In which industries are you seeing the level of interest growing for KCS? What is driving it?

KCS had its start in high-tech, and (after 15 years) has clearly crossed into a mainstream practice in tech support–especially high complexity tech support. We’re seeing interest from early adopters in other knowledge intensive businesses, such as insurance underwriting and telecommunications, but little mainstream adoption. Clearly, in regulated fields, KCS has to be implemented differently from enterprise high-tech, but the core principles work well. Across industries, some service desks or help desks are implementing KCS as well.

As things keep getting more complex, I think we’ll see an increasing number of business areas where KCS makes sense. For example, one of my KCS customers manufactures truck transmissions! It sounds surprising, but these components are very complex, and their support operation doesn’t feel that different from a standard technology support center.

For companies that are implementing KCS, what do you see as the biggest challenge(s)? How are companies mitigating the risks?

If you look at any organizational transformation like KCS, the biggest risk is the set of “people” issues–perceived as politics, ineffective middle management, or stubborn end-users. The antidote is leadership–aligning people with a common organizational vision. As one of my customers told me, “people want to do the right thing for the team–they just often don’t know what that is.” Absent Dilbertesque dysfunctions that get in the way of doing the right thing, I think that’s true.

There are many common-sense tools that leaders can use to create alignment–coaching, appealing to people’s motivations, dealing forthrightly with objections, creating a healthy context for measurement and deploying transformational metrics–but the cornerstone has to be clear and honest communication about not just the what, but the why.

What do you see as the key Return on Investment (ROI) that KCS implementators are receiving?

Scale! Every one of my customers is under incredible pressure to do more with less. More customers, more complex products, higher expectations, managed services and on-demand offerings, value-added support…oh, and by the way, your budget is the same as last year’s. If you’re lucky.

For some, the key driver of scale is internal support center efficiencies. Treating more problems as known, or reducing rediscovery, saves significant time every time it happens. Capturing, modifying, and reusing content within the support process greatly increases the capacity of a support team.
For others, self-service takes center stage. Especially if self-service isn’t especially effective today, there’s a tremendous opportunity to not only deflect calls with knowledge, but to deliver far more support than you ever knew people wanted.

But it all comes down to doing more with the same people, or slowing the pace of headcount growth, which is frighteningly unsustainable for some of my more successful customers. So it’s all about leverage.

If you were to look into your crystal ball, what changes do you think we will see to KCS over the next three or four years?

The first area is making collaboration an explicit part of the process. KCS is tightly wedded to case management, and case management applications have traditionally been anti-collaborative: analysts own cases, then they escalate cases, or they requeue cases, but it’s not generally easy just to work together on the cases that most interest you. Support communities are just the opposite, and they seem to do a better job of allocating work. So we need to figure that out.

Of course, collaboration doesn’t end inside the support center. Whether you like the buzzword or not, Web 2.0 works. Why shouldn’t customers participate in the knowledge management process? For example, treating self-service and support communities as two separate things doesn’t make any sense.
The second area is the one I mentioned before: adapting KCS practices to work in regulated, generally lower-complexity environments like financial services.

Finally, I think we’re going to get a lot better at modeling the problem-solving process. A number of my customers are implementing Kepner-Tregoe, for example, and whether it’s K-T or something else, I think we’re going to need to provide more help and structure for problem-solving.
Of course, the great thing about working on a practice as rich and dynamic as KCS is that, three years from now, we’ll have learned a bunch about things we’re not even thinking about now.

Are there any other comments you would like to make about KCS?

The final point I’d like to leave people with is this: done right, knowledge management is the best thing a support leader can do for his or her employees. First, it can relieve some of the unremitting stress they’re under. Second, it can open new opportunities for doing interesting work, like creating revenue-bearing value-added support offerings. Third, it provides recognition for knowledge sharing–something that’s really hard to track without something like KCS. Finally, it moves them up the value-chain, reducing possible concerns about outsourcing or layoffs. So, don’t be concerned about asking them to take on another project; be happy that you’re doing something transformational and wonderful for your team.

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05/15/07

Interview with Mark Buckallew - InQuira Product Manager

Why did you become KCS verified? We were talking to customers that were looking for new innovative ways to provide service. A number of customers told us about KCS. We then met with Melissa George and later Greg Oxton of the Consortium for Service Innovation. They provided the KCS verification requirements and Melissa went through a thorough demo of how we use our product to support the KCS methodology. It seemed like a very good fit for our product. We also recently had 20 people go through the KCS training to develop our internal expertise.In addition, as we heard requirements from consultants and customers we have incorporated new features into the out-of-the box product.

Which of your products are KCS verified? What do they do? We became verified a little over a year ago on Version 7.3 (Intelligent Search and Information Manager). This verification covers all versions until there is an updated KCS standard. The next standard to be addressed will be KCS 4.0. We feel like we follow the methodology out-of-the-box especially around metrics and reporting. We have added to our OOTB reports for content usage to report on reuse of solutions and have the ability to group by user or team.

How do you envision the future of KCS? KCS as a set of practices is becoming less bleeding edge and more adopted as good practices that achieve results. We see customers and prospects interested in the methodology, though they often do not know a lot about the methodology. Over time, we expect that more customers will send their internal people through KCS training. As the Consortium evolves there will be more focus on collaboration that will drive new standards. KCS adoption outside of high tech is starting. The majority of the consortium members are high tech. We also see KCS members now focusing on areas that have been a strength for InQuira, around streamlining user interactions on web sites and in contact centers and we see that area evolving and expanding in KCS.

What trends do you see in the demand for KCS verified products? We are seeing increased demand as KCS moves from untested and new to becoming proven and more widely known, especially in high tech. From a knowledge management perspective, the market demand is for solutions that are well proven to achieve results. I do think that different industry verticals besides high tech can apply the KCS practices to achieve similar success. InQuira also provides solutions for these other industry verticals that help to streamline drive compelling user experiences for web sites and contact centers. There is an element of KCS that is expanding in this area. We need more members in the Consortium fromdifferent industry verticals to provide their input.

What types of return on investment is KCS bringing your customers? A customer that has been with us a considerable time and who follows a number of KCS practices is Pitney Bowes. Though Pitney would not necessarily say that they are following a KCS methodology, they do operate with similar practices. Pitney Bowes has seen tremendous increases in self service usage and call deflection. During postage rate increases there are large volumes of inbound calls coming into the contact center. A lot of the questions are now handled out on the website. Pitney had 140,000 questions hitting the site in one day. Actual call volumes were much lower than expected. KCS consultants would say that rolling out an implementation typically needs to be done in increments. Consultants would say roll out to 50 people at a time. Customers that are starting with smaller numbers of users and then making changes to follow the methodology are successful. We have other customers that have rolled out to a lot of people at once. They have immediate pain because there is a shift in focus on employee contributions and metrics that can take some time to adopt and change internally.

What is the biggest challenge you see for implementing KCS? I think it comes down to getting people to understand what KCS is about for the leadership roles. They need to be looking at metrics and employee contributions from a new perspective. The whole team needs to understand the process and the measures need to be looked at differently. They have to demonstrate that this is not the next fad and encourage end-user adoption such as getting people to create and collectively own content. At the same time you have some coaching and licensing that takes place to ensure content standards. I think it is the leadership team accepting and promoting a new way of doing things.

In what areas of the KCS methodology is your product a strong fit? We have a saying at InQuira, “Better search gives you better knowledge.”If you are searching and finding then you are not creating duplicates. If you don’t represent the content well then you make a lot of duplicate content that is difficult to discover. InQuira focuses more on B loop content (coaching and leadership that looks over the system) that you can streamline common interactions. As people ask about the same things you are giving them more focused answers. InQuira identifies 85% of the interactions. If you can do that you can handle a lot of the interactions more effectively and I think this is where InQuira does very well. We are creating a methodology and approach for figuring out the B loop content and more of the intelligent search.

We identify common actions and detect them at the point the customer is asking the questions. For example when you get to Telcom where 80% of the interactions are about bills, you can streamline answers like providing the last ten bill payments.

Is the KCS Self Assessment available? We did a self assessment. It was stellar. There were only a few little gaps that we incorporated into the product. The Self Assessment is not yet released to the public.

Is InQuira a member of the KCS Consortium? Yes.

KCS is a registered service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation

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