How to Leverage the Googlization of Knowledge Management

In my last blog post I wrote about the winners of our Service Revolutions competition at TSW, in which a group of tech companies each had 7 minutes to demo bleeding-edge technology, with the audience voting to determine the “coolest” presentation. This Thursday I’m hosting a webinar at 10am PT, “Making the Web Work for Customer Support,” with the winner of the Service Revolutions Commercial category, Radialpoint.

Radialpoint is really at the center of a number of converging trends around knowledge management in service. In the webinar I’ll be talking about:

• The rise of complexity is making each customer issue harder to solve, and more companies are questioning the traditional “generalist” model of support, moving toward a collaborative group of expert specialists.
• Traditional knowledgebase solutions are only meeting part of the needs of companies, leaving large gaps of customer issues with no corresponding content.
• The primary way most people attempt to find information now is using Google (which I refer to as ‘Googlization’), and I have new survey data to illustrate this. I’m hearing from more support managers that they’ve invested heavily in KM, but their support techs use Google and bypass all the internal content.
• Useful web content found by support techs isn’t captured or shared with other knowledge workers, causing support techs to “reinvent the wheel” researching the same  problem again and again.

Radialpoint can help address each of these problems. You need to see a demo to understand how cool this technology is, but in a nutshell, they are able to incorporate all your internal content (knowledgebase articles, manuals, case notes, release notes, etc.) into the Google searches your employees execute, automatically positioning your content along with web content. And, they can capture links to useful web content so it can be validated (much like you would a new knowledgebase article) and shared with other support techs. And, they offer some hot new features to enable and encourage collaboration, such as expertise management.

My thinking on knowledge management continues to evolve. Clearly companies need to recognize there are enormous amounts of useful information in online discussion forums, developer boards, even in YouTube videos, and you ignore all of this to your peril. But you still can’t abandon the traditional knowledgebase, which is proven to streamline resolution for repetitive issues. I would argue that Radialpoint helps solve both issues.

Please sign up for Thursday’s short 30 minute webinar. Here’s the link to register: http://www.tsia.com/documents/Making_the_Web_Work_for_Customer_Support/

If you aren’t available then, sign up anyway, and we’ll send you a link to the OnDemand version afterwards which you can watch at your leisure.

Thanks for reading, and hope to see you live on Thursday!

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Tags: Google, Googlization, Radialpoint

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