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.

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Driving Online Customer Success: Guest Blog by Mark Penson, CMO & co-founder, Survey Anyplace

Hello Blog Readers! I rarely allow guest bloggers on my site, but I wanted to highlight this great post by a new TSIA partner, Survey Anyplace, who will be participating in our TSW Expo next week in Las Vegas. Enjoy!–John

Driving Online Customer Success
Real-time Feedback & Two-way Communication Drives Customer Technology Usage and the Bottom Line
By Mark Penson, CMO & co-founder, Survey Anyplace

When was the last time you used your generic spreadsheet program to its maximum capabilities? Do you even know all it can do for you? Many of your clients have the same issues with the software you’re providing. You need to get to know your customer better before you can help them know your product better. You need to determine what they most need to truly benefit from the services you provide.

When was the last time you received an email after you made a product purchase? Did you actually fill it out? No. I didn’t think so. That’s exactly my point.

Get into the minds of your customers, in real-time, so they can tell you exactly what they think, when they think it, so you can make sure you deliver – and continue to deliver for a very long time – exactly what will delight, not just satisfy them.

Customer Retention, Usage, and Happiness for Long-term Profit

You need real-time, two-way communication to drive customer satisfaction. Consider every customer interaction to be an opportunity to delight.

Customers have a variety of ways to get in touch with you….or may decide not to. It may be easier for your customer to ignore you. You need to remedy this. If the customer doesn’t contact you, initiate contact! If not, you’ll lose the customer before you’ve had time to react.  Think about this statement: “unknown” equals “unloved.”

The question is how you can create two-way communication.

1. Always ask for feedback.

• Provide easy-to-answer questionnaires embedded in your mobile app or web application to let your user tell you what he thinks about your app, device or service. You’ll get very valuable “in the moment” data.
• During online support, provide a “Click on this button” survey, asking for his one-minute feedback.
• Add a sticker with a personalized QR code and URL linking to a survey on every hardware package.
• If you know who the user is, personalize the survey, upload the results into the CRM system, and react or act accordingly.
• Always give your users an incentive, of course.

2. Post your users’ feedback in your newsletters, on your website, or any other channel you use to get in touch with them.

• Be sure to point out what you’ve changed or improved based on the information, so they can see their participation gets results.

3. Gamifying Effort Scores for Better Educated Customers

• If you’re using only 20% of an application, it’s easy to drop it and jump to another vendor. It’s incredibly important that your customers use your software or hardware to its full extent. Only then will your accounts be less vulnerable to your competitors.
• Embed questionnaires and quizzes within your applications. Use a “Did you know….?” style. Ask users to take small quizzes about some of the features.
• Add gamification: give them a score, let them earn badges. Give prizes to people who not only know the most, but also to highly active participants.
• At the end of each quiz, always ask for one minute of feedback.
• Track the answers. Not only are you driving loyalty, but also analyzing the scores allows you to measure the “user experience” and the effort it takes to learn new features.

4. Be Proactive During Online Support

• For every online interaction, let the customer tell you what he thinks. Did he really get the help he needed? Ask him explicitly. If he’s not happy, give him the chance to “click on this button” to get in touch with your priority helpdesk.
• Don’t just collect the data. Analyze it and make any necessary changes to your customer service process or to reorganize the way the team works.

Get Your Employees’ Effort Scores, Too

Your employees need to know more than your customers. They cannot support your customers unless they understand your products at the deepest levels themselves. Are they there yet? An advanced training program doesn’t necessarily mean that employees all have the required skills. Do you test them on a frequent basis? If not, you should. Define a process to review general and detailed scores and to take actions on individual and group performances.

No matter what you do, though, make it fun. Gamification is critical to drive participation.

Organize quizzes for all the required subjects. Ask your employees to take them at different levels, from junior to expert. Reward them for their expertise and participation.

For these companies without a formal training program, create one using the collective intelligence of your employees – crowd-source it. Ask each person to take a specific product to create quizzes and try them on their fellow employees. You’ll end up with a full training library at a low cost. Formalize it. Gamify it, too, by department, area of expertise, etc.

Success for your organization means satisfied customers. Get everyone on board to drive customer delight in real-time.

Mark Penson is CMO & co-founder of Survey Anyplace, which generates real-time insights by facilitating easy creation of real-time customer surveys and quizzes. www.surveyanyplace.com

Gamification At Work: New Book Provides Rich Examples for Enterprise Apps

I did not jump on the gamification bandwagon early. I’ve attended a lot of webcasts and conference presentations on the topic, and I kept hearing the same unconvincing stories over and over, with no great examples of how this applies to the world of enterprise applications. Too many vendors have added a “Like” button somewhere in an application and call it gamification. I’ve seen people talk about revolutionary gamification strategies to drive worker productivity, but it was the same old incentives for extra effort we’ve used for decades. I had started to think that gamification was like the infamous emperor–maybe not completely naked, but at the least scantily clad.

I’m happy to say there is a new book about to be published that finally convinced me the gamification movement is real, it is revolutionary, and it definitely has a place in enterprise software and service operations. The book,”Gamification At Work,” was co-authored by two prominent design professionals, Janaki Kumar, Head of Strategic Design Services at SAP and Mario Herger, a Senior Innovation Strategist at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, California. With a real background in enterprise software, Janaki and Mario provide a deep dive into gamification examples for software, productivity and even support communities (using actual examples from the SAP customer community). “Gamification At Work” will be published later this month, but the publishers have provided a link to access an online version of the book, just for “Ragsdale’s Eye On Service” readers, so please click through and check it out: http://www.interaction-design.org/books/gamification_at_work.html?p=c782

I knew I was onto something when on the very first page, I found this: “[The authors] caution against taking a ‘chocolate covered broccoli’ approach of simply adding points and badges to business applications and calling them gamified.” This has been my exact complaint, so I knew these guys had figured it out.

The previous presentations I’ve seen on gamification give gaming examples and say, “Think how we could use that in corporate America!!!” But they don’t give examples. This book gives examples. Not only does it provide a look at the psychology of gaming, and walks you through the typical push backs on the topic and why they aren’t valid (things like it only works for kids, or women won’t use it), but it also details gamification elements, gives the root of the idea from the gaming world, then shows how it can be leveraged in enterprise apps or corporate processes. My favorite part of the book is Chapter 6, describing various gamification elements, and not just points and badges, but interesting concepts like Scaffolding, Narrative and Emotion.

This book is must read for enterprise application designers, and the examples about online communities and worker productivity make interesting reading for service management as well. Please take advantage of the free online version while available, or order now from Amazon!

Thanks to Janaki Kumar and Mario Herger for sending me an advance copy, and to Lee Traupel of the Interaction Design Foundation for extending the free online version to my blog readers. And as always, thank you for reading!