every environment is different,
basic reporting on the existing knowledge articles
will provide some indication of usage and the
approach that should be taken. Whether the
decision is made to migrate all of the existing
articles over, or to leave them in place and build
up new articles based on demand. The KCS-driven
solution is to only review and edit articles as they
are needed. This relieves the pressure of having
to assign hundred, thousands, and even tens of
thousands of articles out to SMEs, and time is not
wasted on checking information that may never be
used again.
With these processes being applied to both
scenarios, companies are seeing a huge increase in
productivity, and metrics are improving across the
board.
Next part covers the third principle of KCS –
Develop a knowledge base of an organization’s
collective experience to-date.
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Principle 3: Develop a know-
ledge base of an organization’s
collective experience
In this third part, we look at knowledge as a
collective experience, and how the combined
expertise and experience of the organization are
far greater than that of any one individual. It’s
about creating involvement and spreading the
risks, without leaving anyone feeling minimized.
Embracing KCS as a new methodology is not easy,
and requires a culture shift, with an accompanying
adjustment of processes, measurements and
sometimes, even, compensation. As companies
move from a mindset of solely rewarding the
individual for their personal skill set and experience
to one that recognizes both the individual and also
the team, a massive change occurs.
Collective gathering and sharing of
information
A key factor in this change is recognizing that
while subject matter experts (SME’s) are usually
recognized as the ‘go to’ person in an organization,
as environments change and new products and
services are released, the ability of one person
to have all of the information about a specific
item becomes not only an impossibility, but
also a liability. The rapid pace of change within
organizations has outstripped the ability of most
employees to keep up. In addition, the sheer
thought of a company being put in the position of
not knowing how to solve an issue, because the
only employee(s) who knows how to do so leave
the company, strikes fear into the heart of any
leader.
KCS gives us a process for reducing this risk, by
motivating and encouraging a hive-like mentality,
much like what occurs in bees, ants and other
insects that work together for a common good.
Just as these tiny communities pass information
back about a food source, danger to the hive,
or any other change that is occurring, the best
practice is for all individuals to contribute their
own knowledge, thus aggregating ALL of the
information into one source that can be accessed
by everyone.
To benefit from the differences
An organization need to look only as far as their
ticketing system (or knowledge solution) to see
example after example of how the collective
experience can benefit the organization. For
example, either while performing ticket quality
assurance assessments or, most often seen, during
problem management research and discovery, it is
relatively easy to note how different solutions can
be presented to identical issues by different people.
Not only does wording vary from person to person,
but the steps and depth of each solution can
present a wide range of possibilities, and each one
of them can be correct!
Making the changes positive for
everyone
By capturing the information that the organization
is collectively experiencing through interactions
with both the customer and each other, the bottle
neck approach of a SME holding all the pertinent
information is relieved, and along with it, the
fear that all knowledge could walk out the door
one day. Getting to this stage, however, can be
a challenge, in that SME’s recognize their skillset,
knowledge and abilities and can be concerned that,
from their view, ‘once everything is documented,
there won’t be a need for them’.
While a common concern, this can easily be
addressed by showing the progress and forward
direction of the organization, and the continued
need for the SME’s to learn the new products and
services which will be released in coming months
and years. In addition, their skill sets often translate
into additional responsibilities and new roles as
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the organization evolves and grows, a career path
which should be shared with them.
Finally, rewarding and recognizing their
contributions is vital to KCS, a component which
will be covered in the following part about
Gamification!
Principle 4: Reward learning,
collaboration, sharing and
improving
Gamification is the application of game design
and game mechanics in a work or social setting to
motivate individuals and teams to perform specific
and often repetitive actions. A core principle of
KCS is rewarding and recognizing effort, and it has
proven to be a successful combination when used
with gamification to achieve this, both immediate
and long term. In this article you will learn about
the goals of reward and recognition, how to
calculate the scoring and how to steer the content
work with gamification.
Every week, companies across the globe struggle
with the same challenges when implementing
a Knowledge solution and Knowledge Centered
Support (KCS). Once the processes are created
and the tool is implemented, the actual day to
day performance comes under scrutiny, with
metrics being analyzed and meetings being held
to determine (from the CIO) why knowledge ‘isn’t
working’, and (from the CFO) where is the ROI?
Regardless of how perfect the project plan
seemed, the first struggle is getting employees
and customers to use the tool (and follow the
processes). While the workflow may have seemed
straightforward, and even easy to do, most
employees, and most people, regard any sort of
change as difficult, and will resist anything that
could be perceived as adding to their workload. A
well-engineered and fully integrated solution will
make their lives easier, however, the reality is that
it still requires their participation and investment,
even to perform the routine, yet key steps.
The goal –immediate and long term
reward
Companies turn to training, workshops and
frequent communications to jumpstart new
initiatives; however, a core principle of KCS is
rewarding and recognizing effort. A well thought
out KCS program will not only incentivize the
employees to follow the Knowledge processes,
but will also reward them for each behavior that
ingrains the pattern needed into their daily work
flow. Gamification formalizes and automates both
immediate and long term reward and recognition
so that employees (and later customers) will ‘buy in’
to the processes, which is critical for not only the
program launch, but also the continued success.
How to calculate the scoring
The first steps in Gamification are to decide exactly
what behavior you wish to incent. For example,
when a knowledge program is in its first steps, the
concentration is usually on searching, creating
new articles and then editing existing articles.
This focus will feed the knowledge solution with
new information and ensure that articles are kept
relevant by the continuous review and updating of
existing articles as they are used. Because both of
these are core functions of KCS, they merit equal
scoring when calculating the participation rates.
Also, whether an organization decides to import
existing knowledge articles or to start fresh and
create all new articles as they are needed, the
employees should be searching the knowledge
solution for existing content before creating a new
article. When it is found, it should be linked to the
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About ComAround
ComAround is a global knowledge solution provider headquartered in Stockholm Sweden. We are
an industry leader in SaaS based self service solutions. We have been developing smart services
for more than twenty years now, helping users working with technology tools to resolve their
problems quickly.
ticketing system (CRM or ITSM), and while the
level of effort to link an article is minimal (because
systems should be integrated, making one click
linking possible), this should still be rewarded and
counted.
A robust knowledge solution will automate the
calculations needed, and display the results, both
for individual employees on their own view of the
tool, and also overall in a Top 10 type of display.
This provides an immediate feedback every time
an employee reaches a new milestone (first article
created, tenth article created, etc.), and also fosters
a sense of pride when the employee makes the
leaderboard and is recognized (virtually) in front of
everyone for their hard work.
Let gamification lead the content in the
right direction
Once the program is established, gamification will
ensure continuous improvement by periodically
conducting a competition which will garner
attention and refocus on the key performance
objectives that are needed. For example, a
company may notice that the quality of article
is waning, and launch a 30 day quest in which
Article Edits are scored at a higher point count, and
all employees who achieve a certain number of
Edits are awarded a virtual badge that is displayed
when they log in, as well as a summary list that
is displayed organization wide. In addition, many
companies tally scores (automatically) for overall
‘points’ as well as a rolling 30 or 90 day total, so
that a new employee may participate and be
recognized as much as a seasoned veteran.
Gamification works, and more and more
companies are turning to it, with an estimated 70%
of Fortune 2000 companies planning to implement
some form of it by 2015. Great organizations are
embracing it, and seeing an increase in productivity
and employee happiness, which in turns leads to
greater ROI.
Read more
Knowledge bank: www.comaround.com/the-concept/knowledge-bank
Blog: comaround.wordpress.com/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/comaround
By: Brandon Caudle
Customer Experience Visionary and
ComAround Advisory
