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March/April 2007
What best practices exist for capturing knowledge?
(Congratulations to the reader from Chicago Public Schools who submitted this month's topic!)
In This Issue:
Capturing Tacit Knowledge
Jumpstarting Your Knowledge Base With Existing Content
Much of the knowledge circulating within organizations is tacit – not formally documented, perhaps even unspoken. Just think of a co-worker who has been at your company for many years. How much information have they internalized about your processes, products and services? If they are no longer around to share that tacit knowledge, what impact will that have on the organization? Capturing this implicit knowledge so that it can be shared in an explicit manner with customers, partners and other employees is an ongoing challenge.
The key to capturing tacit knowledge is to incorporate it as a by-product of the problem resolution workflow – to inject the ability to capture a solution in real time during the process of a user doing their job, at the point of resolution, without imposing additional burden on the contributor. Ideally, any user can be a contributor to the knowledge base, including external customers, partners and employees. A company needs to decide who authors content, who recommends content, and if there is a publishing review process to make the content available. Tacit knowledge can be captured by creating new content from exchanges with users and by modifying existing content so that it remains up-to-date, accurate and relevant.
Capturing Knowledge Dynamically
Tacit knowledge can be captured on-the-fly during interactions with support agents, or through collaborative communications:
1. Authoring content during a problem resolution process:
When a customer is searching for an answer to a question or problem, perhaps via web self-service, and they are not able to find it, they may seek assistance from a support agent. A support case is opened to track the issue raised by the customer. If a solution does not already exist in the knowledge base, the agent will engage with the customer, and sometimes colleagues as well, to arrive at a resolution. This newly created solution to the user's question can then be captured and formalized, along with the context of the problem in the user's words and other key points tracked in the case, as content to be recommended to the knowledge base. All of this can be accomplished as part of the agent's workflow and even done directly from within the CRM system, as long as it is integrated with search capability and to the knowledge base.
2. Creating content from collaboration:
Chat - Content can be created from chat sessions and linked to a case, or recommended as a solution in the knowledge base. As an example of this, when two users text message back and forth to resolve an issue, the transcript can be recommended as a knowledge article.
Discussion Forums – Companies can harvest knowledge directly from discussion forums. For example, with InQuira 8, users with privileges have the ability to click to recommend or contribute content from a forum topic, easily capturing questions and solutions to be published as new knowledge articles.
If a resolution is not found during an exchange with an agent or via collaboration, the agent or a user may request new content to be created, thus facilitating more context-specific knowledge capture.
Modifying Existing Knowledge
Tacit knowledge can also be captured by allowing modifications to existing content when users are searching for solutions. By flagging documents that need to be changed and routing that request to the owner of the document, a user can improve content as it is being employed. Alternatively, a user can fix an existing solution herself and subsequently have it go through a publishing process for review by the owner. In either case, the resulting improved content enhances the experience of subsequent users.
Tacit knowledge may only be a subset of the content stored in the knowledge base. However, by enabling the ability to capture more tacit knowledge, an organization creates collective ownership of the knowledge base, builds a knowledge base that captures the collective experience of all users and ensures that the content evolves based on demand.
For information on Knowledge-Centered Support methodology, see Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS): Fundamentally Improving How Companies Resolve Complex Customer Problems.
---David Kay and Françoise Tourniaire, Authors of Collective Wisdom: Transforming Support with Knowledge---
If you're starting out with an empty or tiny knowledge base, you may be wondering where solutions will come from. The good news is, there are usually many sources of inspiration and the only challenge is to mine them properly.
Think of three ways to create knowledge base solutions:
Capture. This is the more straightforward method: simply capture user experience as logged in support cases and structure it as required to create a formal solution. Many support centers consider capturing solutions an integral part of case resolution.
Author. This is for new, yet-to-be-captured information, which can come from a subject-matter expert in Engineering or in Support, or from existing documents that were not originally meant for support or even for customers' consumption.
Reuse and repurpose. This is a vast and rewarding field that targets already-available information from other parts of the company, customer forums, third-party vendor information, etc. The effort here is concentrated on finding appropriate sources of information and targeting specific documents within them.
In many support centers, the first strategy, capture, is the dominant method to create new knowledge base solutions. However, almost all centers rely on authoring and reuse for at least some types of solutions.
Here are some places to find inspiration for knowledge base solutions:
Support cases. Support cases, by definition, embody the entire universe of questions that customers have asked so far. While customers may ask different questions in the future, the answers to past cases are likely to be useful when answering future cases.
Customer forums. Online customer forums, which allow customers to post questions and receive answers from other users in the community, are also a rich source of inspiration. Answers in customer forums may be lacking or downright incorrect, but the questions themselves are always useful.
Self-service requests. Customers ask all kinds of questions from the self-service system. Studying patterns of both successful and unsuccessful queries helps locate knowledge gaps and problematic solutions. A sophisticated knowledge management tool is a great help here as it can gather user queries and organize them in logical sets.
Marketing documents. While many support knowledge bases are more technical in nature than marketing information, you may be able to find useful source materials in marketing documents.
Engineering documents. Engineering documents such as formal product specs or technical documentation score high on the technical scale. Also, the defect tracking system can contain the seeds of information for the knowledge base.
Product documentation. The official product documentation may be so well organized and accessible that it is unnecessary and redundant to ever use it as a source of knowledge base content, but that is unlikely. Don't be shy about repurposing written publications and online help, either by liberally linking to them or copying the most useful and frequently missed parts.
Internal training. All internal training documents, whether for Engineering, Support, Sales, or other groups in the company provide rich fodder for the knowledge base.
Customer training. Customer training materials can be useful just like internal training materials, and with the added bonus that their contents have already been vetted as suitable for customers.
Third-party information. Many products rely on other, third-party products such as hardware, software, or applications. While you already have your hands full documenting your products and you may not see it as your mission to collect and organize third-party knowledge, such information is often very useful to customers.
Internal communications. Internal communications, for instance between support staffers collaborating on support cases, or between Support and Engineering, are not always collected systematically into the case-tracking system and yet they may be the most wonderful source of information on difficult issues.
Newsletters. We think that newsletters can be derived from a solid knowledge base, but it's also possible to take advantage of existing newsletters to feed the knowledge base. At the very least, post the newsletters into the knowledge base. Consider both internal and external newsletters.
When to Access and When to Mine?
You have the option to mine content from these published sources into the knowledge base. With a modern knowledge management system, you can also search these sources directly alongside the knowledgebase. When do you do which?
If possible, it's always easier to leave content in its own repository. Someone else publishes it, keeps it up to date, and expires it. If you have a version or an extract of someone else's content, you'll have to do all this work in parallel with them, and it's easy to get out of sync.
Sometimes it's not desirable to leave content in another repository. You'll need to pull content into your knowledge base if:
The content isn't really published or maintained; it's just on an internal server somewhere available on an "as is" basis.
You want to make solutions visible to those who don't have access to the content—for example, pulling cleansed information from internal documentation into a self-service solution.
It's too hard to find the answer to a question—for example, extracting a nugget from a 150-page manual into a short knowledge base solution.
The key benefits you get from creating a knowledge base article are providing context to knowledge and gaining control over the information. If you're creating an article from existing published content, it's always a good idea to link to the original source, too.
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