The document discusses the importance of a dynamic knowledge management infrastructure for enhancing self-service capabilities in customer support. It emphasizes three critical areas: building customer-contextual knowledge, understanding knowledge coverage ratios, and enabling content vitality to ensure customers can resolve issues quickly and effectively. The integration of adaptive technology and continuous content improvement is necessary for organizations to maintain high customer satisfaction and effectively manage evolving support needs.

1. conversational knowledge. While this may
require a significant “rewiring” of how your
call center agents handle customer calls, a
robust knowledge infrastructure will
empower them to accomplish this without
additional overhead.
2. Understand your knowledge cover-
age ratio. Knowledge coverage is another
factor to consider when planning to roll out
self-service. Simply stated, how many of the
known issues with your products have well-
documented solutions? As noted in the
example above, most customers may search
twice on your self-service website, but each
attempted search that fails will reduce their
confidence in self-resolving their issue.
By studying coverage closely, you’ll
increase the chance that your customers will
succeed in resolving their issues via self-serv-
ice. With a robust knowledge management
infrastructure, your organization can become
proactive in closing those gaps by analyzing
reports that identify areas where customers
were not successful in finding a resolution.
Understanding this coverage ratio, and proac-
tivelydevelopingknowledgetocovermoreres-
olutions, will substantially increase success
rates on self-service.
3. Enable content vitality. A final factor
is putting in place a knowledge infrastructure
that enables knowledge vitality, or freshness,
through deeply integrated processes. Know-
ledge is ever-evolving. Unlike product
manuals, which are typically tailored to a
static state, your customers’ experiences
are dynamic and ever-changing. Your self-
service knowledge should reflect the best
resolutions of this cumulative set of customer
experiences.
The best way to capture these experi-
ences is through integrating systems and
processes throughout your customer lifecy-
cle management approach. The right know-
ledge management infrastructure will enable
this content vitality by empowering both
your customers and employees to participate
in real-time knowledge improvements.Your
empowered employees should be able to
modify knowledge on issues as they evolve,
giving your organization the ability to
present the best knowledge options to your
customers in real time.
A Dynamic Environment is the
Ultimate Goal
When considering self-service, it is
important to remember that customer-cen-
tric knowledge is not created just by your
organization. It intimately involves your
customer in a constantly evolving ecosys-
tem. To improve your customers’chances of
finding the right knowledge, at the right
time, the three focus areas above should
serve as foundation blocks for your knowl-
edge management solution. T
KNOVA, a Consona CRM solution, maximizes the value
of every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle.
Built on an adaptive search and knowledge management
platform, KNOVA’s suite of applications integrates with
CRM implementations to help companies increase rev-
enues, reduce service costs and improve customer satis-
faction. Industry leaders including AOL, Ford, HP, Novell,
McAfee and H&R Block rely on KNOVA’s award-winning
service resolution management applications to power an
intelligent customer experience on their websites and
within their contact centers. For more information, visit
www.knova.com.
Dynamic Knowledge
Management
Key to Better Web Self-Service
We’ve all experienced it—a product that
we’vecome to rely on suddenlymalfunctions.
Afterattempting to troubleshoot the issue our-
selves, our next instinct is to search for a solu-
tion on the product’s website. If we’re lucky,
we’ll arrive at a resolution, successfully
“deflecting” a call into the product company’s
call center. All too often, however, the web-
site fails to get us to that resolution. We may
try searching the site again, maybe with a dif-
ferent set of keywords, but we probably won’t
try a third time.
At that point the product company faces
two residual problems. First, we may head off
“ontothecloud”toseeifanInternetsearchcan
produce a solution, one that is outside the con-
trol of the product company. Or, we’ll call the
company, thereby creating an exponential
increaseinthecostofhandlingthatissue.Both
suboptimal directions are often the result of
inadequate knowledge availability for self-
service users.
Many companies struggle to understand
that self-service technology can only
achieve its optimal benefits when it enables
a dynamic ecosystem of knowledge man-
agement. We can’t find knowledge if it is
out of context, out of date or just not avail-
able. To get the most out of your knowledge
infrastructure, all three of these issues need
to be addressed:
1. Build knowledge that is in the context
of your customer. Many organizations
incorrectly assume that publishing product
manuals, and similar formal descriptive docu-
mentation, to the Web will enable their cus-
tomerstosolvetheirownproblems.Whilethis
may work in some instances, most product
manualsaren’tconstructedtoresolvecustomer
issues. In other words, the context of the
knowledge is incorrect.
Building knowledge in the context of the
customer starts by understanding the ques-
tions they ask and keywords they use when
they search for solutions. This process starts
in your call center and extends to your web-
site. In your call center, customer queries
need to be captured in the actual “voice of
the customer.” This point of contact is where
“conversational knowledge” is created.
Much of your success with self-service will
be your organization’s ability to develop
April 2008S10 KMWorld
Nitin Badjatia has
been a technology
consultant, banker
and business
strategist for the last
18 years. At KNOVA,
he’s responsible for
constructing tailored
service resolution
management
solutions for KNOVA
customers. Badjatia
joined KNOVA in
2004 through a merger with ServiceWare
Technologies. Read more from him at his weblog
“Thought Stream” www.nitinbadjatia.com.
Nitin Badjatia
By Nitin Badjatia, Enterprise Solutions Architect, KNOVA
“Self-service
technology can only
achieve its optimal
benefits when it
enables a dynamic
ecosystem of
knowledge
management.”

2. technology must be robust enough to inter-
pret the keywords and present results that
contain similar terms or concepts. Such
contextualized results reflect a knowledge
management approach to enterprise search.
By returning results that have concepts that
are common to the query, your customer’s
chances of a speedy resolution increase
substantially.
That search box must also understand
that many queries are best answered by
invoking a process, not just returning search
results. For example a customer may initi-
ate a request that asks for “password reset.”
Instead of returning a set of results, the
search box should understand the purpose
of that query, and spawn the password reset
process, or resolution wizard. As with con-
textualized search, speed to resolution is the
real key to success.
When the query submitted into the
search box is considered too broad, which
is often the case with single-word queries,
the underlying technology can improve
speed to resolution by not only providing
the best possible content, but also by topi-
cal categorization of relevant content. Con-
tent that is clustered, acting as a filter,
reduces the result set and improves the
speed to resolution.
Successful Search Depends on
Robust Content
Even the most dynamic search technol-
ogy is dependent on a robust set of content
sources. Your customers can’t find content
that isn’t reachable. Often overlooked when
considering search technology, content
ultimately makes the search experience
dynamic and productive for your customers.
Simply exposing product manuals, techni-
cal notes and formally authored content to
a search engine is not sufficient. Dynamic
content management involves an ongoing
analysis of customer queries to better under-
stand where content gaps exist and aligning
content management processes to help close
those gaps.
By enabling a true knowledge manage-
ment-driven search process, customer sup-
port administrators should be empowered to
analyze search query data and proactively
focus on developing new content, or improv-
ing existing content, to increase the number
of successful resolutions for customers.
The goal for your customers is finding
the right answer. The goal for your organi-
zation should be providing that right answer
in a fast, accurate and consistent manner
through a dynamic knowledge management
process. By integrating a robust enterprise
search with a proactive content creation and
maintenance process, you’ll be able to
deliver on the customer’s expectation of
finding the right answers quickly.
KNOVA, a Consona CRM solution, maximizes the value
of every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle.
Built on an adaptive search and knowledge management
platform, KNOVA’s suite of applications integrates with
CRM implementations to help companies increase rev-
enues, reduce service costs and improve customer satis-
faction. Industry leaders including AOL, Ford, HP, Novell,
McAfee and H&R Block rely on KNOVA’s award-winning
service resolution management applications to power an
intelligent customer experience on their websites and
within their contact centers. For more information, visit
www.knova.com.
Your Customers Can
Search, But Do They Find?
Oftentimes when customers come to your
website, they are there to find an answer to
an issue—a resolution to a problem. Many
companies seem to think that attaching a ro-
bust search engine to a content source is
enough to do the trick.
But companies that consider customer
self-service a strategic asset see that
inbound customer exception in a different
light. They realize that customers don’t want
to search for the best result; rather they want
to find a resolution, and find it quickly. It
may state the obvious, but it is important to
note that, while issue resolution must incor-
porate a robust search technology, that tech-
nology must also be intelligent enough to
interpret the underlying meaning of the cus-
tomer query. Furthermore, a holistic view of
issue resolution also considers the nature of
the content that customers are presented,
and empowers your organization to proac-
tively monitor and perfect the resolutions
presented to customers.
That simple text entry box, which usu-
ally is prominently displayed on every page
of your website, has a daunting task. When
a customer enters a search term, typically
no more than two to three words, that box
must launch a query into available content
sources to find the right answer as quickly
and efficiently as possible. On a typical
website, the underlying enterprise search
engine scours your content sources, and
presents the best possible documents that
reflect the queried terms. This is not much
different than popular Web search tools.
Customers are left to fend for themselves
and interpret which query result actually
provides the best possible resolution to their
request. In today’s competitive environ-
ment, leaving customers to fend for them-
selves is not enough.
Understanding the
Customer’s Query
For leading customer-service organiza-
tions, that text entry box needs to be smart
enough to interpret the purpose of the cus-
tomer query. In some instances, query
terms are not exact matches to terms within
your content. In these cases, the underlying
May 2008S22 KMWorld
Nitin Badjatia has
been a technology
consultant, banker
and business
strategist for the last
18 years. At KNOVA,
he’s responsible for
constructing tailored
service resolution
management
solutions for KNOVA
customers. Badjatia
joined KNOVA in
2004 through a merger with ServiceWare
Technologies. Read more from him at his weblog,
“Thought Stream”, www.nitinbadjatia.com.
Nitin Badjatia
By Nitin Badjatia, Enterprise Solutions Architect, KNOVA
“Customers
don’t want to
search for the best
result; rather they
want to find a
resolution, and find
it quickly.”

3. timely editorial review to confirm the
validity of new solutions.
The adaptive organization also recognizes
that a great deal of knowledge resides outside
of the support organization. A dynamic trust-
ed system can incorporate this external
knowledge—oftentimes marketing material,
manuals and other formal documents—into
its results so that support personnel have
access to the best information that is avail-
able. By enabling external communities,
through forums, the adaptive organization
can also capture a wealth of customer knowl-
edge within the trusted system.
Critical to the success of creating and
maintaining a trusted system is its ability to
integrate into the key applications that power
a support organization.A flexible, trusted sys-
tem should seamlessly integrate into incident
management systems, CRM applications and
Web portals to allow for easy, in-process
access to both obtain relevant knowledge and
create new knowledge in a timely and effi-
cient manner.
Define an Adaptive Process
A trusted system alone cannot enable an
adaptive support environment. Along with
implementing a dynamic knowledge man-
agement system, organizations often find a
need to rethink how support personnel han-
dle rapid changes within their environment.
A key theme that emerges is the idea of
training to process, and not to products and
features. Traditional support organizations
spend significant amounts of time educat-
ing both new hires and existing employees
on specific company products and features.
In a dynamic environment, this training can
be obsolete within weeks, and can create
an endless cycle of re-training.
An adaptive organization doesn’t focus
solely on product-oriented training: it
relies on the trusted system to continuous-
ly generate and provide new and reliable
knowledge to support personnel as they
need it. Given this dynamic knowledge
management approach, support personnel
can rely on the process of interacting with
the trusted system to find the best possible
answer, instead of having to memorize a
rapidly changing set of products and crite-
ria. As new products, product revisions and
acquisitions are absorbed by the company,
support can be ready to handle these
changes with the trusted system.
Adaptive Customer Support
Customer support is increasingly becom-
ing the primary connection that customers
have with their vendors. Even the most
dynamic organizations can look flat-footed if
support is ill-prepared to handle a broad
array of unplanned, unexpected support
requests. By enabling a trusted system
through a powerful knowledge management
application, support can be prepared to han-
dle a rapidly changing environment. The
adaptive customer support organization can
drive customer satisfaction, improve key
contact center metrics and often drive prod-
uct improvement cycles. T
KNOVA, a Consona CRM solution, maximizes the value
of every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle.
Built on an adaptive search and knowledge management
platform, KNOVA’s suite of applications integrates with
CRM implementations to help companies increase rev-
enues, reduce service costs and improve customer satis-
faction. Industry leaders including AOL, Ford, HP, Novell
and H&R Block rely on KNOVA’s award-winning service
resolution management applications to power an intelli-
gent customer experience on their websites and within
their contact centers. For more information, visit
www.knova.com.
Planning for Adaptive
Customer Support
Withacceleratingbusinesscycles,everypart
of a company must be ready to adapt to a fluid
business environment. For the customer-sup-
port organization, this often means being pre-
pared to absorb corporate acquisitions, new
product launches and incremental product en-
hancements faster than anticipated.
Gone are the days when company
development cycles churned out new prod-
ucts in a predictable rhythm, when corpo-
rate growth was more organic than acquisi-
tion-driven and support managers had
budgets that grew in parallel to the top line.
Support managers today must struggle
with a broad array of issues, often with lit-
tle or no increase in manpower or budgets.
A well-developed knowledge manage-
ment strategy can enable a support manager
to handle rapid changes, while continuing to
optimize resources and increase the influ-
ence of support throughout the company. A
holistic approach to creating an adaptive
organization takes into consideration both
technology and process challenges.
Design a Trusted System
The heart of any successful customer
support organization is a trusted system—
a common repository which holds the best
information available across the company.
Most often this is a knowledge manage-
ment application. Key factors to consider
in establishing a trusted system include the
ability to author, manage and maintain
content within the system, the ability to
aggregate information from disparate
sources throughout your organization and
the ability of the system to integrate the
system into the core applications of your
support organization.
The adaptive support organization
recognizes that knowledge is created dur-
ing every support interaction. Whether it
is a simple search request that improves
the intelligent search engine’s results, or
a fresh set of procedures that leads to a
better break/fix solution, a trusted system
should capture relevant knowledge dur-
ing each interaction. Content creation
within the trusted system requires a
robust workflow process, allowing for
October 2008S16 KMWorld
By Nitin Badjatia, Enterprise Solutions Architect, KNOVA
Nitin Badjatia has
been a technology
consultant, banker
and business
strategist for the last
18 years. At KNOVA,
he’s responsible for
constructing tailored
service resolution
management
solutions for KNOVA
customers. Badjatia
joined KNOVA in
2004 through a merger with ServiceWare
Technologies. Read more from him at his weblog
“Thought Stream” www.nitinbadjatia.com.
Nitin Badjatia
“A trusted system
should capture
relevant knowledge
during each
interaction.”