January/February 2007
What techniques can we use to encourage greater web self-service adoption?
(Congratulations to the reader from Xerox who submitted this month's topic!)

In This Issue:
Techniques to Drive WSS Adoption
Use Incentives to Encourage KM Adoption
What's New in InQuira 8

Increasingly, consumers look to the Web as the resource of choice for researching and answering all their questions, support and otherwise. Google and other Web-wide information sources have benefited most dramatically from this developing consumer dynamic, but do not underestimate its potential impact on consumers' expectations for your site. To maximize user adoption, your Web self-service initiatives must not only satisfy corporate objectives, but must meet or even exceed consumer expectations. We lay out here four techniques for implementing Web self-service on your customer-facing websites.

1. Involve your customers from the start
Do not assume that you know what will work best for your customers. If you intend to create a self-service experience that meets your customers' needs—one that will encourage them to utilize your website over other channels—bring them into the design process from the beginning. Build the self-service channel based on the customers' perspective. Build the self-service channel through the lens of its targeted users. Use surveys, interviews and usability focus groups to understand customers' objectives for each visit, the challenges they face in finding the information they need, and their priorities and preferences for accessing that information in a self-directed way. Throughout the design phase, solicit feedback from your customers. Be prepared to make modifications throughout each phase of the project.

2. Create a personalized online dialogue with your customers
Design the interaction process with more than deflection in mind; strive to provide each customer with an extraordinary customer experience. Guide them to information that not only meets their needs, but anticipates and delivers the information of subsequent or related needs. Think of Web self-service as a virtual concierge to your customer. Design an experience to engage the customer, and personalize the subsequent interaction to the needs of each unique customer. Exceed your customers' expectations.

3. Promote and educate
Direct your customers to the self-service channel through ongoing promotion and education. Do not expect your customers to know that the self-service option exists. Develop a strategy for generating awareness throughout your company. Tell your customers about the self-service channel and how to use it. Broadcast details on your home page. Highlight the self-service channel in your direct marketing campaigns and customer communications, including invoices and bills. Include links to the self-service site in all email responses to customers. Promote the self-service website in place of hold music while customers wait to speak with an agent. And, whenever customers utilizes an alternate channel to solve a problem or to find information, use that as an opportunity to educate them about their self-service options. Train agents to be self-service advocates.

4. Evolve with your customers
Implementing self-service offerings is not a static process; it requires ongoing maintenance and improvements. Analytics are the best way to monitor user acceptance and self-service effectiveness. Customer surveys can ensure you are not making incorrect assumptions about what the metrics mean. Use the information you receive from analytics and surveys to continuously tune your self-service processes to your customers' advantage.

The bottom line: Web self-service adoption depends heavily on delivering the right customer experience for every interaction. If a customer has a successful experience through the Web self-service channel, they are more likely to continue using it.

Web self-service initiatives fail without quality content backing them up. So just as important as customer adoption of Web self-service, you need employee adoption of your knowledge management (KM) processes and tools to feed the Web self-service system. One successful strategy to encourage KM adoption is to offer incentives.

Reward the desired behavior
Employees tend to be attached to the current processes in place and may be unwilling to move out of their comfort zones to embrace new processes and technologies. In order to make a successful shift in culture, first, organizations need to help employees understand the desired results and how they will be measured. Subsequently, they have to develop ways to recognize user KM adoption and reward key KM contributors accordingly, thus encouraging its use. According to Ladd Bodem, Principal and co-founder of market research firm ServiceXRG, “Rewarding and recognizing efforts to share knowledge is a powerful way to encourage this activity.” He suggests considering periodic bonuses to individuals with exemplary efforts, peer recognition combined with cash, and project work available to individuals who actively share knowledge as three incentive strategies.

How InQuira can help
InQuira Information Manager 8.0 supports a reward system by providing a reputation model. Authors are awarded points for their contributions, and achieve reputation levels based upon their total points and defined point range for the level. For instance, points are provided to an author for each time their document is used to solve a case, taking into account the value of resolving that case to the company. Points can be determined and configured in the system for various activities, providing more points for more valued activities. As an example, ten points may be given each time an author's document is used to solve a case, with multipliers based upon the case value, whereas contributing a new document results in five points being given to the author. Authors can see their total points and reports show where they rank compared to others.

In essence, you create a transparent knowledge environment where the most valued contributors are recognized for their contributions. This benefits the contributor, the company as a whole, and the customer, who ultimately consumes that knowledge.

InQuira introduces several new and enhanced products and features with InQuira 8, including comprehensive collaboration functionality with the new InQuira Discussion Forums, built on top of InQuira Information Manager and tightly integrated with InQuira Intelligent Search. Forum posts are automatically filtered with the search engine to return possible answers or provide context sensitive marketing offers. Knowledge content can be contributed directly from the forums.

As part of the release, InQuira introduces InQuira Information Center. Information Center brings Intelligent Search, Discussion Forums, and Information Manager together into a comprehensive knowledge portal. Information Center takes advantage of many new Information Manager features, including subscriptions and personalization. Information Manager also includes usability improvements for managing knowledge content.

InQuira 8 Intelligent Search introduces a new System Manager and Event Log Viewer to ease the administration of the system, reducing complexity and improving problem diagnosis.

InQuira 8 Analytics is enhanced with Session and User Experience analysis which includes new reports on InQuira Personalized Navigation, InQuira Process Wizards, and complete session and activity analysis.

InQuira 8 will be available to customers in February 2007, first on Windows and Oracle platforms and subsequently on all remaining supported platforms, including Linux and Solaris.

If you are interested in speaking with an InQuira sales representative to learn more, please contact us: http://www.inquira.com/contact.asp