The Future of Knowledge Management & Access

Last week, I had the pleasure of giving a TED-style talk on the future of knowledge management at the Technology Services World (TSW) 2013 Best Practices conference in Santa Clara. The event provided an enlightening forum to discuss the future of customer service, including how new technologies and approaches to knowledge management can empower individuals to become more informed and effective workers.

I had the chance to share our thoughts on how we need to transform knowledge management with the audience, but I also wanted to share them with you.

We’ve been brought up to believe that knowledge acquisition comes through repetition and practice. It’s a key component to Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, where he says that it takes 10 years to become world-class at one thing. And yet, most of us don’t have 10 years to devote to something with the amount of focus it requires to become world class. And we don’t have to, because we’re learning that knowledge is not sequential – it’s personal. The future of learning and knowledge management is not about practice or process – it’s about access and interaction, enabling people to follow their own paths through information based on their own levels of knowledge and experience. Read more and comment…

Three Ways to Generate Knowledge from Customer Service Interactions

I grew up (professionally) in Call Centers.

I did all the jobs there were to be done at one time or another: answered phones, played supervisor, managed people, planned for growth, interfaced with business users – and many more you probably don’t want to know or do (if you ever are asked to upgrade a cabling plan, run fast).  Back then tools and systems were almost non-existent; certainly not as advanced as today’s solutions.  The most dreaded part of working the front line was always (well, when you get past the bad people who like to yell) doing wrap-up notes.

These are the notes we had to write in the customer record following a call to summarize what happened, what they said, what we said and did, and the result.  The idea was that if the customer called back we knew what happened.  The advent of recording and the evolution of CRM solutions that pull in information from everywhere and automatically record everything the agent and the consumer do across all channels creates loads of transactional, operational, and even feedback information. The wrap up note is a thing of the past (I know they are still being done in some places, but the number of interactions that demand them is minimal compared to every one of them in the past). Read more and comment…

Attention Companies: Stop Knowledge Hoarding

We have grown up in an era where knowledge was considered power.  If you had the best marks in your class at school, then you must be smart. If colleagues come to me to get answers, then I must be important – and on and on.

This behavior has created “knowledge hoarders” – those who view individual knowledge as a personal source of power and influence. This might have been ok if you were vying for $1 million on the popular game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” or were a contestant on Jeopardy – but if you look at it from an organizational perspective, this goes against all entrepreneurial principles of using all available resources for the growth of the enterprise.  If you were in retail, you would be looking at, “what is my inventory turnover.” if I were in manufacturing, I might be looking at, “what’s my raw material turnover” or “how quickly am I consuming and turning my resources into valuable assets.”

Why is this not true for knowledge?  How often does your company reuse knowledge that was generated by you, aka “an asset?”  We hire people into our organizations and train them for a period of time to make sure they are productive at some particular function.  Yet there are still haves and have not’s when it comes to knowledge.  I would be willing to bet that in most organizations, there are those people that are top performers in terms of reliability, knowledge and the ability to get the job done.  On the other hand, there are those that seem to struggle to do the same tasks.  We are very quick to make up excuses: “we did not train them enough” or “they need more hands-on experience,” for example. Read more and comment…

Return on Knowledge: The Next Big Source of Wealth Creation in a Big Data World

You’ve seen us write many times in this blog about the knowledge-access challenges posed by Big Data and for two good reasons:

1. Big, unstructured data, fragmented across an ever growing number of sources, is overwhelming organizations, requiring them to find new ways to access information in order to stay competitive, better serve their customers and bring more innovative products to market, faster.
2. At the other end of the spectrum are customers who are increasingly knowledgeable and demanding a greater degree of immediacy and relevance towards their needs.

Hidden inside streams of structured and unstructured data are information relationships that answer questions employees haven’t even thought to ask, but which may hold the key to your company’s differentiation and its ability to serve customers with higher value.   This is the challenge of knowledge management today: putting knowledge to constant reuse by each and every employee and each and every customer.

In fact, Gartner has predicted that enterprise data will grow by 800 percent in five years, with 80 percent of it unstructured. As this data grows, so does the problem of knowledge access.

In business, knowledge is what keeps organizations competitive and innovative. It is a true asset and hence  should be treated as such. It is imperative for it to be accessed and shared across teams and geographies. Knowledge is useless sitting in repositories where no one even knows it exists; it is only valuable when it is accessible and reused as often as possible. But making it accessible is much easier said than done and employees waste precious time trying to find and correlate it.

Take for example the results from an IDC report, which found that knowledge workers spend anywhere from 15 to 35 percent of their time searching for, assembling, and unfortunately, recreating information that already exists. Just think of the time and money lost when employees at your organization don’t know where to look, or how to ask for what they are seeking – or better yet, don’t even know it exists. The explosion of Big Data only exacerbates this challenge.

To overcome this challenge, companies must look to harness their data, garner better insights and increase return on what is arguably the greatest asset they possess: Knowledge. Return on Knowledge (ROK) may be the next big differentiator and source of wealth creation for companies in today’s Big Data world. Helping your employees – and your customers – find answers to the questions they haven’t thought to ask can move your business forward by leaps and bounds.

Check out our latest eBook to learn how you can gain greater Return on Knowledge – and let us know how you’re judging the success of your knowledge management initiatives.

Mining for Gold: Search Technology Finds Knowledge Amid the Data Chaos

Customer demand for high-quality support continues to grow, as customers have raised the bar for every interaction with support organizations. This comes as a result of the plethora of information available to customers on the Internet, combined with an increase in competitive choices and product complexity. Given this situation, it is imperative that support organizations at least be on a level field of knowledge, or the customer will lose trust. This means that support executives need to be armed with not only the right data, but the right insight.

These executives know there is value in all the data and metrics they collect, but identifying this value using legacy tools has proved frustrating, if not impossible. CRM, multichannel and telephony solutions typically include strong operational reporting, which is useful to determine a top performer for a certain metric, or to measure organizational performance by key performance indicators. But what is missing is the ability to consolidate, correlate, access and analyze data across multiple data sources, identifying linkages and trends, enabling root-cause analysis, and providing insight to allow better understanding for better customer engagement.

Many point solutions have attempted to solve the challenge of information access with built-in search. However, the sophistication of search embedded in many software solutions, while rising, cannot connect the dots across the increasingly social enterprise.  Advanced unified indexing technology not only provides access to much-needed analytics, but it is leveraged by agents to significantly impact performance metrics. By having collective knowledge about the customer, as well as their products, support cases, and more, agents can more quickly solve customer challenges the first time, improving resolution time and customer satisfaction across phone, web and email channels.

Find advice from us and the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) on how customer support organizations can leverage data for actionable insight in this new whitepaper.

Now Live on the AppExchange: Salesforce Service Cloud users can stop searching, and start finding

Knowledge Management will never be the same.

We’re at the start of a sea change in how employees find the information they need to do their work. Not surprisingly, the sea change begins with a combination of solutions known for leadership and innovation: Salesforce and Coveo. Together, we are turning knowledge management—and enterprise search—upside down.

Placing customers first, Coveo in September introduced the beta version of our application that pushes relevant knowledge directly into the Salesforce Case Console, into the context of the agent. We started here because we know that companies need and want to improve the customer experience. We know that agents struggle mightily to find the combination of information that will help them solve challenges for their customers faster and better. And we know the problem is only getting worse, in an age of big, unstructured and structured data, and with the continued proliferation of point systems and fragmented content sources.

So we put our enterprise-grade, Unified Indexing technology to the test. Could we push the information that would help agents help their customers faster and with more accuracy, regardless of where it resides? Could we provide a next generation federated search experience to even the most junior customer service agent? Could we make it fast and simple to configure and activate, in the cloud? Could we improve the capacity of a contact center by 10 or even 20 percent overnight by injecting better knowledge?

When we launched Coveo for Salesforce Beta version in September, we heard from many of our friends in the analyst and influencer community that it was going to be a game-changer. Our Beta Program participants proved the theory:

“Users simply find what they didn’t even know they were looking for. We need the right information at the right time to ensure our customers’ greatest success, and Coveo helps us to do that, right in Salesforce.” – Gerard Snippe, Rembrandt, a division of Rabobank (case study)

Today, we’re making this game-changing application one that turns knowledge management and enterprise search upside down, available to every company that uses Salesforce, with our listing of Coveo for Salesforce on the AppExchange. Starting today, Salesforce admins can, with a free trial, help their users stop searching, and start finding. Coveo for Salesforce, Service Cloud Edition is Generally Available on the AppExchange.

How will this turn transform your customer service and support initiatives?