Making life easier for users with simple, intuitive knowledge management
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James Leslie, VP Professional Services at Transversal, walks us through some Knowledge Management Best Practices, ranging from how to optimize your content through to tools which can make your life easier.
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Making life easier for users with simple, intuitive knowledge management
- 1. Making life easier for you and your users JAMES LESLIE VP PROFESSIONAL SERVICES Knowledge Management Simplified
- 2. “Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.” (Duhon, Gartner Group, 1998) What is Knowledge Management? “Knowledge management is the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.” (Davenport, 1994)
- 3. What should Knowledge Management be? SIMPLE TO FIND TO UNDERSTAND TO MONITOR TO MANAGE INTUITIVE INNOVATIVE EVOLVING
- 4. REDUCE Customer Effort Channel Shift Escalation AHT Why Simple? INCREASE FCR CSAT AHT
- 7. Offline is the new luxury
- 8. Online is the New Norm Online is the new norm
- 9. Online is the new norm
- 10. Online is the new norm
- 11. Online is the new norm
- 12. Online is the new norm
- 13. Online is the new norm
- 14. Mobile devices in 2014 350k 525k 1.5 million
- 15. Mobile Devices in 2014 More Connected Devices Than People
- 16. Device Smart technology tailors the way your knowledge is displayed to the device that it’s on. Knowledge should be Device Smart
- 17. » The internet is pan-generational » Users expect instant gratification » People seek self-service rather than interaction Generation Internet
- 23. 40,000 search queries per second 145 million per hour 3.5 billion per day » People use Google as a first point of contact » Where do your users go when they want help? The Google Effect
- 24. {Barclays screen capture video}
- 25. » Automatically optimize content with no need for Adwords, keywords, metadata or manual intervention to drive up your rankings » Almost half the traffic to Transversal hosted optimized pages comes through Google Optimized Knowledge
- 27. »Prescience APIs give you the freedom to embed consistent knowledge everywhere. Knowledge Everywhere
- 32. Answer contextual questions on your pages before they’ve been asked. PrescienceAPIs inside your site
- 33. Complementary, related entries based on what users might ask next, can answer questions before they are asked, automatically. Smart Links
- 34. Guide users to their answers in the simplest way. Decision Trees
- 35. »Perform a live search that adapts as the user types Predictive Search
- 36. {video – iplayer “watch abroad”}
- 37. »Inject knowledge into contact forms to search knowledge articles and return common questions relating to their query Supercharge Escalation channels
- 40. »Keep text concise »Make it media rich with images, videos and sound files Easy to Scan
- 41. »Use your customer’s language »Use active voice Easy to Read
- 42. » Utilise readability tools such as Gunning Fog Index or Flesch Reading Ease tool – free at checktext.org “Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.” Readability Tools
- 44. Knowledge is not a one-off project, it should constantly evolve. Evolve your Knowledge Ecosystem Deploy MonitorOptimize
- 45. Get ratings on the quality of your entries Feedback - Ratings
- 46. »Find out how you can improve the quality of the entry when it is under-performing. Feedback – Textual Healing
- 47. {video of isp ratings}
- 48. »Evaluate the reasons people escalate and see if you can fill gaps in the knowledgebase. Fill Knowledge Gaps
- 49. Look for Patterns Next generation tools like TrendWatch find themes in search queries, email and social media, allowing you to address them before they become issues
- 50. »Regularly review content to ensure that it is up to date »Remove unused or duplicate content to make it easier for users to find their answer and improve search results Regularly refresh content
- 52. What should Knowledge Management be? SIMPLE TO FIND TO UNDERSTAND TO MONITOR TO MANAGE INTUITIVE INNOVATIVE EVOLVING
- 53. Questions?
Editor's Notes
- HI, I'm James Leslie - VP of Professional Services at Transversal. I’m here today to talk to you Simplifying Knowledge management - Hopefully there will be elements of this presentation that every single one of you can take away today and use to improve your Knowledge Management implementation. A lot of what I’m going to be covering today will be looking primarily at Web Self-service, but if you are here from a contact centre or HR sector, don’t worry.... Most of these best practices go across all the sectors. For contact centres, your users are your agents, and for HR, in many ways the only real difference is that we’re restricting who can get access to the information on your implemetations to the people within your company, but 90% of the same principles apply
- So let’s start right at the beginning here and looking at a quick definition of what Knowledge Management or KM, is… back in 1994 the American academic Thomas Davenport came up with this definition which is still widely quoted today. 4 years later in 98, Bryant Duhon from Gartner expanded on this to what is probably the most widely accepted definition of Knowledge Management…. So who’s still awake? Not the ideal way to start the graveyard slot on a Tuesday afternoon? This makes Knowledge Management seem pretty dull, huh? Yeah, we think so too… so we like to think about it a little differently….
- We believe there is a better way to look at knowledge Management, not so much what it is but what it should be….. I believe, we believe it should be intuitive, innovative and evolving - because we think it should be simple for people to find good help, simple to understand it and simple for you to monitor and manage it. Now that sounds better, right? and that’s why we have been developing the next generation of our Prescience technologies, And if we follow this approach, we’re going to have a truly positive effect on the user’s experience and the metrics that matter to you…..
- (READ METRICS AND EXPLAIN) Paradox - you may find that successful KM implementation can lead to an increase in AHT largely because we can remove so much of the low hanging fruit – allowing your agents to concentrate on the higher value, more complex enquiries instead Consistent AHT You can also reduce training time for your staff by having a consistent centralized knowledgebase
- So let’s have a look at some of the things that we can do to make Knowledge simple to find, understand, monitor and manage… starting with making things to simple to find.
- The internet has had the fastest uptake of any form of technology in the history of our planet. We, like hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on it for our work life as well as for so many facets of our personal lives. For most of us it has been accessible for less than 20 years and yet, it is in every part of the globe linking people with knowledge in completely unprecedented ways, and of course photos of cats looking like celebrities…
- The internet is so prevalent in our world now that we hear that Offline has become the new luxury. It’s a great slogan, but it’s more than that – it resonates with people wanting to escape email, messenger, facebook, twitter and those buzzfeed questionairres that tell you which breakfast cereal you are. Remote holiday destinations advertise being offline as one of their key features, People pay to have de-tech weekends, Hotels offering rooms which block phone signals, Restaurants even offer discounts if you check in your mobile phone before dining. This is for one simple reason: If offline is the new luxury, that is purely because…..
- Online is the new norm Be it on desktops…
- Laptops
- Tablets
- Phones
- E-book readers
- -----STOP----- Or TVs where if you are not watching programmes via the internet, you’re encouraged to live tweet your opinion on what you’re seeing. Even watches are online these days….do we have any here? Practically every day a new device comes out, or a new way of viewing the internet, and as the Internet of Things continues to grow, this is going to increase at an exponential rate…
- On average last year, there were 350k babies born every day 525k iPhones made And a staggering 1.5 million android devices Every day
- There are more than 10 billion devices connected to the internet at any one time – that’s more connected devices than people on the planet – Given how different all these devices are it’s easy to see how complicated it could be to push knowledge to them, but the good news is that we make it simple for you…
- We use Device Smart technology to tailor the way that your knowledge is displayed to the device it is being viewed on. You may have heard of Responsive Design. Well, this is like Responsive Design+. We’re taking responsive to the next level where we can also detect the type of device accessing the information to add additional layers to the presentation or even deliver adapted content. User journeys often vary depending on the device they are using, so let’s tailor the help that we provide to that device from the same knowledge repository, without you or the user needing to do anything. It just works.
- We’ve been talking about these users with all their multiple devices, but who are they? Who are our users? The internet is not about Millenials or Generation X, Y or Z… it is pan-generational – a demographic we can simply term Generation Internet. Generation Internet seek instant gratification – if they can’t find the product or information they are looking for on your site, they are perfectly happy to go to a competitor’s site instead. The idea that people don’t want to self-serve is simply wrong. Self-service is ingrained into everyday life now…. We all use….
- ATMs instead of bank counters
- Checkouts in supermarkets
- Check-ins at airports – we’re somehow automatically cooler than those rookie travellers in the check-in queue when using one of those, aren’t we?
- ----STOP------ And Ticket machines…and these are just examples of physical self-service… However, The biggest example of self-service in the world comes from California and most of the people in this room will have already used it today….
- Like them or Loathe them, there’s no denying these guys…. And apologies to anyone with an interest in other search engines (they do exist), but at the point your brand name becomes the definitive verb for your business sector, you know you’ve got it sewn up.
- For many people, Google is the first point of call when they have an issue. We all do it – if you get an error message on your printer at home, what do you do? You google the error message If you want to know when the supermarket is open until on a Sunday, Where do you go to first to find out that answer? At least half of us are likely to go straight to google and ask there directly. So where do you users go when they want help? Transversal’s optimized pages give you ultra-findability for the information in your knowledgebase – reaching audiences asking general questions as well as ones that are specific to your company, for example….
- Screen grab video – Barclays – how long does a cheque take to clear
- Our Prescience technology automatically optimizes the content you put in without the need for any specialist knowledge, keywords, paid adwords, meta tags or any weird and not so wonderful blackhat techniques. I mentioned that about half of us would head straight for Google if we have an issue… I didn’t pluck that number out of the air… our statistics show that almost half the traffic to the public pages we host comes from Google. Here’s another general query that can drive traffic, and therefore potential customers to your site, even if they are not including your brand in their search (Mothercare video)
- {mothercare screen capture video}
- While Google is a great resource for information it is of course not the be all and end all. Knowledge should be an intrinsic part of your multichannel strategy, so that you have ONE consistent answer across all your channels Embed it in Apps…
- Apps
- CRM Systems
- Or chat environments to empower your agents with one consistent answer. All of this can easily be achieved by integrating our knowledge into your systems via Prescience APIs
- We can even aspire to the “zero click” utopia where we answer a user’s question without them being aware they had one. That sounds crazy, right? Well, with minimum effort you can use our Prescience APIs to embed knowledge into pages on your own site that is contextual to those pages, and pull in the most commonly asked questions about those specific areas. Embedding knowledge this way, can have great effects - Amazon
- If a user has found their answer, wouldn’t it be great to give them easy access to any follow-on questions they may have? The concept of Related entries have been around for years but depending on how they are delivered, they can need a large amount of manual administration. Our next generation Smart Links automatically categorise and recognise relations so that you don’t have to. Again, we’re trying to answer questions before they even arise
- Decision Trees can guide your users through a series of options until they reach their goal - maybe finding which type of mortgage, mobile phone or car booster seat is most appropriate for them. You can also help your contact centre agents to diagnose complicated technical problems for the user. We’re keeping it simple.
- We’re all used to Google autocompleting common search terms as we type, and it’s useful, right? We can take that a step further and perform a live natural language search that will return and refine results as a user types, making it quick and straightforward for them to find their answers. This is technology that we can embed within self-service, agent portals, CRM integrations, Chat environments or anywhere you want to
- It varies across different audiences, but we commonly see around a 1/3rd of users select an entry from the live search, with around 40% of those leaving the site after viewing that entry. We can’t say with 100% certainty that all of those queries been successfully resolved, but a large amount of them will have been.
- There will always be some users who want to contact you without attempting to self-serve first. Don’t try and prevent this from happening - we want to reward people for finding their answer through self-service, rather than penalising customers who feel that they should speak to you. However we can use subtle techniques to get them self-serving unobtrusively within the escalation process. We can inject contextual knowledge based on their subject and issue summary to offer help without adversely affecting their journey. And who knows, if they can find their answer without needing to wait for a response, maybe they’ll try self-serving first before hitting the contact button next time.
- Language and tone of voice are intrinsic to a successful knowledgebase solution. These 2 elements help to reflect your brand, and along with simple readability rules can make your knowledgebase simple to understand
- People scan websites. Keep your text as concise as possible, and punctuate it with rich media items such as images or video where appropriate.
- Use your customer’s language, rather than your internal terminology. Most of the time it is not important to the customer how something gets fixed, only that it gets fixed. Use the active voice wherever possible in your entries, pose questions such as “What are your delivery charges?” rather than just “Delivery charges”. Countless studies have shown that people pick active voice results above the same sentiment in a passive voice, as we identify our needs with the question as it is posed rather than a general phrase on the subject.
- Readability tools can help you to assess how easy to understand your knowledgebase items are. The amusingly named Gunning Fog Index assesses the readability of your text by working out the number of years of education that you would need to understand a block of text, based on punctuation, number of words and the number of syllables used in those words. Simplifying your text using tools like this doesn’t mean dumbing down your answers, it’s purely making them easier to understand. One of the improvements that Michael touched upon earlier, is that we will be adding the ability to check these readability scores of an entry with a single click of a button from within the entry editing page, but in the meantime you can check the quality of your article at checktext.org.
- Lastly, we get to how you can make your knowledgebase Simple to monitor and manage. I’ve grouped these 2 together because they are so tightly linked in the Knowledge eco-system
- When thinking of knowledge, we need to think of it as a life-form, something that is constantly being refined and nurtured to become the best that it can. That doesn’t mean a huge commitment of resource, but to get the most out of it, and see year on year improvements, we need to monitor and tweak it on an ongoing basis. The more stakeholders who have an input the better – staff of all levels, be they managers, shop floor, support agents, or admin staff should be encouraged to suggest refinements and to help spot gaps in your knowledgebase. But often the most useful stakeholders you have are the people posing the questions - your customers, - they know more about what they expect and need to have answered than you do
- There is a number of different ways that we regularly give feedback on the internet, whether it be rating a product on Amazon, a restaurant on Trip Advisor, a film on IMDB or Liking a post on Facebook. We can add the same functionality to see how people feel about the quality of your knowledgebase item. Did it answer their question? How would they rate it out of 5 stars? Do they “Like” it?
- Go a step further by finding out what it is that they did or didn’t like about the entry, and more importantly how it can be improved. When I get that Feedback it’s like Textual Healing
- Use a pre-defined list for the user to select from or have a free text box to get exactly how they feel. Was the entry confusing? Did it have a broken link? Was it misleading? This is invaluable feedback that allows you to tweak your entries and ensure that over a period of time your average rating score is going up – and therefore answering more questions successfully.
- You can use the feedback you gained to improve the quality of your knowledgebase But by evaluating the contact reasons when people speak to your agents, we can see if we have gaps in the knowledgebase. If so, we can quickly add an entry to cover that topic and get more people to self-serve with such issues in the future.
- Tools such as TrendWatch can look for themes across a number of different sources including search, email and social media to uncover bubbling themes before they become major service issues, allowing you to publish content to help deal with the situation before it gets out of hand.
- I mentioned earlier that to get the full value from your knowledgebase, we want to keep it constantly evolving. A large part of this is reviewing and refreshing the content in it to ensure that it is still relevant and required. If entries aren’t being used, or are no longer relevant, clear them out of your knowledge base to avoid unnecessary noise. We see on average, that 80-90% of normal service inquiries are resolved by 15-20% of the content on a site, so keeping a restrained approach to your knowledge base, while of course ensuring that you don’t create more knowledge gaps is a great move.
- I’ve talked a lot for the last half hour or so, I’ve thrown statistics and facts at you, alongside a lot of our best practice guidelines, and hopefully not too many of you have nodded off in this mid-afternoon slot, but to round this off, let’s go back to where we started….
- Don’t worry… I’m not going to bore you again with those cold definitions of what Knowledge Management is, because it’s much more important for us to look at what Knowledge Management should be for us and for our users…. At Transversal we believe that Knowledge Management should be Intuitive, Innovative and Evolving. Hopefully I have shown you a few ways that it can be all of those things, to help make it more effective in your business, whether it be via web self-service, a contact centre environment or an HR environment. Hopefully we’ve seen that by taking some easy steps, we can make Knowledge simple to find and simple to understand for your users, and simple for you to monitor and manage.