Find what you have; capture what you learn; communicate what you know Getting Incredible Results out of Knowledge Management! David Stanley-Jones Director

find what you have; capture what you learn; communicate what you know

Getting Incredible Results out of Knowledge Management!

David Stanley-JonesDirector Service Quality

NWCCP & HDNW

Agenda: Getting incredible results out of KM!

Why KCS & Call Center Issues KCS foundations:

– what it is– fundamental concepts– best practices

KCS vs. Call Center issues: How & why you can excel with KCS KCS benefits for Companies KCS benefits for staff How to measure success Exercise: Is KCS relevant to me? Summary

Why Knowledge Centered Support (KCS)?

Every company uses knowledge management in one form or another –

HOWEVER – not all companies achieve the same level of results with KM.

KCS is a ‘best practice approach to Knowledge Management’ and it has the ability to help you address many of your critical issues….

So just what are those issues that you’re dealing with?

Issues: First contact resolution

Issues: Customer Satisfaction

92 percent of U.S. consumers form their image of a company based on their experience using a call center

63 percent of consumers will stop using a company’s products or services based on a negative call center experience.

Among those calling to express dissatisfaction with a product or service, 86 percent were more likely to stop using the company if their experience with the customer representative was negative.

Customers are becoming less tolerant of long call times, inaccurate answers to questions, unpleasant interactions with service representatives … Gartner predicts that 75 percent of organizations will continue to fail to fully meet customer expectations for customer service excellence through 2007, and the result will be average turnover of 100 percent of the customer base every five years.

[Picking Up Call Center Productivity, Improving Service and Support through Legacy IT Evolution, Seagull White Paper ]

Issues: More from fewer staff; morale

Deterioration of Human Capital - Giga Information Group states that through 2003,

organizations will be forced to continue doing more with less,

and the downsizing that took place during the past eighteen months means remaining workers will need to pick up the load from their departed colleagues, leading to a deterioration of morale.


Giga Information Group, IT Trends 2003 - Human Capital Management, October 9, 2002

Issues: Reduce costs

Cost Reduction Pressures - According to Giga, assisted services for nontechnical calls typically cost from $3 per call to $12, while technical assistance calls frequently range from $12 to $18 or higher.ii

Call center managers are under pressure to reduce these costs…


Issues: Generate revenues

The Need to Capitalize on New Business Opportunities - Gartner predicts that by 2007, 40 percent of call centers will have a significant impact on an enterprise’s revenue stream.iii

The added responsibility of selling will require call center managers to provide their representatives with specialized training. Plus, they will need to find a way to integrate customer-related information captured from across the enterprise and consolidate it into a central database to provide service representatives with a comprehensive view of real-time customer data.

[Picking Up Call Center Productivity, Improving Service and Support through Legacy IT Evolution, Seagull White Paper ]iii - Gartner, Is Self-service the Panacea?, March 11, 2002

Issues: Self service needed to reduce hiring

Growing Trend Toward Self-service - Gartner estimates that three percent of the American workforce works in a call center today ... five percent of the American workforce will be working in call centers by 2010.vi

This rate of growth is alarming for most business owners who will eventually have to allocate more resources for locating and hiring qualified workers, training them and purchasing additional equipment to support them.

Self-service can help control call center costs and enhance the customer experience by focusing on exception handling rather than repetitive questions.


Issues: Provide ‘up to the second information’

Demand for Real-time Customer Service - Thanks to the Web, customers now want and expect up-to-the-second information


Top Ten Reasons you Need KCS

10. Need to respond and resolve problems faster

9. Problems becoming more complex

8. Giving different answers to the same question

7. Support analysts suffering from burnout

6. Little time for training

5. Answering the same questions over and over

4. Opportunity to learn from customers’ experience

3. Need to improve first contact resolution

2. Enable web based self-help

1. You must lower your support costs!



– what it is– fundamental concepts – best practices

KCS vs. Call Center issues: How & why you can excel with KCS. KCS benefits for Companies KCS benefits for staff How to measure success Exercise: Is KCS relevant to me? Summary

The Concepts of KCS

KCS is a methodology and a set of practices and processes that focuses on knowledge as a key asset of the support

organization.

KCS seeks to:

Create content as a by-product of solving problems

Evolve content based on demand and usage

Develop a KB of our collective experience to-date

Reward learning, collaboration, sharing and improving

KCS is not something we do

in addition to solving problems…

KCS becomes the way we solve problems

The Partnership Behind KCS

The Consortium for Service Innovation

Non-profit alliance of support organizations Addresses challenges facing the industry R&D, new business strategies, and cross-industry perspectives

Board of Directors includes support executives from Cisco, HP, Microsoft, Novell, and Oracle.

www.serviceinnovation.org

The Evolution Of KCS – a ‘proven’ approach

KCS originated in 1992 with a simple premise:

To capture, Structure, and Re-use support knowledge

With 10+ years in development and over $45 million invested, KCS has been tried and tested by early adopters that include 3Com, Oracle, Novell, and VeriSign.

Best practice processes – the ‘double loop’





First Contact Resolution – if only I ‘knew the answer’!

The importance of ‘CAPTURE IN THE WORKFLOW’ …. Tacit knowledge

Where is your company’s knowledge stored?

Capturing ‘tacit knowledge’

“We don’t know what we know until someone asks us”

(Dave Snowden, Director of the IBM’s Center for Action Research in Organizational Complexity).

Benefits of ‘capture in the workflow’

Customer wording and context The ‘tacit’ knowledge is recorded and made ‘explicit’

Able to improve first contact resolution

which improves customer satisfaction

and enables staff to do more without working harder

it reduces cost

and provides up to the minute experience

makes it easier for customers to use self-service

Structure for reuse – if only I ‘could find the answer’!

Structuring for reuse’ yields …. consistency, accuracy, speed of retrieval, readability, dynamic prompting of questions to ask

Capture + structure = accuracy, consistency, speed

No throw away effort – distributed/scalable QA

Searching is creating = no throw away effort; either a new or an improved entry results.

JIT quality review = distributed QA by all users. No complaining allowed!





Company benefits

Operational efficiency

30-60% improved time to resolve

Increased support capacity >100%

Improved time to proficiency – months to weeks

Efficient creation of content to enable web self-help

Identification/elimination of root causes

Company benefits

10. Able to respond and resolve problems faster

9. Able to handle more complex problems

8. Give consistent answers to the same question

7. Decrease analysts burnout

6. Decrease time needed for training

5. Reduce answering the same questions over and over

4. Learn from customers’ experience

3. Improve first contact resolution

2. Enable web based self-help

1. Lower your support costs!

Company benefits

Improved customer satisfaction

Generation of new revenues

Provide up to the second information

Self-service

Improved accuracy





Benefits for staff: achievement & recognition!

One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees? by Frederick Herzberg, Harvard Business Review 2002





Install an integrated interactive reporting system

Clear focus on what you need to measure, and what to do, in order to improve your ROI.

Overview of an example reporting system.

Performance Management PlanPerformance Management Plan





KCS exercise …

Write down as many G-rated body part with 3 letters as you can think of.

KCS exercise … what did we learn?

Collectively we know more than we do individually.

Even for things we know a KB can be effective ... especially when speed and accuracy and consistency are needed.

If we had been agents at the Merriam-Webster support center, we would each have given a different answer, and all of them would have been a subset of the complete answer.

KCS and KM isn't just for hard and complicated issues





Summary

If your call times are too long, if first call closure rates are too low, if your web site is underutilized - implementing KCS practices can help improve your results

If you want to create a real and sustainable competitive advantage – KCS is a key.

If you have to support a rapid increase in new products and services – KCS is your life ring!

Summary

KCS isn’t just for help desks – it’s of value to any group that has to answer questions / issues. (recall the ‘body parts’ example)

KCS allows you to ‘tap into the TACIT knowledge’ of your team

KCS is good for companies

KCS is ‘really good’ for staff (achievement, recognition, etc.)

However - KCS does take ‘participation’

Summary – critical success factors

Real ‘management’ support Well defined and executed set of ‘KM roles Ongoing adherence to the 8 processes Change management for the ‘culture’ – communication, motivation,

incentives, personal development, etc. Robust performance management program to weekly track progress to

goals, and guide continuous improvement activities An effective enabling technology

Don’t be discouraged by what’s required – a well focused effort typically provides a HUGE increase in financial benefits, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction!

Thank you

David Stanley-Jones

Director Service Quality

Primus Knowledge Solutions

206-834-8430

[email protected]

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Find what you have; capture what you learn; communicate what you know Getting Incredible Results out of Knowledge Management! David Stanley-Jones Director