Tools are much less important than a robust process. This theme recurred throughout both Best Practices sessions. While a good tool is a great help, attendees told success stories achieved without a serious tool, and disaster stories when a tool could not overcome general indifference to knowledge management. You need people and a reasonable process for maintaining knowledge more than a tool.
Make document creation painless. A critical component of knowledge management is getting enough contributions of new documents. Avoid asking contributors to use complex templates and fancy formats: a simple, short, not pretty document is better than none.
Beware of the incentives you use with the team. Simple quotas for creating new documents will generate many documents, but the documents won’t necessarily be useful, or even contain truly new information. It’s better to require publishing-grade documents (but don’t be surprised if all the documents are created in the last week of the quarter). An interesting twist would be to reward the staff for the number of times documents they created got used in the process of resolving cases – if you can indeed capture that level of detail.
Try to close the loop with the product documentation. One fearless attendee reported that all knowledge base documents go to the Tech Pubs team for potential inclusion in future product documentation. The rest of us could only gawk in awe. Let’s be inspired by her example!
Traditional tools can be resource sinks. Complex categorization and keyword definition requirements may help searches, but they require so much work to create and maintain that many attendees actually recommended a good search engine and little categorization.
Target maintenance. It would be great to review all documents on a regular basis, and some attendees create an expiration date on each document that causes it to go back through the review process. If you’re short on resources, however, it’s fine to target the most heavily used documents for review and leave it at that. And although our inner pack rat may cringe at the idea, some attendees simply purged older documents that had had no traffic in a long time. (Others kept them around for those customers who are still using old releases that have long been forgotten by the staff!)
Encourage customers to use the knowledge base. Attendees recommended a variety of techniques, starting with providing a high-quality knowledge base, promoting it via the support reps, who can point out to customers whenever they resolve an issue through the help of the knowledge base, and mentioning the online self-service tools when customers call the support hotline. For free support, it’s fine to force customers to do one pass through the knowledge base before allowing them to log a new case.
Paths are different for small and large companies. While large companies often require and can afford powerful tools and funding dedicated teams, neither are a requirement for smaller companies.
ROI can be hard to find. Knowledge management is not a guaranteed path to savings. Many attendees reported difficulties getting enough resources and focus to achieve their knowledge management goals. All noted that knowledge management is a process, not a one-time event. The real challenge is not so much populating the knowledge base to begin with, but rather keeping it current and fresh. A key component for attendees who felt their knowledge management setup was working well was to integrate knowledge management with case management, so building and maintaining knowledge is not a separate chore, but part of resolving customer issues.
About the Author
Francoise Tourniaire is the founder and principal of FT Works, a consulting firm that helps technology companies create and grow their support operations. She’s the author of The Art of Software Support, a practical guide for support managers and executives. For more information, visit www.ftworks.com or call 650 559 9826.
