Dynamic Knowledge
Nitin Badjatia has
Management
Key to Better Web Self-Service
By Nitin Badjatia, Enterprise Solutions Architect, KNOVA
W e’ve all experienced it—a product that
we’ve come to rely on suddenly malfunctions.
After attempting to troubleshoot the issue our-
selves, our next instinct is to search for a solu-
tion on the product’s website. If we’re lucky,
we’ll arrive at a resolution, successfully
“deflecting” a call into the product company’s
call center. All too often, however, the web-
site fails to get us to that resolution. We may
try searching the site again, maybe with a dif-
ferent set of keywords, but we probably won’t
try a third time.
At that point the product company faces
two residual problems. First, we may head off
“onto the cloud” to see if an Internet search can
produce a solution, one that is outside the con-
trol of the product company. Or, we’ll call the
company, thereby creating an exponential
increase in the cost of handling that issue. Both
suboptimal directions are often the result of
inadequate knowledge availability for self-
service users.
Many companies struggle to understand
that self-service technology can only
achieve its optimal benefits when it enables
a dynamic ecosystem of knowledge man-
agement. We can’t find knowledge if it is
out of context, out of date or just not avail-
able. To get the most out of your knowledge
infrastructure, all three of these issues need
to be addressed:
1. Build knowledge that is in the context
of your customer. Many organizations
incorrectly assume that publishing product
manuals, and similar formal descriptive docu-
mentation, to the Web will enable their cus-
tomers to solve their own problems. While this
may work in some instances, most product
manuals aren’t constructed to resolve customer
issues. In other words, the context of the
knowledge is incorrect.
Building knowledge in the context of the
customer starts by understanding the ques-
tions they ask and keywords they use when
they search for solutions. This process starts
in your call center and extends to your web-
site. In your call center, customer queries
need to be captured in the actual “voice of
the customer.” This point of contact is where
“conversational knowledge” is created.
Much of your success with self-service will
be your organization’s ability to develop
S10 KMWorld April 2008
conversational knowledge. While this may
require a significant “rewiring” of how your
call center agents handle customer calls, a
robust knowledge infrastructure will
empower them to accomplish this without
additional overhead.
2. Understand your knowledge cover-
age ratio. Knowledge coverage is another
factor to consider when planning to roll out
self-service. Simply stated, how many of the
known issues with your products have well-
documented solutions? As noted in the
example above, most customers may search
twice on your self-service website, but each
attempted search that fails will reduce their
confidence in self-resolving their issue.
“Self-service
technology can only
achieve its optimal
benefits when it
enables a dynamic
ecosystem of
knowledge
management.”
By studying coverage closely, you’ll
increase the chance that your customers will
succeed in resolving their issues via self-serv-
ice. With a robust knowledge management
infrastructure, your organization can become
proactive in closing those gaps by analyzing
reports that identify areas where customers
were not successful in finding a resolution.
Understanding this coverage ratio, and proac-
tively developing knowledge to cover more res-
olutions, will substantially increase success
rates on self-service.
3. Enable content vitality. A final factor
is putting in place a knowledge infrastructure
been a technology
consultant, banker
and business
strategist for the last
18 years. At KNOVA,
he’s responsible for
constructing tailored
service resolution
management
solutions for KNOVA
Nitin Badjatia customers. Badjatia
joined KNOVA in
2004 through a merger with ServiceWare
Technologies. Read more from him at his weblog
“Thought Stream” www.nitinbadjatia.com.
that enables knowledge vitality, or freshness,
through deeply integrated processes. Know-
ledge is ever-evolving. Unlike product
manuals, which are typically tailored to a
static state, your customers’ experiences
are dynamic and ever-changing. Your self-
service knowledge should reflect the best
resolutions of this cumulative set of customer
experiences.
The best way to capture these experi-
ences is through integrating systems and
processes throughout your customer lifecy-
cle management approach. The right know-
ledge management infrastructure will enable
this content vitality by empowering both
your customers and employees to participate
in real-time knowledge improvements. Your
empowered employees should be able to
modify knowledge on issues as they evolve,
giving your organization the ability to
present the best knowledge options to your
customers in real time.
A Dynamic Environment is the
Ultimate Goal
When considering self-service, it is
important to remember that customer-cen-
tric knowledge is not created just by your
organization. It intimately involves your
customer in a constantly evolving ecosys-
tem. To improve your customers’ chances of
finding the right knowledge, at the right
time, the three focus areas above should
serve as foundation blocks for your knowl-
edge management solution. ❚
KNOVA, a Consona CRM solution, maximizes the value
of every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle.
Built on an adaptive search and knowledge management
platform, KNOVA’s suite of applications integrates with
CRM implementations to help companies increase rev-
enues, reduce service costs and improve customer satis-
faction. Industry leaders including AOL, Ford, HP, Novell,
McAfee and H&R Block rely on KNOVA’s award-winning
service resolution management applications to power an
intelligent customer experience on their websites and
within their contact centers. For more information, visit
www.knova.com.
Your Customers Can
Search, But Do They Find?
By Nitin Badjatia, Enterprise Solutions Architect, KNOVA
O ftentimes when customers come to your
website, they are there to find an answer to
an issue—a resolution to a problem. Many
companies seem to think that attaching a ro-
bust search engine to a content source is
enough to do the trick.
But companies that consider customer
self-service a strategic asset see that
inbound customer exception in a different
light. They realize that customers don’t want
to search for the best result; rather they want
to find a resolution, and find it quickly. It
may state the obvious, but it is important to
note that, while issue resolution must incor-
porate a robust search technology, that tech-
nology must also be intelligent enough to
interpret the underlying meaning of the cus-
tomer query. Furthermore, a holistic view of
issue resolution also considers the nature of
the content that customers are presented,
and empowers your organization to proac-
tively monitor and perfect the resolutions
presented to customers.
That simple text entry box, which usu-
ally is prominently displayed on every page
of your website, has a daunting task. When
a customer enters a search term, typically
no more than two to three words, that box
must launch a query into available content
sources to find the right answer as quickly
and efficiently as possible. On a typical
website, the underlying enterprise search
engine scours your content sources, and
presents the best possible documents that
reflect the queried terms. This is not much
different than popular Web search tools.
Customers are left to fend for themselves
and interpret which query result actually
provides the best possible resolution to their
request. In today’s competitive environ-
ment, leaving customers to fend for them-
selves is not enough.
Understanding the
Customer’s Query
For leading customer-service organiza-
tions, that text entry box needs to be smart
enough to interpret the purpose of the cus-
tomer query. In some instances, query
terms are not exact matches to terms within
your content. In these cases, the underlying
S22 KMWorld May 2008
technology must be robust enough to inter-
pret the keywords and present results that
contain similar terms or concepts. Such
contextualized results reflect a knowledge
management approach to enterprise search.
By returning results that have concepts that
are common to the query, your customer’s
chances of a speedy resolution increase
substantially.
That search box must also understand
that many queries are best answered by
invoking a process, not just returning search
results. For example a customer may initi-
ate a request that asks for “password reset.”
“Customers
don’t want to
search for the best
result; rather they
want to find a
resolution, and find
it quickly.”
Instead of returning a set of results, the
search box should understand the purpose
of that query, and spawn the password reset
process, or resolution wizard. As with con-
textualized search, speed to resolution is the
real key to success.
When the query submitted into the
search box is considered too broad, which
is often the case with single-word queries,
the underlying technology can improve
speed to resolution by not only providing
the best possible content, but also by topi-
cal categorization of relevant content. Con-
tent that is clustered, acting as a filter,
Nitin Badjatia has
been a technology
consultant, banker
and business
strategist for the last
18 years. At KNOVA,
he’s responsible for
constructing tailored
service resolution
management
solutions for KNOVA
Nitin Badjatia customers. Badjatia
joined KNOVA in
2004 through a merger with ServiceWare
Technologies. Read more from him at his weblog,
“Thought Stream”, www.nitinbadjatia.com.
reduces the result set and improves the
speed to resolution.
Successful Search Depends on
Robust Content
Even the most dynamic search technol-
ogy is dependent on a robust set of content
sources. Your customers can’t find content
that isn’t reachable. Often overlooked when
considering search technology, content
ultimately makes the search experience
dynamic and productive for your customers.
Simply exposing product manuals, techni-
cal notes and formally authored content to
a search engine is not sufficient. Dynamic
content management involves an ongoing
analysis of customer queries to better under-
stand where content gaps exist and aligning
content management processes to help close
those gaps.
By enabling a true knowledge manage-
ment-driven search process, customer sup-
port administrators should be empowered to
analyze search query data and proactively
focus on developing new content, or improv-
ing existing content, to increase the number
of successful resolutions for customers.
The goal for your customers is finding
the right answer. The goal for your organi-
zation should be providing that right answer
in a fast, accurate and consistent manner
through a dynamic knowledge management
process. By integrating a robust enterprise
search with a proactive content creation and
maintenance process, you’ll be able to
deliver on the customer’s expectation of
finding the right answers quickly.
KNOVA, a Consona CRM solution, maximizes the value
of every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle.
Built on an adaptive search and knowledge management
platform, KNOVA’s suite of applications integrates with
CRM implementations to help companies increase rev-
enues, reduce service costs and improve customer satis-
faction. Industry leaders including AOL, Ford, HP, Novell,
McAfee and H&R Block rely on KNOVA’s award-winning
service resolution management applications to power an
intelligent customer experience on their websites and
within their contact centers. For more information, visit
www.knova.com.