News

From the CSI Member’s Summit meeting, the community is trying to tackle the issues around setting up a community, including technology, information organization, participation, gettting stuck, etc.

Feel free to join the conversation at wiki101.org.

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.

05/25/07

What is Kana currently doing in the marketplace?

We are a ten-year old company, founded in 1996, and the result of eleven mergers and acquisitions. We have spent a lot of time the last couple of years consolidating products, product time lines and roadmaps, as well as vision and strategy. KCS fitted into what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go.

What is the target market that you are looking at?

Our sweet spot is multi-channeled customer service. What we are seeing is a real shift in the way people do customer service. Email has become a well established adopted channel and chat is being more and more utilized. What we are finding is that many industries are fielding growth in eService communication as well as the need to consolidate all their interaction channels with their customer base to be able to provide the same experience to their customer irrespective of the choice of channel that the customer chooses. At the core of our multi-channel customer service solution is our knowledgebase that all our other applications access  - that is our chat application, call center application or our email application.

Is this strategy receiving a good response from customers?

It is. Many of our recent wins have been attributed to our multi-channel capabilities and as well as market timing. Multi-channel customer service has been touted for many years by vendors. But what we are seeing is that our customers are only now needing to provide customer support to their customers in a multi-channel format.

Why did you become KCS verified?

Because we have deeply integrated our product line to be able to offer multi-channel customer service, and at the core of this integration is our knowledgebase. We are finding that many of our customers are expressing an interest to loosen up the control of their knowledgebase and to be able to pass in some of the Web 2.0 principles to the way that knowledge is managed. KCS plays very nicely to a methodology of being able to solicit agent, customer and expert user feedback in order to optimize the content of your knowledgebase.

KANA’s knowledge management solutions can support a very thorough step-by-step workflow process or we can loosen up the control of the way knowledge is created and offer knowledge management via the KCS methodology. We wanted to be able to state that our product supports an established, workflow-driven authoring methodology as well as a KCS methodology of authoring.

Do you see your customer actually knowing what KCS is or are any of them asking for it?

Most of our customers don’t ask for it per se. This is because many of our customers are in the financial, telecommunications and healthcare sector which are heavily regulated.

However, some of our high tech customers are already using a Wiki style authoring format which allows agents to update a knowledgebase. This is in alignment with the KCS model. These customers are asking for a better understanding of KCS principles and how they can be leveraged.

What is your product that was recently verified for KCS?
It is called IQ and it our knowledge management product - Version 9.

How do you envision the future of KCS?

It is a set of best practices and a methodology for being able to gather agents and customer feedback to optimize the content of the knowledge base so that it contains answers to the questions that customers are asking, in the customer’s vernacular. So I see it as a methodology that a corporation buys into for the management of the information within their knowledgebase.

Are you seeing a good return of investment for your customers specifically along the lines of KCS?

Very few of our customers implement KCS per the way it is described in the Consortium for Service Innovation. This is because KANA’s core base of customers are in the financial services industry and health care and communication industries which are heavily regulated. However we do see an interest and adoption with our retail customer base, as well as our high tech customers which have expert user communities.

Do you see any trends for the demand of the KCS verified products? 

Our customers are just beginning to be educated about the KCS methodology. We find that some customers request some of the principles that embody KCS which are not very different from the collaborative authoring methodologies that are the core foundation of the Web 2.0 world.

What areas of the KCS methodology do you see your product as a strong fit?

All of them. We are able to support every single step in the solve and evolve loop and we have reports and analytics that are able to report on KCS metrics.

Would this be reporting items like reuse? 

Yes, as well as knowledge creation, number of duplicates created, number of unique solutions created as well as content that is not used in the knowledge base and content that is not there in the knowledge base. We have a very flexible reporting platform that allows you to easily create any custom reports that are able to answer virtually any question you may ask.

And KCS has two thrusts. The first is that it is a methodology of maintaining the content in your knowledgebase: agents and customers taking collective responsibility for any piece of content that they act interact with - the “flag it or fix it” idea. The second is the ability to report on and understand the agent trends and the usage trends of your knowledgebase.

How configurable is your product?

Our product is very configurable. If you want to have a very work flow driven authoring process our product can support that and if you want to loosen the authoring process completely and have it KCS-like where content is published in draft mode as soon as it is authored, we can do that too. What underpins our product is a very configurable workflow engine that we can set up to any business process that a company would have.

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

KCS is the way of the future, and I believe the rate of adoption for KCS-like methodologies is coming. We see that that Wikis and blogs are taking off. In the Web 2.0 world, the trend is not to rely on a small subset of the agent population to create content. The trend is to solicit the input of every agent that is fielding questions from customers when they talk to customers.

Additional Resources

Brave New Way of Looking at Knowledge by Kate Leggett http://www.crmadvocate.com/required/kana030807.html

Press release for Kana KCS certification is located at: http://www.kana.com/news.php?pressID=377

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

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

Three series of summer training classes will be held by HDI.

Schedule
Chicago - 06/13/20007 to 06/15/2007
New York - 07/11/2007 to 07/13/2007
Los Angeles - 08/08/07 to 08/10/07

HDI Member Cost is $1495

For further information and registration visit HDI.

A three-day KCS Foundations Workshop will be held in England June 4-6, 2007.
See the Pro-Cubed Website or call 0845 330 6457 for additional information.

A three-day training session, Knowledge Management Foundations Workshop: The KCS Principles, will be held in New York 03/19/07 - 03/21/2007
To download a course catalog visit the HDI website

Today Stone Cobra launched the new website with information on software development, integration and implementation in addition to an interactive segment focused on Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS). Stone Cobra is excited to work with the Consortium for Service Innovation on furthering the principles of KCS.

We hope that you will find the information presented useful and informative. Please leave us a comment to let us know how we may improve our website. Thanks for visiting.

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

A three-day KCS Foundations Training Session will be held in (Irving) Dallas, Texas March 7-9, 2007
See the KR Consulting website or contact Laura Armbruster at 1-877-597-3699 for more information.

Stone Cobra announces the release of an add-on product that automatically produces PDF documents from your Knowledge Management application. This product allows you create knowledge in your standard web or client-based formats and then auto-generate PDF versions of those knowledge articles for mailing to your customers or field service agents. Contact us for more information.