3 Ways Search Is Saving Customer Support: View the OnDemand Webinar

Yesterday I had the pleasure of co-presenting a webinar with one of my very favorite speakers, Diane Berry, Senior VP of Market Strategy for Coveo. Diane was a past winner of our TechFutures event and is always a dynamic speaker with great content. We had big attendance for yesterday’s webinar, and the OnDemand version is now available for viewing. I thought I would give you a quick look at what we talked about, and you can view the OnDemand event at your leisure.

Enterprise search is increasingly a cornerstone of a company’s knowledge management strategy. During the webinar, I talked about what I call “the three realities of enterprise search:”

• A single knowledgebase for all information is unrealistic. Valuable content is stored across the enterprise—and in people’s heads. Yes, a knowledgebase for capturing tacit knowledge is critical, but that is only one source of information. Online documentation, product manuals, release notes, forum conversations, etc., are all critical to support technicians and customers. Companies need search technology to search everyplace at once, not just a single repository.

• Knowing the right place to look for information is impossible—especially for newer employees. Surveys tell us that TSIA members have a dozen or more applications and content sources that they routinely access to support customers, and knowing where to look to find what you need can take years to learn. Unified search pulls from every content source, every time; the actual location of the content is irrelevant.

• Filtering search results to find exactly what you need is a necessity. We know that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. Not only do you need relevancy analysis (which we discuss in the webinar), but you also need filtering options to allow knowledge workers, and customers performing self-service, to find exactly what they need without rephrasing their search over and over again.

Diane and I then went through the list of “The Three Ways Search is Saving Customer Support,” and based on my inquiry conversations, that is no exaggeration. How is enterprise search saving support? Here are the three points we discussed:

#1. Search turns your community or customer portal into a self-service, case deflection engine.

I’ve heard companies afraid to use the word “deflection,” thinking it implies they don’t want to talk to customers. This is simply not the case. My 2015 Social Support Survey shows that 46% of customers PREFER self-service, and only 11% prefer phone. Giving customers a dynamic and sucessful self-service experience is exactly what they want. And it is a win-win, since fully burdened support calls for B2B companies can be $700 or more, and self-service sessions typically cost less than $10.

#2. Search gives employees insight from across  your entire enterprise ecosystem.

One of the hot trends I’m seeing is imbedded, dynamic, contextual search. Imbedded because it sits within your CRM or other system of record, so no additional searches or windows are required. Dynamic because search results constantly update in real time, depending on what you type. And contextual, because the results are filtered based on the case title and notes you type in, as well as the value of any custom fields such as product or failing component. In this way, employees can see a list of related content from across the enterprise: related cases, knowledge articles, documentation, forum conversations, as well as lists of experts on the topic in case you need to escalate.

#3. Search analytics identify trends, knowledge gaps, and optimize relevance.

A couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to spend an hour with Diane and her analytics team focusing on how analytics can improve the success of a knowledge management program. I was so impressed with the conversation that now I’m writing a new research report, “Leveraging Analytics to Boost KM Success: Proactive Analytics Automate the Knowledge Maintenance Process,” to be published later this month. In particular, analytics can help proactively identify content gaps, improve relevance scores, and recognize content consumption trends. In the webinar, Diane provides examples and screen shots to illustrate these.

Here is the link to view the OnDemand version of the webinar: http://www.tsia.com/webinars/Trend_Alert_3_Ways_Search_Is_Saving_Customer_Support/

The webinar is only 30 minutes, and we did receive some interesting questions during the Q&A period at the end. Be sure to follow the link and watch the webinar when you have time.

And as always, thanks for reading!

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What I Heard at TSW: KM Culture, Social Knowledge, Gamification, KaaS

Last week was our Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas. It was our biggest conference ever, with over 1,300 attendees. I spent most of Tuesday doing more than a dozen 1:1 meetings with members, answering technology questions, helping them create a short list of possible vendors for a planned technology purchase, or giving them a map of exhibiting partners to visit in the EXPO depending on the problem they were trying to solve. Since my Power Hour session on Monday was about the results of my August knowledge management survey, many of my member meetings were related to KM: what wasn’t working, what they would do differently next time, new technologies to invest in, etc. Based on questions asked during the KM session, and conversations with members and partners afterwards, here are some popular conversation threads I wanted to share with a larger audience.

Culture and KM

In my Power Hour presentation, I opened and closed with a focus on corporate culture and KM, and shared some results from my survey on how respondents rated their corporate culture, from a high of “Leaders set the example and reward knowledge sharing” to a low of “Share any knowledge and others will take credit”. We have very smart members, and Jodi McBride, Director, Knowledge & Content Management, Pitney Bowes Global Client Services, asked if there was any data correlation in the survey results between culture and KM success. Well, I hadn’t even thought about that. This morning I spent a bit of time slicing and dicing, and found a very interesting data story:

As you can see in these charts, I sorted all the KM survey responses into three groups by KM culture scores: poorest KM culture (bottom third), average KM culture (middle third), and strongest KM culture (top third). Then I looked at the average scores for each group for the question “How do you rate your existing KM system?” and it appears that culture plays a big role in how well a company’s KM program is going. For both customer-facing and employee-facing knowledgebases, the stronger the culture, the higher the KBs are rated. This played out in many member conversations, and at this point, I see culture as a primary indicator of KM project success.

Social Knowledge

I’ve had a few eye rolls in the past when discussing crowd sourcing knowledge, but that tide seems to have turned. There was a lot of interest in how to incorporate customers into knowledge creation and sharing, with more companies saying they were using wikis or ‘tribal knowledgebases’ to build and curate a knowledgebase by and for customers (Jive Software, who exhibited at TSW, got a lot of booth traffic around this topic). The most telling story came from Scott Bideau, Regional Sales Manager USA West, Coveo, who also attended my Power Hour session. He said that when companies push back on letting customers create knowledge, he asks them: “How many of you truly know more about your customer than they know about you?” After a bit of soul searching, most companies admit that customers DO know more about them than they know about the customer. So why, if the customer does know so much about you (your products, your employees, your website tools, even your culture), why wouldn’t you want to tap into that expertise? Face it, customers who interact with your products in order to do their jobs have a different and likely deeper understanding of your technology than you ever will. Not taking advantage of that would be very sad indeed.

Gamification

I also received multiple questions about gamification, mostly companies looking for some good examples of how to gamify KM to encourage participation in submitting new articles and maintaining older content. I have to admit I have not always been the biggest fan of this topic, and even once wrote that, regarding gamification, “if the emperor is not naked, he is at least scantily clad.” My issue is that many examples I’ve been given of gamification dashboards and contests have been around for 20 years, and are just being re-labeled. One audience member, Chris Hall, Chief Marketing Officer, Transversal, chided me for my ‘grumpy old man’ attitude on the topic, and said there are some very exciting developments in this area. Send me your best examples, and I will blog about them! The bottom line here is that if gamification can be leveraged to encourage employees to participate in what even I admit can be a tedious process, then I’m all for it. But some good examples would be nice. 😉

Knowledge as a Service

This topic was discussed during my Power Hour, and also in several 1:1 meetings afterwards. I wrote about Knowledge as a Service, or KaaS, earlier this year as a hot KM trend, and I think the topic is getting some real traction. After sharing my survey data on “Rip and Replace,” showing that nearly half of companies were on their 3rd, 4th, 5th or more employee-facing knowledge platform, clearly a lot of service organizations have yet to find KM success, with the technology being a scapegoat for what is almost always a process problem. If companies can outsource calls, maintenance renewals, product testing, etc., to a strategic partner who can do it better, why not  work with experts in knowledge management who can make your KM program a success? One of our KaaS partners, Klever,  exhibited in the EXPO, so hopefully they had some good traffic on this topic.

In addition to these themes, I had multiple conversations about KM staffing, how to kickstart a KM program, and who/how/how often to provide KM training for employees. I also explained the difference between federated search and unified search, and the difference between full text search and natural language search, so many times I finally have a fairly short answer to the question. (Short for me, anyway.)

If you would like more information on the results of my KM survey, I will be doing a free webinar this Friday at 8am PT going over all the content I covered in my Power Hour. Here’s a link to register for the event:  http://www.tsia.com/documents/Knowledge_Management_Industry_Pulse_Session/ 

TSIA members can access a copy of the research report detailing the survey findings here: http://www.tsia.com/documents/The_State_of_Knowledge_Management_2014/ 

If you aren’t a TSIA member, we are making a copy of the report available to all members of the Klever community for a limited time next month, so register now and you will be eligible to download the report:  http://www.getklever.com/Public/Register.aspx 

Thanks everyone who attended my session, scheduled 1:1 meetings, or sent emails about my KM survey results. And as always, thanks for reading.

The State of Knowledge Management: 2014

Today at Technology Services World I am releasing the results of my August knowledge management survey both online, and in my Power Hour session at 4:15. The data shows that companies continue to find enormous potential in knowledge management, but are often thwarted by corporate culture, and tend to blame technology for process problems. Also, there is growing interest in emerging technologies that are changing the approach and priority of knowledge capture and sharing.

To me, the single most compelling piece of data related to the untapped potential of KM. The survey asked, “If your organization was sharing knowledge as well as they possibly could, how much would it improve the productivity of your team?” Here are the results:

40% of respondents said that doing KM well could increase employee productivity by 20-30%, and a third of respondents said that KM had the potential of a 30-50%+ improvement. Every year KM technology tops the list of solutions companies plan to invest in, and this is the reason: they understand there is enormous potential for ROI by doing KM well, and they are allocating budget to make it happen.

However, as I have said for years, and wrote a chapter about in my book Lessons Unlearned, the reason most KM programs fail is not about the technology, but process. Usually a new knowledge management platform is launched, everyone gets knowledge centered support (KCS) training, and support organizations see immediate results in lower resolution time and higher first contact resolution rates. But then sometime in year 2, things typically start falling apart. Key resources are pulled off projects, project champions move on to other priorities, and the number of dedicated knowledge workers declines. Content becomes stale, there are a lot of outdated and duplicate articles, and both employees and customers stop using the knowledgebase.

According to the survey, only 35% of companies regularly update content on a daily or weekly basis, and 27% admit “We have not updated our content for a very long time.” Only 36% have a proactive process to identify content gaps, and 35% say they have zero tools or processes to find content gaps.

Although clearly there are holes in processes contributing to the downfall of many a KM program, as soon as problems arise, the first thing everyone says is, “We need to find a new KM tool!” According to the survey, 48% of Employee-Facing knowledge implementations and 39% of Customer-Facing knowledge implementations are on their 3rd, 4th, 5th or more solution in recent memory. “Rip and replace” continues to be the most common approach to fix what is almost always a process problem. And guess what? 2 years later, if the processes don’t improve, they are in the same position and shopping for a new KM platform once again.

A major shift to knowledge strategies in the last 5 years has been the number of content sources. It is a bit unrealistic to expect a large enterprise to have a single knowledgebase, but even if they do, they also have many other valuable content sources, including online communities, online documentation, release notes, etc. For this reason, search technology has emerged as a cornerstone of a successful knowledge strategy.

I am a big advocate of unified search technology, which indexes all of your content sources–in any format in any location–and returns search matches based on concept (not key word) matching, as well as providing filtering options to drill down into exactly what you need. Federated search is less helpful; these search tools just leverage whatever search capabilities are inherent within each content repository and present a consolidated list of returns. The problem is federated search is usually a full text search, not a concept search, so if you search for ‘voice of the customer’ it won’t find ‘customer satisfaction’ or ‘customer experience,’ which are related concepts but different terminology.

Only a quarter of companies have implemented unified search for employees and customers. More than half say that the search engine they offer for their knowledgebase ONLY searches the knowledgebase, meaning if there is relevant content in the community or online manuals, the user will never know about it. This comes up in the majority of my KM-related inquiry calls, so I’m hoping to see some movement in these numbers in the 2015 KM survey.

For TSIA members, you can download a copy of the report detailing the survey findings later today on http://www.tsia.com. For those of you attending TSW, you can pick up a copy of the report in the TSIA EXPO booth.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey. And, as always, thanks for reading!

Technology Services World: Knowledge Management Content and Exhibitors

Capturing, sharing and maintaining knowledge is always a popular topic at TSIA Conferences, and at our upcoming Technology Services World in Las Vegas, October 20-22, there will be a lot of great content on this hot topic. Our 2nd annual knowledge management survey was completed in August, and I’ll be revealing the findings and publishing the results at the event. I’ve had mulitple inquiries over the last week asking what KM content will be featured at the show, and what exhibitors in the Expo offer knowledge management tools and services, so here’s a peak at KM-releated sessions and exhibitors so you can start planning your time now.

First up are the breakout sessions focusing on knowledge management. For detailed sessions descriptions, see the TSW agenda online.

• Transforming Knowledge Management: Hot KM Trends. In this Power Hour session on Monday at 4:15, I’ll walk through the results of the KM survey, including information on KM across service divisions, and emerging technology areas such as mobility, video, unified search, expertise management, etc.
• Three Months, 300% Productivity Improvement: Transforming Customer Success Using Rapid Knowledge Sharing. Phil Verghis, Klever; Mitchell Spence, Tyler Technologies, Inc. Tuesday, 2:00 PM.
• Using KCS and Discovery Based Consumption Analytics to Generate Proactive Support Deliverables and Guaranteed Customer Outcomes. Rob Baker, Akamai Technologies, Inc. Tuesday, 3:30 PM.
• OK, We’ve Done KCS. What’s Next? David Kay, DB Kay & Associates; Sean Murphy, Riverbed Technology, Inc. Tuesday, 3:30 PM.
• From Knowledge Hoarding to Solve-Once: Aligning Support around a Knowledge Culture. Linda Hartig, Avaya; Dan Pratt, Avaya; Joey Fister, Avaya. Tuesday, 4:45 PM.
• Knowledge: Experience Sharing of KCS Implementation. Nicolas Brunel, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Wednesday, 11:30 AM.

Here’s a look at KM-related partners participating in the Expo:

• Aptean/Knova. Knowledgebase, search
• Coveo. Unified search, expertise management
• DB Kay & Associates. KM and KCS assessment and training
• GeoFluent/Lionbridge. Translation services
• Klever. KM and KCS assessment and training, Knowledge as a Service
• Jive. Employee and customer collaboration, crowdsourcing KM
• LivePerson. Self-service knowledgebase, multi-channel service
• Radialpoint. Knowledge management, search, mobile self-service
• Stone Cobra. KM implementations, assessments, training
• SYSTRAN. Translation services
• Transversal. Knowledgebase, self-service, collaboration
• Verint/Kana. Knowledgebase, self-service, multi-channel, crowdsourcing KM

If you are attending TSW and would like to discuss your KM strategy, I have open slots for 1:1 meetings on Tuesday, 10/21. When you arrive at registration, ask to schedule a 1:1!

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

Announcing the TSIA TechBEST Best in Satisfaction Finalists: Bomgar, Coveo, and DB Kay & Associates

Each year TSIA conducts the Global Technology Survey, tracking adoption, satisfaction, and planned spending across 24 categories of technology and services. The satisfaction section of the survey has delivered interesting results, with the majority of categories averaging a satisfaction score well below industry averages. There are, however, some clear outliers from these averages, with some technology or service providers well regarded by TSIA members and highly rated for member satisfaction.

According to the TSIA Support Services Benchmark, customer satisfaction with enterprise software averages 4.3 on a five-point scale (with 1 representing very unsatisfied and 5 representing very satisfied). It is troubling, then, that the satisfaction scores for the 24 categories covered in the TSIA Global Technology Survey range from a low of 3.2 to a high of 3.9—all are well under the industry average of 4.3. However, if you look at individual satisfaction scores by vendor, multiple bright spots emerge. In fact, multiple partners received scores above 4.0, with one partner scoring an average of 4.71. The three partners with the highest satisfaction scores are named finalists in the TechBEST Best in Satisfaction Award. The three finalists are:

• Bomgar. Bomgar is a leader in enterprise remote support solutions for easily and securely supporting computing systems and mobile devices. The company’s products help organizations improve tech support efficiency and performance by enabling them to securely support nearly any device or system, anywhere in the world—including Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and more. More than 8,000 organizations across 65 countries have deployed Bomgar to rapidly improve customer satisfaction while dramatically reducing costs. Bomgar has offices in Jackson, Atlanta, Washington DC, Paris, London, and Singapore. For more information, see www.bomgar.com.

• Coveo. Coveo helps companies provide more effective customer service by harnessing knowledge and experts from their enterprise knowledge ecosystems. Leveraging powerful unified search and relevance technology, Coveo surfaces relevant enterprise knowledge directly to agents and community members. With Coveo for Salesforce, Service Cloud Edition, related cases, articles, emails, experts, and more are searchable and surfaced in a single view on the Service Cloud console so agents can solve cases efficiently. Coveo for Salesforce, Communities Edition helps improve call deflection and customer satisfaction by automatically displaying content and experts related to topics members are discussing. Coveo is a salesforce.com strategic partner, with customers including Rally Software, Logitech, Deltek, EXFO, Tokyo Electron America, and SunGard. Learn more at www.coveo.com.

• DB Kay & Associates. DB Kay & Associates, Inc. helps support organizations create customer success and better customer experiences through sustainable knowledge programs. The firm consults and trains to drive best practic-es (such as KCS) and secure executive support, reducing risk and accelerating success. DB Kay leads customer experience mapping exercises to identify and fix customer experience issues. They offer everything from short strategy sessions to hands-on program management. Whatever the engagement, they know they’ve been successful when they’ve transferred knowledge effectively enough that their customers no longer need them! DB Kay customers include Ultimate, Sage, IBM, Carestream, Riverbed, Microsoft, and NetApp. For more information, go to www.dbkay.com.

Today at Technology Services World, I will interviewing the three finalists in the TechBEST Best in Satisfaction Showcase at 12:45pm, immediately following TechFUTURES. Please join us to hear more about these companies, and what they do to ensure satisfaction customers. Thanks for reading, and hope to see you there!

Top Knowledge Management Trends for 2014

Today I co-presented a webinar with longtime partner Coveo, “Top Knowledge Management Trends of 2014.” We had a huge response to the event, and the largest live audience I’ve seen for a webinar in quite a while. KM is always a hot topic with TSIA members, but interest continues to grow as we see knowledge strategies moving beyond customer support to include field service, professional services, managed services, and more. So what are the biggest trends in KM today? Based on TSIA data and member conversations, here are the top 3 trends I highlighted in today’s webinar:

 

• Legacy search tools failing. My colleague Ken O’Reilly completed TSIA’s first “knowledge management practices” survey in December, and the results will be published in the next couple of weeks. I shared a couple of proof points in the webinar today to illustrate how existing KM implementations aren’t keeping up. The lion’s share of respondents to the survey have had both their customer-facing and employee-facing KM platforms in place for 4 or more years, which should indicate they are mature, highly adopted, and delivering value. But, when asked to rate their current KM implementations, the largest percent of respondents indicated the worst option: “Needs a lot of work.” So why are these mature implementations failing? In my experience, inadequate search is often at the root of the problem. Legacy search tools don’t do well outside a proprietary knowledgebase, and according to my annual tech survey, SharePoint is now the top installed knowledgebase tool used by service organizations. Not a specialized tool built for support knowledge, a generic content warehouse. With customers and employees now expecting to search content anywhere in the enterprise, in any format, requirements for search have evolved dramatically. Today, companies need a search tool that provides context, intelligence, dynamic taxonomies, and multiple filtering options.

• Enterprise collaboration. I have a report in editing right now calling enterprise collaboration “the third wave of knowledge management.” Another factoid from the recent KM survey is that less than half of customer issues are resolved by content in the knowledgebase. If you don’t have the answer at your fingertips, the most direct route to the answer is to ask an expert. I’m seeing huge planned spending on enterprise collaboration tools to enable this. But the missing element–and this is a BIG missing element–is how to know who the expert is to ask. This is where expertise management comes in. I have blogged before about the importance of expertise management, and I’m hoping more companies begin to include requirements for this in their KM/enterprise search plans. The same search platform that can analyze all the content in your enterprise to create dynamic taxonomies, can also create relationships between content topics and people. So, if you are trouble shooting an install script, the system can prompt you with the developer who wrote the install script, the Q&A person who tested it, and the Tech Pubs person who documented it. Armed with this information, you know exactly who to reach out to for an answer.

• Mobility. I tend to refer to this trend as “The Connected Customer” and “The Connected Technician.” The mass adoption of smartphones and tablets has revolutionized the way we retrieve and interact with information. While the majority of mobile devices may be originally designed for consumers, we bring our consumer experiences into the workplace with us. Today’s customers and employees expect–if not demand–that they have ubiquitous access to corporate content at any time, from any place, using any device. But to enable this, you need the right mobile infrastructure. When shopping for KM/search technology, include requirements in three areas. First, the system should support all devices, not just Droid or Apple or RIM. Ideally, this means HTML5. Secondly, the system should offer optimized displays for mobile devices–the same user interface that works fine on a desktop web browser will not work effectively on a 2″x 3″ smartphone screen. And third, the system should be able to retrieve and display a wide variety of formats. I’ve heard complaints from companies whose mobile search tools displayed some file types like ASCII characters–completely unreadable.

 

For those of you who missed today’s webinar, here’s a link to the OnDemand version:  https://cysalesteam.com/tsia/event/on-demand-top-knowledge-management-trends-of-2014. It is only 30 minutes, and worth a listen if you are interested in what’s new with KM. Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. We didn’t have time to answer audience questions, so if you asked a question during the live event, we will be following up with you afterwards.

And as always, thanks for reading!

Announcing Finalists for TSIA TechBest in Adoption: Citrix, Compuware, Coveo

Each Spring I launch the TSIA Member Technology Survey, which tracks adoption, satisfaction, and planned spending across 24 categories of tools and services common within service operations. The survey reveals which solutions are most popular with TSIA members, and it is interesting to find out which vendors see growing adoption. One thing is certain: When the percent of members using a particular solution sharply rises, it indicates that provider has the right messaging, the right tools, and the right price for technology service organizations. Proven success within the TSIA membership means the solution meets the business needs of users, is delivering value, and doesn’t require extensive implementation or customization to be effective.

Comparing the results from 2012 and 2013, the three TSIA partners that saw the largest increase in member adoption are Citrix, Compuware, and Coveo. These three firms represent the finalists in the 2013 TechBEST Best in Adoption Award and will be interviewed in the TechBEST Showcase that opens Technology Services World today in the EXPO Theater. The partner with the highest year-over-year gain in adoption will be named the winner during the closing Awards Luncheon on Wednesday, October 23.

• Citrix is transforming how people, businesses, and IT work and collaborate in the cloud era. The Citrix GoTo cloud services portfolio powers mobile workstyles allowing companies to work with anyone from any-where. With GoToAssist, companies are able to deliver amazing support experiences and maintain maximum uptime of people, their devices, and apps. GoToAssist seamlessly integrates web collaboration with technical support and remote monitoring tools to remove support complexities, drive efficiencies, and reduce costs. Using all three capabilities together makes it simple for support professionals to identify, ticket, and quickly resolve issues. Citrix also offers other services purpose-built for collaboration and remote access that include GoToMeeting, GoToTraining, GoToWebinar, GoToMyPC, Podio, and ShareFile. Learn more at www.citrix.com.
• Compuware Changepoint allows organizations to maximize professional services profitability and maintain a focus on effective product decisions and delivery. Changepoint’s PSA solution includes powerful business analytics and mobility, providing total operational visibility and control over the services portfolio. Services organizations can manage every aspect of their business with Changepoint, from customer acquisition, to services delivery, through to project financial control. Changepoint customers achieve strong margins, manage projects and resources with greater efficiency, deliver a competitive product and services mix, and maintain top-line revenues and bottom-line profitability. Examples of Changepoint customers include Altum, Circle Software, Innovaost, Kana, Patheon, Priocept, Sage, Steria, and Ziggo. Learn more at www.compuware.com.
• Coveo makes companies more relevant and responsive to their customers by providing technology that delivers, in real time, the most relevant, context-aware information for every employee and every customer. Coveo’s revolutionary Search & Relevance technology takes knowledge management to a new, more relevant level by securely connecting with and harnessing an organization’s big, fragmented data from any combination of cloud, social, and on-premise systems. For example, with Coveo for Salesforce, case-relevant knowledge from anywhere (social, on-premise and cloud-based systems) is presented directly into the agent’s context, related to the case at hand: solutions to similar cases, knowledge articles, relevant communications, even experts who can help. Technology companies including Deltek, EXFO, Tokyo Electron America, and SunGard use Coveo to inject more relevant knowledge into customer service interactions, personalize online experiences, and radically boost knowledge management initiatives. Learn more at www.coveo.com.

I’ll be intereviewing the finalists today at 11:30 in the Expo. Hope to see you there! And as always, thanks for reading!

93% of Service Organizations have a KM initiative in progress: Separating “Big K” and “Little k” KM

In the last few weeks something has become very clear to me: I needed a new vocabulary for knowledge management. As I blogged previously, I noticed at our recent Technology Services World conference that the questions around KM seemed to be shifting. I’ve thought more about this, especially in light of a 2 part webcast series we are doing on knowledge management–both webcasts from very different angles. In the first webcast yesterday, we asked a poll question to see how many audience members were in the middle of a KM project, and the results surprised me:

A full 92.7% of the audience said yes. Actually, the follow on poll question, a bit tongue in cheek I admit, asked, “Are you ALWAYS working on a knowledge management initiative?” and 65% of the audience said “Yes, it sure seems like it.” So I went back and reviewed the KM inquiries I’ve received over the past few months, and they seem to logically break down into 2 categories, which I’m calling “Big K KM” and Little k KM.” Here’s what that means:

• Little k: By little I certainly don’t mean less important or strategic, so let’s get that out of the way up front. Little k knowledge management is the tools and processes around capturing tacit knowledge, as defined by knowledge centered support (KCS). This is how support organizations (and increasingly field service and professional services) are capturing new knowledge gleaned through solving customer problems and sharing them with employees and customers. This has traditionally been the “hot” area of KM with TSIA members, with companies looking for best practices on getting support techs to contribute, how to incent workers to participate, publishing processes, and tools to easily capture the content and make it easy to find later. This is the focus of an upcoming webcast with RightAnswers.
• Big K: Separate from capturing tacit knowledge is the whole concept of how to easily index and search your explicit knowledge: all the product manuals, release notes, test plans, development notes, case histories, community and social content, etc.  In the past I referred to this part of KM as content management, but I n0 longer think that is accurate, and here’s why: the goal of content management projects from IT is typically to establish a data warehouse where all corporate IP is stored. The problem is, these data warehouses come with basic full text search capabilities, so if you know what you are looking for (project plan for release 3.2.1 in July, 2009) it works great. That is content management. However, if you are trying to mine that data warehouse to solve a customer problem (Error 204 during the create process) you need a concept-based search engine to research content as you don’t necessarily know what you are looking for.

The technology side of Big K KM is about intelligent/faceted search technology that does 4 things: 1) indexes the content to supplement the basic or nonexistent indexing in the data warehouse, 2) add additional layers of meta data around each piece of content to allow concept based searches,  3) automatically prompt the employee/customer with contextual data, eliminating the need to search, rephrase, search, rephrase, search, etc., and 4) provide the user with ‘facets’ so they can drill down into the data based on filters like data, content source, author, related product or release, etc. This was the topic of yesterday’s webcast with Coveo.

The third poll question in yesterday’s webcast asked: “Do you believe your organization is getting the most from all of its knowledge assets, across systems, the web and social media?” Not surprisingly, 87% of the audience said, “Not even close to all of it.” Technology service organizations are increasingly understanding that while they must continue to focus on knowledge fundamentals (Little k), they also need a separate but equal focus on mining the rest of corporate content (Big K). I used to lump all of this together into one big KM category, but no more. The companies I see being highly successful at KM–with reduced talk times, resolve times and higher first contact resolution to prove it–are tackling both Big K and Little k. And moving forward, that is going to be my recommendation for members.

What do you think? Which do you see as the biggest challenge, successful Big K or Little k? Are you tackling these challenges as one big problem, or as separate issues? Feel free to add a comment and let me know your thoughts. And as always, thanks for reading!

Join us live for TechFUTURES in Santa Clara!

Last fall at our Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas, the question I asked everyone I talked to was, “What does the support desk of the future look like?” What I heard were lots of elements that are quickly evolving, and will definitely be different in 3 or 5 or 10 years. Social media and rising customer clout were voiced by many people. Impacts of mobility–on how we service customers and how customers consume our products–is another game changer. Remote workers becoming the predominate model for support was also on the minds of many people. And other people expressed concern that many of today’s challenges, such as knowledge management, will only get worse in the years to come.

Out of these dialogs grew a new TSIA event, TechFUTURES, which will open our Spring TSW conference on Monday at 11:00am at the Santa Clara Convention Center. TechFUTURES presents a day in the live of a support technician, and the day in the life of a technology customer, in the year 2018. We will look at how things will change in respect to four specific areas:

• Social media. How will social media shape customer conversations, especially as Generation Y becomes the primary demographic for employees and customers? After seven years of investment, TSIA members are finally starting to see ROI for social initiatives. How will customer communities, as well as current and future social media channels, allow service operations to accommodate ever-growing customer demand for support without infinite scaling of service employees?
• Knowledge and content management. With the amount of content exploding due to rising complexity and faster release cycles, how can future service employees navigate an impossibly large knowledge infrastructure? Tomorrow’s corporate content store will be even larger and more dispersed than today, creating challenges for service organizations to find what they need quickly and efficiently. How can knowledge tools become more intelligent, anticipating our needs and proactively serving content to employees and customers?
• Mobility. The mobile revolution has quickly moved customers from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets, with a myriad of smaller and smarter devices on the horizon. As customers become inseparable from technology, their expectations for service continue to rise. As more sophisticated mobile devices proliferate, and mobile applications become the predominate way customers access our technology, how do we effectively support this increasingly mobile customer?
• Customer experience. With the customer quickly gaining clout and visibility, how will the customer experience movement impact service operations in five to ten years? With the push toward managed services, how can next-generation remote and proactive support technology radically change the customer ownership experience? Where can we make investments today to better enable the ultimate customer experience in the future?

I will open TechFUTURES and then turn things over to our panelists, each an expert on one of these areas, who will present their vision of the future. Our experts are:

• Social Media: Joe Cothrel, Chief Community Officer, Lithium
• Knowledge and Content Management: Diane Berry, SVP, Marketing and Communications, Coveo
• Mobility: John Purcell, Director, Products, LogMeIn
• Customer Experience: Anthony (T.J.) Felice, President, ISOdx Solutions

After the 4 presentations, each audience member will vote live for what they think is the most provocative view of the future, using hand held response units provided in each seat. I will announce the winner during the awards ceremony at Service Revolutions on Wednesday at the close of the conference.

If you are interested in attending TechFUTURES, attendance is included with your TSW registration. If you aren’t attending TSW, TechFUTURES is open to the public and you can register and get an entry badge at the TSW registration area in the rotunda. I’m really looking forward to this new event, and hope to see you there! Thanks as always for reading!

Interview with Partner Advisory Board Member Diane Berry, SVP Marketing and Communications, Coveo: Big Data

TSIA has recently launched our very first Partner Advisory Board, consisting of technology, service provider and consulting partners in the TSIA partner network. This is a great opportunity for us to stay current on marketing and spending trends in other industries, as well as track emerging best practices in our own industry. We have an impressive list of partners on the board; here is a link to view the complete list.

I will be bringing you interviews with our Partner Advisory Board members, a few at a time. Today’s interview is with Diane Berry, SVP Marketing and Communications, Coveo.  Coveo Insight Solutions™ leverage the full breadth and depth of information available across your organization, whether it resides in systems behind the firewall or in the cloud, to increase enterprise innovation, competitiveness and agility.

John Ragsdale: I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Diane Berry, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communication for Coveo, and thanks for participating in this blog interview. Could I ask you to start with a little background on Coveo?

Diane Berry: Coveo is an Insight Solutions software company with a new radically new approach to information integration. We help organizations get a much higher return on collective knowledge and information, and place the customer at the center of operations to facilitate sales, marketing, customer service and product engineering.   In effect, by aligning information better, we help companies establish one-to-one relationships with customers and prospects to increase sales, build customer loyalty and build more innovative products that reflect customer/marketplace needs.

As you know, with all the talk about “big data,” there is tremendous value in information that is never realized.  Companies are overwhelmed by unstructured information both within the enterprise and in social media. Coveo unlocks the value in that information with our technology, and we make it highly consumable for the users, whether that user is a customer service agent, a marketing manager, or the customer. Our customers share a common belief: “waiting for the perfectly integrated system is a losing game!”

Our unified indexing technology, at a very high level, creates structure within information where none exists, across systems and across customer interaction channels. Our platform connects with and pulls information securely from basically all enterprise and social systems to create a virtual integration layer that is always up to date. In this Unified Index, we enrich the data, consolidate and correlate it, and discover information relationships to help users become, as we say, “insightfull.”  From here, the information is consumable via role-based Insight Consoles.   If you think of, say,  Yahoo! Finance on the Internet, you get an idea of the type of mashups that we provide, in real-time, both on company websites and within the enterprise systems and the social media—however, an important difference is that the information is instantly assembled in alignment with the context of the user. The interface, in effect, “knows” the user and serves up personalized information.

John: I first became aware of Coveo as an innovative enterprise search vendor, but clearly you have expanded your platform beyond just search. But let me start with search, since poor search technology is at the root of many of problems we have today with customers, call center agents and support technicians all struggling to find the right answer amid an ocean of corporate content. How does Coveo solve this problem?

Diane:  Yes we do start with an Enterprise Search 2.0-approach to consolidating and correlating information from basically any system, whether that is within the enterprise, in the cloud, or even in social media. This is our Unified Indexing Technology. You can think about it as a real-time, virtual information integration.  The system is always indexing the latest changes from each system, so the agent—or the customer—always has the latest, contextually relevant information in front of him or her.  With the most recent version of our platform, Coveo 7.0, we’ve introduced Multi-Channel Text Analytics on top of the Unified Index. This creates information relationships that help agents solve challenges quickly and easily, and can also helps customers  to solve even complex issues via self-service.  There is a growing swell in a new technology category – Insight Solutions. Today, that is what we bring to market – solutions that help agents, executives and customers gain insight from the unprecedented—and still growing—mountains of unstructured and structured data in enterprise and social systems.

John: I fear the challenges you are solving are getting worse every year. According to my annual technology survey, 21% of technology support groups are using generic data warehouses like Lotus Notes and MS Sharepoint instead of a specialized knowledge base tool, up from 0% in 2007. What I’m hearing is that CIOs are pushing generic tools down the throats of business users, and as a result, content is being dumped into these repositories with little or no indexing or search capabilities. As one member told me, Sharepoint was a “black hole of content” for them—they could enter all the data they wanted, but they would never retrieve it again. This seems to make sophisticated search a “must have” for more companies. Is this something you are seeing in the field?

Diane:  Well, we do see this happening, and yet we see that even with sophisticated knowledge bases, companies face the same problems. It is difficult to get the information you need, because it never only resides in a “system of record.” (And yes, as you say, sometimes these “systems of record” – such as SharePoint – don’t easily give up what they have ingested….) Over the past decade, regardless of the promise of integrated solution suites, information systems have more than doubled within enterprises. For one of our customers, we are indexing 74 different systems – that is CA Technologies, which as we are all aware has grown significantly through acquisition. So this is not just about the large amounts of data, it is also about different types of data; the geometric growth of data is a strong challenge in and of itself.   All of our customers have either a knowledge base or generic data warehouse as you point out, or both in many cases, and in a strong M&A environment there may be multiples of both, plus CRM(s), plus issue defect databases, plus PLM systems…..add on top of all of this multiple customer and developer communities, plus social media such as Twitter, and you have an unbelievable mess for agents to sort through to find the answers they need.

John: I just had a conversation with a member yesterday about launching a “voice of the customer” program, and I’m happy to see interest brewing on the B2B side to improve the customer experience. Clearly social media is raising the stakes for this, with companies ignoring customer sentiment at their peril. Coveo had a major announcement last fall that will have a huge impact on analyzing customer conversations: Coveo 7.0 with Multi-Channel Text Analytics. Could you talk about this new product?

Diane: We are very excited about Coveo 7.0, as I mentioned earlier. The implication for VOTC programs is huge – and, I think, finally takes them beyond surveys to the combination of survey, multi-channel interactions, social media (including community) interaction, all correlated with their products, history and cases.  Equally as important, with Coveo, companies easily share this information across silos, so engineering and product development use it as they develop roadmaps and products, sales & marketing use it as they talk with customers and market to them. It is a virtuous circle of sorts.  This is possible because the platform is completely modular and extensible. I mentioned CA Technologies earlier – CA has rolled out Coveo to its customers via the company’s self-service portal as well as all of its employees.  These employees benefit from role-based access to a common, unified index of information across the company, and placing the customer squarely in the center of operations.  I think customer centricity, which this approach enables, is often the end goal of VOTC programs.

John: With the economy still questionable, clearly companies are not investing in new technology unless they understand where the return on investment comes from. I’ve seen some impressive case studies from your customers, including some TSIA members, on the actual benefits from implementing Coveo. Could you explain where the ROI usually comes from? What sort of metrics do you see impacted?

Diane:  Yes the economy remains questionable; however we are seeing growth in our customer base, as well as plans for growth as they develop solutions that enable their customers to save time and money—particularly with the movement to cloud-based solutions. I think you’ll see that this applies both to companies in growth mode as well as in savings mode.  I was with one of our customers a couple of weeks ago, who is currently rolling out Coveo to its customer service teams, and as a second phase will provide it to their customers for self-service. They are developing new cloud-based offerings which they believe will increase their market share considerably, and quickly. And yet they want to double capacity without adding headcount in their customer support operations—and without impacting customer satisfaction. So, basically, they want to double their capacity. Coveo will enable them to do this, first by helping their agents to become much more effective and efficient, and secondly through self-service, by helping them to deflect calls for even complex issues.

As another example, CA Technologies uses Coveo as the backbone for pulling together information across the enterprise.  With Coveo, CA connects 74 different systems, including customer communities.  If we take just customer service, where they serve approximately 150,000 customers, CA has achieved tremendous results over the past couple of years using Coveo Insight Solutions: Here are some stats shown by CA during a recent Gartner webinar:

• Overall Satisfaction:  Up 40 Basis points
• Knowledge Base Content Satisfaction:  Up 90 Basis points
• Online Usability:  Up 50 Basis points
• Time To Resolution:  Down 15%
• % Opened Online:  Up 41%
• Customer service capacity increase:  Up 8%
• Customer service staff reduction:  Down 5%

So they were able to increase capacity, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction at the same time – until now, these were diametrically opposed goals. Here is a link to a YouTube video of CA talking about their savings.

John: Thank you for being here, and thank you for agreeing to serve on our inaugural Partner Advisory Board!

Diane:  Thank you John, it is always a pleasure, and it is an honor to be involved in the TSIA Partner Advisory Board.