Best Practices in
KM for Customer Service
Andy Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Sid Suri, InQuira . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Ashutosh Roy, eGain . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Anand Subramaniam, eGain . . . . . 7
Tracey Mustacchio, Vivisimo . . . . . . 8
Tim Hines, Consona . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Fix it For Me! Staying Ahead of the Customer Sat Curve
David Lloyd, IntelliResponse . . . . 11 Top Three Myths of KM for Customer Service
Parature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Five Big Customer Service Mistakes... And How to Avoid Them
Premium Sponsors
At Your Service
Managing the experience your customers have with your company is probably the most
important effort you can undertake. But many companies don't really have a grasp on what—
exactly—that means. How do our customers perceive us? What do they expect (or demand)
from us? And after they've had an engagement with us, how do they feel? Because it’s that
afterglow that defines the difference between a return customer, or a disaster. . . .
Five Key Benefits: Using Knowledge Management in Customer Service
As products become more complex and companies support broader product portfolios, the
challenges of quickly and efficiently resolving customer issues multiply. The result is fewer
cases are resolved with the first call. Even with significant technology investments,
Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) members report a 24% net decrease in
first-call resolution between between 2003 and 2010. . . .
Six Keys to KM Success: Lessons Learned from the Global 2000
Customer service has emerged as one of the few remaining differentiators that businesses can
sustain over time. Companies that are winning in this environment provide “stand-out” customer
service by using knowledge to empower contact center agents and drive self-service interactions.
In delivering KM solutions to world-class contact centers and self-service operations for more
than 15 years, we have compiled hundreds of best practices. . . .
Harvesting Social Knowledge for Customer Service
Community-based knowledge creation for customer service is not that new. However, enabled by
the ubiquity and ease of use of the Web and the availability of social-networking tools, it has gone
to a whole new level, leading to the coinage of the term “social knowledge.” While more prevalent
in B2C sectors, social knowledge is also starting to matter in B2B sectors.
How can companies harvest the best of social knowledge. . . ?
Information Optimization for Customer Service
Few activities affect the bottom line as much as customer service. Regardless of industry or
type of business, customer satisfaction and retention, new customer acquisition and average
revenue per customer are critical factors. At a time when many products and services are being
commoditized and subjected to fierce competition from around the world, customer
service remains one of the surest ways that companies can differentiate from competitors.
And on the risk side of the equation. . . .
When you think about reducing customer service costs and cutting margins while improving
your service levels, most people go right to the concept of self-service. It’s true that with an
effective knowledge management solution and self-service portal, you can achieve these goals.
You’re harnessing knowledge of known issues and deflecting them to your self-service portal.
In today’s instant gratification world, customers prefer the convenience and immediacy of
fixing it themselves. . . .
We labor under the misguided notion that when it comes to customer- and self-service, content is
king. The more you have, the better. But many corporate efforts designed to enhance service options
fail the very people they were designed to help: the customers. In a typical Fortune 500 company,
there are hundreds of thousands of “digital artifacts” representing the internal “knowledge” of the
organization. This collection of artifacts is captured by CRM and ECM solutions. . . .
Companies that are considered the gold standard for customer service wield it as a powerful
differentiator, enabling them to distance themselves from competitors. There are common
denominators these leading companies use to make their reputations. By adhering to best
practices in service delivery, they’re set up to provide a superior experience each time a
customer contacts them, using that opportunity to deepen the relationship for increased
loyalty, retention and revenues. . . .
Supplement to KMWorld July/August 2010
At Your Service
Navigating the Complex Customer Interaction Dilemma
By Andy Moore, Editorial Director, KMWorld Specialty Publishing Group
M anaging the experience your customers
have with your company is probably the
most important effort you can undertake.
But many companies don’t really have a
grasp on what—exactly—that means. How
do our customers perceive us? What do they
expect (or demand) from us? And after
they’ve had an engagement with us, how do
they feel? Because it’s that afterglow that
defines the difference between a return cus-
tomer, or a disaster.
I sat down with a few trusted advisors
on the subject of “customer service” (or
whatever you want to call it—more on that
later) to see if there are megatrends or
(maybe a little less floridly put) any advice
they could offer. I spoke with Stacy
Monarko, director of product management
for Vivisimo; Ashutosh Roy, chairman and
CEO of eGain; and Sid Suri, senior direc-
tor of product marketing at InQuira.
“Great customer service starts with
knowing how to access knowledge;
whether on the part of the customer
through a well-designed self-service inter-
face or through an agent who has ready
access to key knowledge resources.” These
words come from Sid Suri, senior director
of product marketing at InQuira, but they
would be echoed time and again by my
other panel members this month.
My question was whether rank-and-file
organizations—regular businesses like
yours and mine—have sipped the KM
Kool-Aid, and accept that customer service
is more than merely reading from a help
manual or referring to a pre-written series
of FAQs... or whether there’s more to it
than that.
“Simply collecting information is not
the problem,” says Stacy Monarko. Stacy is
director of product management for
Vivisimo. “Content management, wikis,
blogs, Web content management... there are
plenty of places to collect and share infor-
mation. Anyone can do that. In fact we have
customers buried under 10 years of infor-
mation. One has 160 different applications
it can use to access information. You can’t
survive under that,” she says. “The value is
in optimizing the flow, and driving context
around the information.”
S2 KMWorld July/August 2010
“Not all customer service, but good cus-
tomer service, is definitely a knowledge-pow-
ered initiative,” points out Ashutosh Roy,
chairman and CEO of eGain. In fact, he adds,
“customer service is one of the true killer
applications for knowledge management.
“The reason behind any customer service
interaction is the same—it’s the customer’s
need for some information or help from the
business. Without knowledge, the contact
center agent or self-service system would be
‘flying blind’ and be highly unlikely to fulfill
this customer need,” says Ashutosh.
“The reason behind
any customer service
interaction is the
same—it’s the cus-
tomer’s need for some
information or help
from the business.”
“The important factors in this equation
are time and accuracy. You know yourself
that when a knowledgeable agent is assist-
ing you, your experience is markedly
improved and your attitude toward the
company providing that customer service
experience is much more positive. In addi-
tion, you’re probably off the phone much
faster, a benefit to both you and the service-
provider,” added Sid Suri.
While the basic purpose for improved
customer contact may be self-evident, the
subtleties of the practice may be less clear.
For example, do you call it “customer serv-
ice” or “customer experience” or “cus-
tomer satisfaction” or... what?
“This area is evolving; there are no clear-
cut answers to what it all means,” admits
Stacy. “It’s funny you ask what we call it,
Andy Moore is a
30-year publishing
professional, editor
and writer who now
concentrates on
business process
improvement through
document and content
management. Moore
is the publisher of
KMWorld Magazine
Andy Moore and its related online
publications.
Moore also acts as the editorial director for the
“KMWorld Best Practices White Papers,” overseeing
their content as well as writing the opening articles
for each of the white papers in the series.
Moore is based in Camden, Maine, and can be
reached at andy_moore@kmworld.com
because we just had a conversation about that
last week. I definitely think ‘customer serv-
ice’ is OK, but I tend to go with ‘customer
interaction.’And I expand that through all the
touchpoints—not only with customers, but
with partners and even internal conversations,
such as an IT help desk. And that is impor-
tant; a pharmaceutical company might have
2,000 sales reps, so their internal demand for
support is huge,” she says.
The Social Aspect
I asked the panel to test a radical theory
of mine: “Social media” has had enormous
buzz but very little actual business effect...
APART FROM customer service engage-
ments. Its role in customer service makes
sense... customer feedback, user forums,
blogs, etc. I can see that playing a role in
that very discrete part of the business. But
it has had, in my view, very little impact
elsewhere. Perhaps it’s oversold? The
“promise” of social media has actually not
come true in general business processes...
true or false? And why or why not?
“The promise of social media hasn’t
quite lived up to the buzz,” agrees Ashutosh.
“Not even in customer service engagements,
in my opinion. What we have today is wide-
spread panic about the possibility of cus-
tomers airing grievances in social spaces
that the business might not be monitoring.
Again there are no standards for good prac-
tices—what should you do if a customer
vents loudly on your Facebook page or if
you are the target of a Friday social punk-
ing? There are a growing number of cases
where social interventions have backfired on
the business,” he says.
“The idea that adopting social media as
a knowledge resource has some merit, but
then the search criteria for finding the right
answer changes from ‘finding a needle in a
haystack’ to one more akin to ‘finding a
needle in 100 haystacks,’” says Sid. “Your
search mechanisms need to be much more
accurate and your analytics must be up to
the challenge. There is so much noise in
these social channels that one could easily
become mired in the cacophony,” he adds.
But Sid does have hope for social tools
in broader business applications. “Outside
of the customer service arena, there are a
few examples of manufacturers that use
social feedback channels to refine their
product configurations. I think this holds
some solid potential for mass-customiza-
tion that can improve everyday products for
most people,” he says.
Ashutosh agrees: “There ARE real gains
in ‘going social.’ Done right, and not as a
knee-jerk reaction to panic, it should be of use
to the business at various levels. The most
important thing for the business to decide is its
social persona, a consistent persona that can
help it gain trust in social spaces as well as
guide its behavior in these spaces. Once that’s
done, it can figure out ways in which it would
like to use social media.”
Stacy points out that the effective applica-
tion of social media might have more to do
with the nature of the industry than anything
else. “There are use cases where social media
can have a great impact. Consulting is the best
example. When a consultant is out on a high-
ly paid service engagement, he or she knows
that a colleague is probably trying to do the
same thing on another account,” she says,
adding that other businesses don’t share that
dynamic. “In consulting there may be thou-
sands of people working on very similar
problems; but in an R&D setting, for example,
you may have 15 people working on a very
specific problem. It’s within the nature of
professional services to adopt information
sharing and collaboration on this large a scale.”
A Single Version of the Truth
“Then there’s the emerging area of social
knowledge harvesting,” adds Ashutosh. “We
have clients who are setting up all kinds of
processes to identify and benefit from useful
user-generated content. I think we’ll see a
lot of innovation when the panic and buzz
die down a bit. An area that’s been of inter-
est to us lately is the content demands that
social media places on businesses. You’ll
have to worry about stale content not just on
your website, but also the half a dozen social
spaces you own. It makes single-sourced
publishing more important than ever for
enterprises,” he says.
There’s no doubt that an enormous
challenge for business is consolidating
information sources into “a single version
of the truth.” And as Ashutosh points out,
social media simply aggravates the prob-
lem. But there are efforts underway that
mean to address that problem, and strange-
ly enough, one solution might rely on
MORE information, not less. “We call it
contextual learning,” explains Stacy. “The
more information you put into the system,
the more you can consolidate it. If you have
160 systems, even if you can consolidate
half of them, you’re driving huge value. For
example, if I call a contact center and tell
them my name, they’re immediately gath-
ering great amounts of contextual data
about me. Then if I say, I’m having trouble
texting, even more systems start sending
information to the agent,” she says,
describing a seemingly incongruous pat-
tern of wider information access while at
the same time narrowing the possible
answers. After only two sentences, the
agent is already armed with a humungous
amount of helpful information. But the
more the conversation continues, the more
“honed” the answers can be. “The solution
is the ability to find the commonalities
among many systems, and avoiding the
need for the user to go to several different
systems, with their different access meth-
ods and interfaces, and putting his or her
“One size does NOT fit
all. That’s when you
need to assess your
goals and determine
the best solution.”
name in every time.” But Stacy admits that
it’s unlikely a magic frame will appear with
the perfect answer, like a Magic 8-Ball.
“No, the result is not a typical search
frame,” she agrees, “but more of a dash-
board that shows different, relevant infor-
mation sources.”
Sid adds: “Especially in a self-service
environment, it’s probably better to provide
one reliable answer to the customer’s
query, but therein lies the problem. How do
you know it was the right answer?” he asks
rhetorically. “The key to resolving this
issue is understanding the ‘intent’ of the
customer’s question. How many ways can
you ask the question: What is the price of
the new HTC Droid ERIS? Moreover, what
is the intent of this question? Odds are, if
the customer is shopping price for a specif-
ic smartphone, they’re ready to buy and
you should not confuse the issue with a
bunch of different press releases, phone
configurations and technical information
resources. But you MAY want to augment
the response with co-sell offers, and this is
where the game gets interesting. Only a
comprehensive knowledge platform with
built-in analytics can help you refine and
tune your offers for maximum uptake. The
key is to keep an eye on the analytics and
keep tuning the answers.”
This balance between “too much infor-
mation” versus “the right information” is
becoming difficult to manage. On one
hand, having a wealth of information,
whether it’s directly relevant or not, seems
inherently valuable. On the other hand,
there is the “noise” factor that complicates
the issue. Which should users aim for?
“We agree that customers look for
answers and not a collection of irrelevant
search hits,” says Ashutosh. “While power-
users and experienced contact center agents
may be able to quickly process search hits
and get to answers, most users struggle with
search hits and often give up. Traditional
search puts the onus on the user to come up
with the right set of keywords to get to the
answers they need,” he says. “But modern
multi-search knowledge management sys-
tems enable users to quickly and easily find
that single, relevant answer. They provide
multiple access methods such as dynamic
FAQs, keyword and intent-based search,
browse and guided help, based on user pref-
erences and query type. This is far more
effective than a one-size-fits-all approach,
and helps improve findability.”
Measuring Success
If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s
that one size does NOT fit all. That’s when
you need to assess your goals and determine
the best solution. “Measurements vary,” says
Stacy. “Sometimes call center agents are
measured on call time, but in some indus-
tries—financial services for example—the
metric of success has more to do with the
end-result—cross-selling, upselling and
keeping the caller on the phone longer, rather
than shorter,” she points out.
“We conduct a survey every year,” adds
Ashutosh. “We’ve been noticing that while
businesses are offering more interaction
channels, they score better in basic phone
customer service metrics such as hold
times, transfers and the availability of IVR
self-service than in Web or multichannel
customer service metrics. Businesses don’t
always keep up with consumer behavior.
They can underestimate major trends, such
as the shift to electronic channels, chat,
cobrowse, SMS, email and the Web, either
mobile or non-mobile. Most businesses
are still playing catch-up when it comes
to e-service.”
And so, dear reader, it’s time to take
stock of YOUR service capability. There
are great tips in the following pages, and
there are MANY words of wisdom. Just
remember: it’s the end result that counts the
most... not the means to get there. ❚
KMWorld July/August 2010 S3
Five Key Benefits
Using Knowledge Management
in Customer Service
By Sid Suri, Senior Director, Product Marketing, InQuira, Inc.
A s products become more complex and
companies support broader product portfolios,
the challenges of quickly and efficiently
resolving customer issues multiply. The result
is fewer cases are resolved with the first call.
Even with significant technology investments,
Technology Services Industry Association
(TSIA) members report a 24% net decrease in
first-call resolution between 2003 and 2010.1
Why is this happening?
Contact center investments have focused
on telephony improvements, skills-based
routing, workforce management and CRM
applications, but the key area that has been
woefully under-funded is knowledge man-
agement. These other investments, while
important, only address 20% of service call
times. Most of the time agents spend on the
phone is engaged in research, discovery and
communication of their search results to the
customer.
In this article we’ll discuss several case
studies that illustrate five key areas where
knowledge management can deliver signif-
icant improvements in customer service.
Reducing Research Time
By understanding the customer’s intent
and delivering accurate and consistent
answers to the contact center desktop, you
can cut costs, reduce average-call-handle-
time and improve the overall customer
experience. This is easier said than done.
Agents typically must find answers to serv-
ice issues hidden in a multitude of sources,
including product manuals, marketing col-
lateral, corporate policies, bug databases,
case notes, etc. Requiring agents to sift
through multiple applications and thousands
of irrelevant and outdated documents takes
time and leads to an expensive support call,
as well as frustrated customers.
A knowledge management system
equipped with powerful search that scans the
enterprise to bring back only the snippets of
knowledge relevant to solving the issue is
crucial to reducing research time. Further-
more, an agent should never have to research
a query that’s already been answered.
Through case-linking and rapid inline
S4 KMWorld July/August 2010
creation of knowledge, enterprise-wide
searches can be reduced as the system
becomes smarter and more efficient.
As an example, by arming its front-line
agents with fast, convenient access to the most
relevant information, one InQuira customer has
increased its first-contact resolution rates from
40% to more than 65%. In addition, these tier-
one agents can now handle more calls because
their research time has been reduced by 55%.
Plus, they’re far less likely to escalate calls to
more technical personnel.
“Most of the time
agents spend on the
phone is engaged in
research, discovery
and communication of
their search results.”
Increasing Resolution Accuracy
Most questions can be asked in a multi-
tude of ways such as “upgrade service,”
“how do I upgrade,” “what are my upgrade
options,” etc. But traditional search and con-
tent management engines interpret each
word in these questions separately, bringing
back hundreds if not thousands of irrelevant
results. A KM solution that understands cus-
tomer intent—including special terms such
as product names and industry jargon—and
maps the inquiry to pre-defined results, or
that uses intent to intelligently navigate
enterprise content, is the only way to guar-
antee a high degree of accuracy.
When the success of your insurance business
demands that accurate answers be delivered
Sid Suri is the
senior director of
product marketing
at InQuira. He has
more than 10 years
of experience in
the enterprise
software and
technology
consulting
industries helping
Sid Suri organizations
leverage technology
to achieve positive business results. Prior to
InQuira, Suri held various marketing
responsibilities at TIBCO Software.
to more than 70,000 independent agents as they
write new policies, there is truly only one solu-
tion: knowledge management.
A well-respected specialty insurer dis-
covered that its contact center representa-
tives were struggling, achieving only a
dismal 28% accuracy rate in their response
to agent inquiries as they scoured PDF doc-
uments and regulations that were stored in
multiple databases. As the independent
agents depending on this critical informa-
tion could write policies for a number of
competitive carriers, this metric was cer-
tainly not encouraging new business.
Now its resolution accuracy of the first
search by contact center reps has increased
to more than 85%. As an added benefit, call
times have been reduced by an average of
22%. These improvements in support con-
sistency and research accuracy led to a 35%
increase in the number of new policies writ-
ten over a one-year period.
Reducing Training Time
Training and nurturing contact center
agents is a critical step in building cus-
tomer satisfaction and loyalty, but it’s also
expensive and time-consuming. Agents
are the “face” of your company, so it is
vital that they are seen as intelligent and
responsive.
Agents must be trained not only on your
products and services but also on how to
access information. Time spent learning
how to navigate multiple applications where
content may be stored—and the individual
search terms, tips and tricks for each appli-
cation—can add days if not weeks to train-
ing. A single KM platform with an intuitive
interface dramatically reduces this type of
training time.
One of the world’s leading research and
development enterprises discovered these
uncomfortable truths as its help desks, call cen-
ter agents and sales divisions gradually became
less and less effective. The implementation of
a centralized, comprehensive knowledge base
helped turn these factors around, reducing tech-
nical service agent training time by 20% and
cutting retention-related costs by more than
3%. At the same time, customer satisfaction rat-
ings increased by 10%.
Managing Increasing
Service Volumes
As industry consolidation and acquisi-
tions build the customer base for many sur-
vivors of the recent economic downturn, the
need for more efficient customer support is
rapidly surfacing. One InQuira customer
experienced this effect firsthand. Following
a key acquisition of one of its competitors,
it saw its call volumes triple, while agents
struggled to access siloed information stores
and isolated support resources. Its previ-
ously profitable service offering quickly
became a cost center and the support expe-
rience for its customers deteriorated to the
point where its e-mail servers were filled
with “hate mail”.
Knowledge management can help scale
existing agent resources to handle increas-
ing volume by helping them work more effi-
ciently. It can help inexperienced agents
learn from institutional knowledge through
the KM platform. It can help reduce the time
it takes even top agents to do research while
improving their accuracy and their access to
distributed knowledge sources.
One year after implementing its solution,
its customer support website was named one
of the “Top Ten Web Support Sites” by the
Association of Service Professionals. In
addition, by allowing customers to effec-
tively search for consistent and accurate
answers via the Web channel, it saved $5.8
million in the first year.
In a second example, one of the UK’s lead-
ing wireless telecommunications providers has
shown that call deflection can not only save sig-
nificant money in the contact center, but it can
also reduce customer churn. When it started on
this journey, it required an average of eight calls
to resolve customer issues with some of the
newest smart phones. It has now adopted online
customer discussion forums that handle more
than one million hits and resolve as many as
7,000 cases per month. As the head of e-serv-
ices notes, “If we had to staff for this volume
in the contact center, we would need to hire 19
additional agents.” Not only has their effort paid
off in cost savings, but their discussion forums
have created a self-help community of users
that have a greater sense of loyalty to the
provider and its fellow customers.
Creating Service Insight
The number one advantage that a com-
prehensive knowledge management plat-
form can provide is insight. This type of
service insight can be used to push more
interactions to the Web channel by improv-
ing answer delivery and consistency. It can
help you pinpoint where online-to-assisted
channel escalations are coming from and
how to prevent them. It can show you where
you may have knowledge gaps and where to
take corrective action. And it can show you
emerging service issues through the moder-
ation of discussion forums.
By enabling ongoing learning and easy
authoring and editing, effective knowledge-
bases can foster improvements in every
front-line interaction. By analyzing Web ses-
sions and presenting the results to a repre-
sentative’s desktop along with an escalation
call, the agent can focus on providing new
information, rather than repeating the
answers a customer may have already tried.
This type of multi-channel integration not
only reduces call handle time, but also
improves the customer’s experience.
“The number-one
advantage that
a comprehensive
knowledge
management platform
can provide is insight.”
When the CSR discovers the right answer
for the customer, he or she can easily add that
content to a knowledge article or recommend
the solution to the technical authors for review
and adoption. Once published in the knowl-
edgebase, this new solution can be quickly uti-
lized by others in the contact center as well as
on the Web self-service site and in customer
discussion forums.
“We have more than 1,500 technicians
worldwide, and any one of them can start a
document and submit it to a global docu-
ment flow process. You need a strong tool to
facilitate that,” said the company’s director
of global online services.
The One-Second Productivity
Increase
You may have already invested heavily
in a CRM or contact center desktop appli-
cation. Even with all the proven productiv-
ity increases you’ve read above, you’re
probably asking yourself, “Why should I put
KM on the CSR desktop? My agents are
already overloaded with Alt-Tab functions
and myriad system log-ins.”
The good news is that you don’t have to
add to that burden. Knowledge management
systems already have deep integrations with
the most popular CRM applications, including
Siebel, Oracle Contact Center, Oracle CRM
On-Demand, and SAP CRM. Agents do not
need to switch applications or log in separately
to gain the benefits of knowledge manage-
ment. Answers can be easily linked directly to
the customer’s case and re-used by others in
the contact center to solve similar problems.
Integration such as this significantly reduces
the time-to-resolution for novice agents as well
as more experienced representatives. As shown
in the equation below, the savings of even
one second can have a tremendous affect on
contact-center economics.
Cost per call = $8.16
Average call time @ 7.56 min
(454 seconds) = $0.02/second.
Calls per agent per day @ 72 x number of
agents @ 500 = 36,000 calls per day.
Save two cents per call per day and
you can save $262,000 per year.
Source: Benchmark Portal, Purdue University, Center for
Customer Excellence
So, can having a knowledge manage-
ment application integrated into your exist-
ing CRM desktop save you one second per
call? How long does it take you to switch
applications on your desktop and get accli-
mated to the new interface? I’m betting it
takes longer than a second.
Looking ahead, the challenges of cus-
tomer service and support will only get more
complicated, more complex, and more
demanding. Reducing research time, improv-
ing search accuracy, cutting agent training
requirements, managing increasing service
volumes and gaining service insight will all
be instrumental in helping to build your brand
value while simultaneously managing the
costs of your customer support operations.
Whether your focus is on reducing costs
or improving the customer experience, there
has never been a better time to investigate
the benefits and productivity improvements
made available by the implementation of a
complete, comprehensive knowledge man-
agement platform. ❚
InQuira is a leading provider of intelligent knowledge
solutions that connect people to the answers they need.
InQuira provides enterprise knowledge solutions for
Web self-service, contact center support and knowledge
intranets, built from a single technology platform that
makes it possible for companies to provide a consistent
customer service experience across Web, phone and
community channels.
For additional information, visit www.InQuira.com.
1 TSIA member benchmark report for 2010, J. Ragsdale.
KMWorld July/August 2010 S5
Six Keys to
KM Success
Lessons Learned from the Global 2000
By Ashutosh Roy, Chairman and CEO, eGain Communications Corp.
C ustomer service has emerged as one of
the few remaining differentiators that busi-
nesses can sustain over time. Companies
that are winning in this environment provide
“stand-out” customer service by using
knowledge to empower contact center
agents and drive self-service interactions.
In delivering KM solutions to world-
class contact centers and self-service oper-
ations for more than 15 years, we have
compiled hundreds of best practices that
improve the odds of success in KM imple-
mentations, while maximizing ROI. Listed
below are some of the popular ones.
1. Quantify value.
Assessing expected and realized ROI
before and after the deployment helps you
justify the initial investment as well as
ongoing maintenance of the knowledge-
base (KB) while elevating your visibility
as a value creator for your business.
Best practice: Make sure the metrics
you use are aligned with business objec-
tives. For instance, if your main business
goal is to increase upsell and cross-sell
through knowledge-enabled contextual
offers, reduction in call handle times will
be a conflicting metric. As you assess ROI,
keep in mind that KM delivers positive
ROI in areas such as:
◆ Increase in first-time fixes and revenue
through upsell and cross-sell; and
◆ Reduction in escalations, transfers, repeat
calls, call handle times, training time, un-
warranted product returns, field visits and
staff wage premiums.
2. Build the right team.
Successful KM implementations start
with the right team for knowledge capture
and creation.
Best practice: Build a cross-functional
team that can bring a 360-degree approach
to knowledge creation. Best-practice teams
typically include:
◆ Lead expert: individual who decides how
the KB will be organized, which topics
will be covered, what the roles of various
S6 KMWorld July/August 2010
people in the team are and plans for main-
tenance;
◆ Users: high-performance contact center
agents who provide suggestions;
◆ Knowledge authors: individuals who are
trained to use authoring tools; and
◆ Project manager: individual who keeps
the project on track.
3. Avoid the “swiss cheese” syndrome.
Ambitious deployments almost always
result in a KB that is solid in places, but
full of holes, like a slice of Swiss cheese.
This is a recipe for failure, because if users
can’t find the answers, or get inadequate or
wrong answers, they will quickly stop
using the system.
Best practice: Focus on depth and qual-
ity rather than breadth. For instance, if an
enterprise sells printers, scanners and
copiers, the best approach would be to
cover one product line thoroughly first.
4. Maintain velocity.
A classic mistake in KM implementa-
tions is not making midcourse adjustments
to keep the project on track.
Best practice: If the deployment
appears to be falling behind schedule,
narrow the scope of the KB and finish on
schedule. In fact, it is better to widen the
scope later to expand the benefits of the
deployment. As a rough guide, a typical
enterprise deployment should not take
more than three months after the initial
planning, with three or four full-time peo-
ple engaged. Deployment includes soft-
ware installation, knowledge gathering
and testing both the quality of the KB and
system performance.
5. Balance “ivory tower knowledge” with
“street smarts.”
Enterprises often make the mistake of
relying solely on internally focused
domain experts who rarely speak to cus-
tomers. It is sometimes difficult for experts
to get down to the level of ordinary cus-
tomers who may not know technical terms
such as whether their mutual fund is “no
load,” “front-loaded” or “back-loaded.”
Ashutosh Roy,
eGain’s co-founder,
has served as chief
executive officer and
chairman of eGain
since 1997. From
1995 to 1997, he
served as chairman
of WhoWhere? Inc,
an Internet-service
company he
Ashutosh Roy co-founded, which is
now part of Lycos,
Inc. From 1993 to 1995, Ashu co-founded Parsec
Technologies, an international call center
software company based out of India. Ashu
holds a BS in computer science from IIT,
New Delhi, a master’s degree in computer
science from Johns Hopkins University and an
MBA from Stanford University.
Using jargon in questions posed by agents
or self-service systems is a guaranteed
way to increase escalations and customer
defections.
Best practice: Find KB contributors
who are both technically competent and
not too far removed from customer contact.
Successful customer service depends as
much on the questions posed to customers
as the answers.
6. Provide flexible content access.
People have different ways of finding
information, or the same person may use
different methods to suit the situation. A
flexible approach to information access
dramatically improves user adoption and
ROI. For instance, novice agents, whether
they are in-house or outsourced, may find
it difficult to wade through hundreds of
search hits to find the right answer, but
may fare better if they are guided through
a dialogue, powered by an inference
engine. On the other hand, experienced
agents may prefer to quickly process
search hits.
Best practice: Provide users multiple
ways to access information—FAQ, browse,
search and guided help. The key here is to
make sure that the KB remains the same
and there are no content silos. ❚
eGain is a leading provider of multichannel customer
service and knowledge management software for in-
house or on-demand deployment. For more than a
decade, hundreds of the world’s largest companies have
relied on eGain to transform their traditional call centers,
help desks and Web customer service operations into
multichannel customer interaction hubs (CIH). Based on
the Power of One—the concept of one unified platform
for customer interaction and knowledge management—
eGain solutions help improve customer experience,
optimize end-to-end service process, increase sales and
enhance contact center performance. For additional
information, please visit www.egain.com.

Harvesting Social
Knowledge for
Customer Service
By Anand Subramaniam, VP, Marketing and Inside Sales, eGain
C ommunity-based knowledge creation for
customer service is not that new. However,
enabled by the ubiquity and ease of use of
the Web and the availability of social-net-
working tools, it has gone to a whole new
level, leading to the coinage of the term “so-
cial knowledge.” While more prevalent in
B2C sectors, social knowledge is also start-
ing to matter in B2B sectors.
How can companies harvest the best of
social knowledge for the customer service
they offer through their own contact centers
and service organizations? How should they
engage with customers on social websites?
The following five-step plan will help
increase the odds of success in harvesting
social knowledge for customer service.
1. Assess the opportunity.
Companies need to first assess the oppor-
tunity for social knowledge harvesting in the
context of the nature of their business (e.g.
B2B, B2C etc.) and the customer queries they
get (simple vs. complex).
Social knowledge creation has been more
common in B2C sectors because it is easier to
attain “critical mass” with more contributors
and less specialized knowledge. This means a
bigger harvesting opportunity in B2C than in
B2B (see figure 1).
Customer inquiries fall broadly into four
categories—informational, transactional,
diagnostic and advisory. Generally, infor-
mational and transactional queries tend to
Figure 1: eGain Social Knowledge Opportunity Matrix
be of low-to-moderate complexity while
diagnostic and advice-seeking queries are of
moderate-to-high complexity. Informational
and transactional queries, therefore,
are more likely to be resolved by social
knowledge.
2. Identify high-value knowledge.
Social knowledge contributors have vary-
ing levels of reputation, prolificacy, and influ-
ence, which most social networking tools
measure (number of posts, acceptance rate,
number of connections, etc.). The social
knowledge value (SKV) of contributors can
be estimated by using a combination of these
metrics. Knowledge from high SKV contrib-
utors is ideal for “deep dive” harvesting, while
that from low SKV contributors can be
ignored or skimmed (see figure 2).
3. Engage current customers.
Customers are key to the initiative—both
as knowledge contributors and posters of
queries on social sites. Businesses need to
make sure that queries posted on social sites
are resolved in a timely manner, especially if
they are from high lifetime financial value
customers, whom you usually provide “plat-
inum service” (e.g. proactive offer to chat,
rapid service levels, etc.). The risk of non-res-
olution of customer queries is high on social
sites because of broad market exposure.
If high financial value customers
are also high SKV contributors, they not only
present an opportunity for deep-dive know-
ledge harvesting but are also important for
collaborative product development and social
brand management. See figure 2 for a frame-
work for knowledge harvesting as part of
customer service strategy.
4. Harvest and unify.
Contact centers need to make sure that
social knowledge goes through the same
robust quality control processes as internally
generated knowledge, so that it can be made
part of a common multichannel knowledge-
base. Likewise, social customer interactions
should be added to other multichannel inter-
actions as part of a unified customer interac-
tion hub (CIH), which consolidates interac-
tions, knowledge, business rules, analytics
and administration in one place for better
customer experience, service consistency and
process efficiencies. The hub approach
allows agents to view customers’ social inter-
actions, in addition to direct interactions with
the business, for full context retention and
rapid resolution.
5. Account for sector-specific and
legal factors.
Social monitoring tools, social know-
ledge and robust customer service compli-
ance workflows can help businesses in
sectors such as pharmaceuticals and per-
sonal care products to track adverse
incident reports and act on them rapidly in
compliance with regulations.
Figure 2: eGain Knowledge Harvesting & Customer
Service Framework
All businesses should make sure they
are not violating copyright laws while har-
vesting content from social websites.
When this step-by-step approach is imple-
mented, social knowledge is bound to add sig-
nificant value to any enterprise in the form of
improved customer loyalty, enhanced brand
equity, lower cost of knowledge creation and
reduced customer service costs. ❚
Anand Subramaniam is the VP of marketing and inside
sales for eGain. Before eGain, he held marketing man-
agement, product management and sales- and channel-
enablement positions at companies such as Oracle,
Lotus, Intel and Autodesk. He holds an MSME from the
University of Rhode Island and an MBA from the
University of California at Berkeley.
eGain is a leading provider of multichannel customer
service and knowledge management software for in-
house or on-demand deployment. For more than a
decade, hundreds of the world’s largest companies have
relied on eGain to transform their traditional call centers,
help desks and Web customer service operations into
multichannel customer interaction hubs (CIH). Based on
the Power of One—the concept of one unified platform
for customer interaction and knowledge management—
eGain solutions help improve customer experience,
optimize end-to-end service process, increase sales and
enhance contact center performance. For additional
information, please visit www.egain.com.
KMWorld July/August 2010 S7
Information Optimization
for Customer Service
Successful Information-Centric
Approach to Improving the Bottom Line
By Tracey Mustacchio, Vice President, Marketing, Vivisimo, Inc.
F ew activities affect the bottom line as
much as customer service. Regardless of
industry or type of business, customer sat-
isfaction and retention, new customer ac-
quisition and average revenue per cus-
tomer are critical factors. At a time when
many products and services are being
commoditized and subjected to fierce
competition from around the world, cus-
tomer service remains one of the surest
ways that companies can differentiate
from competitors. And on the risk side of
the equation, we have all seen how quickly
customer service missteps can become
widespread public relations disasters in
the age of social media.
The most common and pervasive chal-
lenges to delivering outstanding customer
service are remarkably consistent across
industries and types of business:
◆ Excessive average handle times for cus-
tomer service engagements;
◆ Training and “on-boarding” of new cus-
tomer service agents;
◆ Lack of consistency in responses to cus-
tomer service incidents;
◆ Lack of a complete view of customer in-
formation;
◆ Retention of top-notch customer service
agents; and
◆ Low customer service satisfaction ratings.
In one way or another, all of these chal-
lenges have at their root a single problem:
failure to get the right information to the
people on the front lines of customer serv-
ice. Directly or indirectly, all of these issues
can be addressed by providing customer
service agents and other customer-facing
employees with the right information at the
time and place they need it most.
It is important to emphasize that the
solution is not more information, but rather
the right information, in a form that is eas-
ily digested by agents on the front lines. We
call this customer service optimization.
S8 KMWorld July/August 2010
Customer Service Optimization
Customer service optimization (CSO) is a
technology-enabled discipline that puts cus-
tomer service professionals in position to
deliver outstanding service. The goal is to cor-
rectly resolve each incident without subject-
ing customers to time-consuming and
annoying delays such as waiting “on hold,”
having to explain their problem more than
once or feeling that they are participating in
on-the-job training of customer service agents.
The ideal customer service agent has two
characteristics: The first is the interpersonal
side, projecting a very positive and person-
able manner that communicates both the
motivation and ability to solve the cus-
tomer’s issue. The second is the actual
knowledge to quickly understand and
resolve the issue. While these two charac-
teristics are clearly distinct, they are actu-
ally quite closely related; agents who are
comfortable and confident in their ability to
resolve customer issues find it much easier
to project the positive and personable atti-
tude that puts customers at ease than if they
are under stress due to inadequate knowl-
edge or access to information.
Properly training customer service agents
in the right customer interaction skills and
techniques is a well-known and highly devel-
oped practice. However, provisioning those
individuals with the knowledge and tools they
need to confidently handle the wide range of
questions and issues that they will have to han-
dle on the front lines of customer service is
another matter and offers the most opportunity
for organizations to distinguish themselves
from their competitors. This is where CSO
comes to the forefront, providing agents and
other customer-facing staff with immediate
access to the knowledge they need to deal with
a variety of challenging issues. CSO is not a
substitute for thorough training; however, it
does enable agents and other customer-facing
individuals to greatly increase their effective-
ness, both initially and over time.
Tracey Mustacchio
has more than 20
years of marketing,
business
development and
product
management
experience. At
Vivisimo,
Mustacchio is
responsible for the
Tracey Mustacchio company’s global
marketing initiatives,
including its go-to-market and product
strategies. Prior to joining Vivisimo, she served
as chief marketing officer for TraceSecurity, a
SaaS-based security compliance provider.
Delivering the Right Information
At the heart of CSO is the ability to
access the best, most relevant and up-to-date
information available in the organization.
Therefore a robust and powerful search
capability is an essential component. Being
able to quickly find relevant data on a topic,
regardless of where it resides and what form
it is in, is often the key to achieving the goal
of resolving incidents in a single call or
interaction.
“Vanilla” search alone, however, is insuf-
ficient to provide a strong foundation for
CSO. Simple keyword search without spe-
cialized features can sometimes overwhelm
agents with irrelevant or poorly organized
results, forcing them to sort through possi-
ble responses while the customer waits for
an answer. Some of the key information
access capabilities for information opti-
mization are:
Advanced relevance: Relevance is the
art and science of delivering the right infor-
mation to a search user. When the user is a
customer service agent on the telephone
with a customer, relevance is of paramount
importance. Relevance in the domain of
CSO is not simply a statistical calculation
comparing the user’s query to the contents
of documents. Often it is prudent for knowl-
edge managers and experts to highlight arti-
cles, snippets of information and other items
as particularly relevant to certain topics.
Freshness: For customer service agents,
having the most up-to-date information on
any topic is critical. There may be a new fix
for a known problem, information on a newly
released product or other insight that is criti-
cal to resolving a customer’s issue. So what-
ever mechanism is used to provide users with
relevant data must be able to quickly index
and return results from brand-new items that
have just been created or updated.
Access to multiple sources: It is a fact
of life in most organizations that important
information is maintained in multiple
repositories, each with its own search and
access method. For the customer service
 Inbound Call Center Success Story
A leading insurance company integrated Vivisimo’s Velocity
Platform into their call center to seamlessly connect all of the
applications used by agents to locate customer and policy infor-
mation. With one click, agents can view all relevant information
about an inquiry in a single window. Agents are able to save
important information in shared bookmarks—improving per-
formance for all agents when a similar question arises. By con-
solidating and simplifying information and eliminating the need
to navigate to multiple applications to access information, this
company added efficiency and agility to their call center’s 14,000
users and saved millions of dollars annually by reducing the
average time required to handle inquiries.

agent who may need information from
CRM systems, technical support incidents,
wikis, product specifications and a myriad
other sources during the course of a cus-
tomer interaction, logging in separately and
conducting separate searches with each is
not an option. The ability to present agents
with a single query across all of the possi-
ble sources is therefore critical.
Shared folders, tagging, commenting
and bookmarking: As agents work with
information in the course of resolving cus-
tomer service incidents, it is important to be
able to provide them with a means to stream-
line future access to information, and to
share this developing knowledge with oth-
ers. Each successful search for information
creates a path that, with the right tools, can
be followed again to resolve a similar or
identical issue. With shared folders, tagging,
commenting and bookmarking capabilities,
each agent becomes a knowledge manager
who is able to improve future access for
themselves and their colleagues.
Expert identification: While customer
service agents may themselves be experts in
one or more of the products or services they
support, sooner or later there is inevitably the
need to escalate a question, either directly or
indirectly, to an authority for a policy decision
or for deeper information on a topic. There-
fore, a truly comprehensive CSO solution will
offer managers the option to provide agents
with the information needed to contact the
designated expert in a particular subject area.
Providing this information seamlessly as part
of search results can be a very effective pro-
ductivity tool when used properly.
CSO in Action
With a clear understanding of what CSO
brings to the table, let’s look at the chal-
lenges that we identified earlier and exam-
ine how these can be addressed through a
successful CSO solution.
Reducing average handle times— Aver-
age handle time (AHT) is a critical metric
that most customer service organizations
measure. Many things can contribute to
excessive AHT, however having agents
spend inordinate amounts of time looking
for information is near the top of the list.
The ability to quickly pull up the right
information and communicate it to the cus-
tomer is potentially the single most impor-
tant factor in reducing AHT. Even small
improvements in AHT can pay big dividends
in large customer service organizations.
Faster training and “on-boarding”—
Bringing new customer service agents on-
board quickly and having them productive
is critical to an expanding business. In some
product categories, as much as 80% of the
support activity occurs in the first 30 days
after purchase because of the initial instal-
lation. If customer service can’t keep up with
a successful sales campaign that is rapidly
bringing on new customers, the long-term
value of those customers will be diminished
because they will potentially return products
or take their business elsewhere if they can’t
be serviced successfully or in a timely fash-
ion. While initial training is very important,
once new agents are on the front lines, quick
access to the right information is a vital part
of making them successful.
Consistency— Consistency in respond-
ing to customer inquiries is an important
quality metric for customer service organi-
zations. If agents are unable to find the right
information, they may begin “authoring”
answers themselves, which leads to incon-
sistency, incorrect answers and lowered cus-
tomer satisfaction. The first step in ensuring
consistency is addressed in the initial train-
ing of agents. However, over time, the abil-
ity to locate the most relevant and current
information and responses is critical to
ensuring consistency. With the most
advanced relevance techniques, business
managers can tag information that they want
agents to see when they search for certain
subjects, including standard and approved
answers to certain questions.
Complete view of customer informa-
tion— Having access to information about
a customer’s past issues, products they have
purchased, email communications and other
information is an important component to
delivering good customer service. The
biggest challenge in making this informa-
tion available to agents is the fact that these
different types of information are typically
stored and managed in separate systems. It
is not enough to simply provide agents with
login credentials to all of these different
systems. To efficiently deliver service,
agents need to be able to perform a single
search across all of the different types of cus-
tomer information, and view that in a single
window on their desktop. Therefore an
effective CSO solution will index and aggre-
gate information about the customer, in
addition to the information the agent needs
to handle the customer’s inquiry.
Retention of agents—Working every day
on the front lines of customer service is not
easy. Turnover rates in customer service posi-
tions can be among the highest in any job cat-
egory. How do you retain top performers in
this important function? CSO can improve
retention of customer service agents by
increasing job satisfaction. Having the right
tools on hand and the ability to add their own
knowledge and experience to the system are
important factors in keeping customer serv-
ice agents motivated and on the job.
Improved customer satisfaction—Cus-
tomer satisfaction is affected by many fac-
tors, from the quality, price and performance
of the products and services they have pur-
chased to their continuing interactions with
manufacturers and merchants involved in
producing, selling and supporting those
products. By helping to ensure that all of the
company representatives who interact with
customers are well-provisioned with the
information they need to handle inquiries
efficiently and effectively, CSO will posi-
tively affect on your organization’s customer
satisfaction.
We have seen that most of the challenges
in delivering effective customer service are
rooted in the need for customer-facing
employees to be able to access the right infor-
mation quickly. This is true of all of the chan-
nels through which companies engage
customers, whether directly through agents
or self-service via the Web. CSO, a technol-
ogy-enabled solution to empowering organi-
zations and customer service agents to deliver
outstanding customer service in a cost-effec-
tive way, offers a clear path for organizations
to differentiate themselves from competitors
and to improve the bottom line. ❚
Vivisimo helps organizations unlock and optimize the
true business value of information—regardless of appli-
cation or source—to drive innovation, real-time decisions
and actionable insight. Visit www.vivisimo.com

KMWorld July/August 2010 S9

Fix it For Me!
Staying Ahead of the Customer Sat Curve with
Proactive Technology
By Tim Hines, Vice President, Product Management, Consona CRM
W hen you think about reducing customer
service costs and cutting margins while
improving your service levels, most people go
right to the concept of self-service. It’s true that
with an effective knowledge management solu-
tion and self-service portal, you can achieve
these goals. You’re harnessing knowledge of
known issues and deflecting them to your self-
service portal. In today’s instant gratification
world, customers prefer the convenience and
immediacy of fixing it themselves.
But even self-service is no longer enough
for the masses. They want to chat, too, and if
they pick up the phone after unsuccessfully
lurking around on your site, your customers
expect you to know about their issue. Adding
channels and putting your agents and organi-
zational knowledge at the center of these chan-
nels seems not only daunting, but expensive.
The dollar signs in your head always
have you searching for quick fixes—you’ll
just put a band-aid on it, right? But wait. The
return on improving your customer service
and support infrastructure can more than
pay for the investment.
Beyond Chat
Let’s start by considering adding chat to
your arsenal: The projected ROI seems
decent. By implementing a chat channel,
many companies have seen:
◆ Increased capacity resulting in reduced
call costs;
◆ A 15%-20% reduction in handle time per
contact; and
◆ Increased support representative produc-
tivity due to handling multiple cases
simultaneously.
Customer demands change faster than the
weather, so when chat alone doesn’t cover it,
consider what you could do with chat PLUS
remote access support and prepackaged pieces
of code designed to automatically resolve
known issues.
How many calls do you get on known
issues where even the knowledgebase arti-
cle is just not doing its job? What if, instead
of offering relevant, accurate knowledge
articles, you could offer up a button that says
“fix it for me”?
Imagine this scenario: your customer
service rep is on the phone or chatting with
S10 KMWorld July/August 2010
a customer who has not been able to solve
his problem via self-service. The rep offers
to remotely diagnose and solve the problem.
With the user’s consent, your remote access
support application queries the remote end-
point, instantly pulling critical diagnostic
information such as OS type and hardware
profiles that can be used to automatically
identify problems. Mind you, this informa-
tion was not acquired after a three- (or 20-)
minute conversation instructing the user
on how to provide this information, but
instantly and automatically.
“The return on improving
your customer service
and support infrastructure
can more than pay for
the investment.”
With the relevant information in hand, a
misconfiguration is identified within sec-
onds and a support action is sent to repair
the problem. A few seconds more, and the
user confirms that the problem is fixed,
gushes praise to the technician and vows to
post a Facebook update trumpeting how eas-
ily his issue was resolved.
Because your representatives knew
exactly where to start looking for the prob-
lem, the resolution time was significantly
decreased and the crux of the advantage of
remote access support can be fully realized.
The actions run in the background, and are
generally unnoticed by a user. An audit trail
of agent or admin actions can be created and
shared with the user so there is no question
of who did what and when.
Historically, remote access required a soft-
ware client to be installed on the target machine
to facilitate connectivity. Today’s remote access
applications are clientless, leveraging ActiveX
and other browser-supported functionality to
Tim Hines began his
career at AOL as a
tech support
representative in
1995. He was a user
and eventually
manager of Vantive,
Witness and TCS.
He also worked
in Andersen
Consulting’s CRM
Tim Hines internal practice.
After leading
implementation efforts with marketing
automation vendors, he joined the Onyx
product management team in 2002. After Onyx
was acquired by Consona, he joined the
company in 2006. Hines guides the product
roadmap and functionality across all of
Consona’s CRM product lines.
give you remote access without the pain of pro-
viding, installing and maintaining software
clients to thousands of remote endpoints.
In addition, end users are more comfort-
able than ever with this type of support.
Those who first experience it are delighted,
and those who have seen it before expect it.
Beyond the Beyond
So what comes after chat and clientless
remote access support? What if you could
resolve issues before your customers even
knew they had them? Once established with the
help of the user, endpoint access can be accom-
plished without further user interaction, allow-
ing for not only the automated remote diagnosis
and repair of misconfigured endpoints, but the
automated push of updated drivers and patches
to facilitate the resolution of problems before
the user even knows they exist.
Consider the following true story:
Recently a large PC manufacturer discovered
that a popular XP patch applied an incorrect
audio driver. Of the 5 million targeted prob-
lematic endpoints, 1.5 million allowed the
proactive support patch to be installed.
Assuming only 10% of these users would
have ended up calling for support, at a con-
servative estimated cost of $5 per call, the
manufacturer alone avoided 150,000 support
calls and saved $750,000.
How much money could your support oper-
ation have saved in a similar scenario? All the
users really wanted was for someone to fix it
for them (and in this case, the users didn’t even
know there was an issue), and now you can
while saving money and increasing customer
satisfaction in the process. ❚
Consona CRM offers the only combined knowledge man-
agement and incident management product that is KCS
Verified v4 by the Consortium for Service Innovation.
More than 1,000 customers worldwide use Consona CRM
solutions to manage process efficiencies, drive revenue
and enable extraordinary customer experiences. Visit
www.consona.com/crm.

Top Three Myths of KM
for Customer Service
W e labor under the misguided notion that
when it comes to customer- and self-service,
content is king. The more you have, the bet-
ter. But many corporate efforts designed to
enhance service options fail the very people
they were designed to help: the customers.
In a typical Fortune 500 company, there
are hundreds of thousands of “digital artifacts”
representing the internal “knowledge” of the
organization. This collection of artifacts is cap-
tured by CRM and ECM solutions, indexed
with search tools and delivered under the guise
of knowledge management. But most CRM,
ECM or CMS technologies deliver customer
self-service results from a content-centric, ver-
sus consumer-centric, point of view.
Customers Want Answers,
Not Documents
By approaching the problem from the con-
sumer perspective (i.e. I want short, succinct
answers to my questions, not documents to
search through), we drive up engagement and
satisfaction, drive down delivery costs and sat-
isfy customers in the channel they chose to
engage us in—thereby building trust.
Here are the top three myths of knowl-
edge management as they relate to customer
service:
1. Existing content captured in ECM and
CMS systems is valuable to customers;
2. Content can be applied readily to
growing external and internal cus-
tomer channels; and
3. Search-based paradigms are the best
ways to connect customers to answers.
This does not mean that your KM initia-
tives are dead, or that you need to toss out
existing products. It DOES mean that you
need to relieve the customer from the com-
plexity of your underlying content and deliver
a single answer to their questions.
Myth #1: The value of existing content.
As Freek Vermeulen noted in a recent blog
entry, “We forgot in the torrent of ‘knowl-
edge euphoria’ that this stuff comes at a
cost—the cost of actually finding it in the
jungle of corporate databases.”
In a typical Fortune 500 environment,
the combination of electronic documents
plus website pages adds up to a staggering,
largely unmanageable, amount of content.
The average number of customer-facing
By David Lloyd, CEO, IntelliResponse
Web pages in the financial services sector
averages more than 11,000. In telecommu-
nications, that number climbs to 64,000!
This is why, as a customer, a quick
attempt to find information for “canceling a
check” can result in dozens of hits without
an appropriate relevant answer in the first
several pages of results—not exactly an
ideal customer experience.
The answers to common questions are
buried in the content. Many major corpora-
tions can satisfy the needs of both customers
and agents with between 300 to 700 pieces
of content... not 30,000 or 70,000.
Myth #2: Content can be applied read-
ily to growing channels. Content merely
being captured and delivered to an inquiring
customer has little to no relevance to that
consumer, or to the channel he or she
chooses to use. Is it effective—or even prac-
tical—to deliver information via mobile
phone or social media forums in the same
way you would in a call center, or email plat-
form? A customer asking, “How do I cancel
a policy?” probably does not want to read
your five-page PDF outlining the business
processes on their cell phone.
Let’s further examine the “cancel a pol-
icy” example from a multichannel viewpoint:
◆ In a call-center agent’s hands, the “answer”
might also offer procedures for client reten-
tion (including special offers) which would
not be included in the self-service area, and
certainly not in the original document;
◆ For the same customer asking this ques-
tion on a website, the “answer” may be an
escalation to a specialty group to retain the
customer using click-to-call or chat; or
◆ For the same customer asking this ques-
tion via mobile or SMS, the answer may
be an immediate call-back to the cus-
tomer, or an abridged answer with exter-
nal links to additional content.
The answers to customer questions all may
share a core message; however, each should be
effectively purposed for the channel into which
it is delivered. If you are intent on delivering a
truly customer-centric self-service and e-serv-
ice strategy, the requirement is to extract the
“answers” (and not the content).
Myth #3: Search is the best way to connect
customers to answers. What do consumers
want? Simply put, they want answers to their
questions. By the time a consumer reaches your
website or call center, he or she is goal-ori-
ented, not research-oriented. In a recent
Jupiter study, lack of accuracy and relevancy
in search results continue to be the main issue
for users in a self-service environment. In
fact, 44% stated that search could not under-
stand their real questions and 35% said the
results were unrelated to the question.
But what should be most concerning is
that 87% of site visitors have left websites
when they could not find the information they
sought. Clearly, most consumers are doing a
lot more “searching” than “finding:”
1. Users escalate immediately to the
most expensive channels (voice, chat,
email) and;
2. They will not willingly return to lower
cost channels.
The result is similar for internal contact-
center agents who have even less freedom.
If knowledge tools fail to deliver the
required information, the results are:
1. Increases in average handling time
(AHT);
2. Decreases in first contact resolution
(FCR);
3. Increases in the volume of escalation;
and
4. Decreases in overall customer satisfaction.
What is the Answer?
Knowledge-based customer service lies
squarely with a focus on content. Such an
approach invariably results in knowledge that:
◆ Contains a depth that includes many
possible answers (compound or complex
content);
◆ Requires the consumer to scan and select
the appropriate content (tedious self-dis-
covery);
◆ Is not purposed for any particular deliv-
ery channel (broad context); and
◆ Provides accessibility based on search
terms in content, not the nature of the
questions.
Tools applied for CRM, KM, CMS/ECM
and intelligent search do not need to be
replaced. They obviously have purpose and
value. But these technologies must be aug-
mented with solutions that address the prob-
lem from a customer-centric point of view.
The appropriate solution:
◆ Provides an answer to the question asked;
◆ Delivers a single approved answer;
◆ Is purposed for the channel it is requested
within; and
◆ Understands the many ways the question
can be asked and relates this to the correct
answer. ❚
For more information on cost-effective ways to enhance
the customer experience at your organization contact:
Mike Hennessy, mike.hennessy@intelliresponse.com.
KMWorld July/August 2010 S11

Five Big Customer
Service Mistakes
And How to Avoid Them
C ompanies that are considered the gold
standard for customer service wield it as a
powerful differentiator, enabling them to
distance themselves from competitors.
There are common denominators these
leading companies use to make their repu-
tations. By adhering to best practices in
service delivery, they’re set up to provide a
superior experience each time a customer
contacts them using that opportunity to
deepen the relationship, for increased loy-
alty, retention and revenues. Conversely,
there are also common mistakes that organ-
izations make that hinder service delivery.
Here are the leading mistakes customer
service departments make—and surefire
ways to avoid them.
1 Not using self-service for deflection.
. Customers have taken to Web-based
self-service—handling everything from
simple product registration to IT break/fix
issues—in vast and growing numbers.
Of the numerous benefits a self-service
strategy provides, cost reduction is a lead-
ing driver. Self-service also increases user
satisfaction with the provider, thus
strengthening the relationship and increas-
ing the possibility it will be a long-term,
lucrative one.
After implementing an integrated cus-
tomer service software suite with self-serv-
ice capabilities, Coremetrics has seen cus-
tomer satisfaction and agent productivity
jump significantly, says Paige Newcombe,
senior director, global client services for the
marketing optimization software provider.
Since its knowledgebase implementation,
Coremetrics has seen nearly 50% of its sup-
port queries originate with the self-service
knowledgebase, keeping its agents working
on more difficult, mission-critical problems.
Further, customer satisfaction has jumped to
90% and customer loyalty to 93%.
“Web self-service has allowed us to
keep support staff levels the same. We’ve
grown our client base by 350% without
adding headcount, which reduces our cost
of providing service. Without it we would
have needed a new agent for every 10 new
clients,” says Newcombe.
S12 KMWorld July/August 2010
By Parature, Inc.
2 Not offering integrated, multi-channel
. support. Self-service doesn’t suffice
as the only offering in a support organiza-
tion’s arsenal. Some customers simply don’t
take to self-service, preferring the more inti-
mate experience of talking to someone on
the phone. They may decide it’s more effec-
tive to send an email, or to get live assistance
by hitting the click-to-chat button.
If the business decides it’s going to offer
multiple channels for gaining service, integra-
tion is key. A lack of integration leads to incon-
sistent delivery standards, knowledgebase
content, sloppy escalation, cost inefficiencies
and plummeting customer satisfaction.
“If the business
decides it’s going to
offer multiple channels
for gaining service,
integration is key.”
This problem has more companies
choosing to purchase their customer-facing
applications in integrated, multi-channel
suites with out-of-the-box integration.
3 Not leveraging social media.
. Great customer service has long been
one of the best forms of marketing, but
today, the two practices are more closely tied
than ever. Thanks to social media, customers
have the ability to rapidly and loudly adver-
tise their happiness, or wreak havoc on a
company until their anger dissipates.
Given people’s increasing comfort to
social media as a communications vehicle,
service organizations that ignore these net-
works not only set themselves up for some
nasty surprises, but miss out on a significant
opportunity to use the chatter to engage users.
Best-in-class customer service platforms
include forum functionality so businesses
can create a hospitable place for their users to
congregate, socialize and solve problems.
These suites also integrate their ticketing
capabilities with platforms like Twitter and
Facebook, allowing organizations to automat-
ically create tickets based on chatter.
4 Not capturing customer feedback
. from support transactions. Support
organizations should not only make use of the
feedback they can find all over the Web on social
networks and at home on their own forums, but
through each and every service interaction they
have. Too many rely solely on support center
metrics and ignore valuable information that can
come straight from the source.
There are multiple instances where it
makes sense to capture feedback directly
from the customer—at the point of interac-
tion or as a follow-up to a transaction. The
support organization’s team can generate a
feedback mechanism as they close a chat
session, a ticket, or after they’ve served up
a knowledgebase article, while they have
the sentiment of the customer at the ready.
5 Not using tracking and reporting
. tools. Measurement is the foundation
of service and support, but too many service
organizations measure everything possible
and then do nothing with the data. Within
these metrics often lie the keys to problem
areas, avenues to improvement, and better
overall customer satisfaction. As long as
they’re out measuring everything from first-
contact resolution to abandonment rate, across
every channel, they should use what they cap-
ture to unlock the information that can trans-
late to critical business improvements.
e-MDs, a provider of EHRs and other
clinical applications, uses reporting tools to
review such metrics as time-to-resolution
to tailor their training programs and
staffing levels, according to James Foster,
client data operations manager.
Another area that’s benefiting from
reporting and analysis is e-MD’s develop-
ment team, taking advantage of the knowl-
edge-sharing between development and
service that technology providers are
always seeking.
“Our reports give us solid data that we
can give to the development team to address
issues in future releases of our products,”
says Foster. ❚
Parature enables organizations to better serve, support,
engage with and retain their customers via the Web.
Industry-leading, on-demand Parature Customer Service
software provides customer service organizations with a
comprehensive, multi-channel way to meet the growing
expectations of their customers. With more than 10 years
experience, Parature serves organizations in a wide vari-
ety of industries worldwide and helps support more than
16 million end users. Parature is among Inc. Magazine’s
Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Software Companies
and is the recipient of numerous product, technology
and leadership awards. Parature is headquartered in
Vienna, VA, with offices in San Francisco and the UK. For
more information, visit www.parature.com or follow
@parature on Twitter.
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The 2010 Best Practices White Paper Series
Connecting Buyers with Sellers
BEST PRACTICES IN...
Business Process Management Paper-Centric Business Process Automation
January 2010 • BPM • EAI • CM/DM • July 2010 • Imaging • EDMS • Capture • Recognition •
❯ Business Process Management Systems ❯ Scanning
❯ Content Management and Integration ❯ Items Processing
❯ Smart Enterprise Suites ❯ Green IT
❯ Collaboration ❯ Forms Processing
❯ Web Services/SOA ❯ Workflow
❯ Business Function/Vertical Market Modules ❯ Business Process Management
❯ Business Process Outsourcing ❯ Records Management

E-Discovery KM for Customer Service

February 2010 • RM • Retention Practices • Email • FRCP • August 2010 • CRM • EDM • Text Analytics •
❯ Email Management ❯ Customer Relationship Management
❯ Enterprise Search/Information Access ❯ Enterprise Document Management
❯ Records Management ❯ Web Self-Service
❯ Information Governance ❯ Site Search/Enterprise Search
❯ Legal Hold ❯ Web Site Analytics
❯ Document Life Cycle Management ❯ Cross-sell/Upsell
❯ Storage/Archive ❯ Sentiment Analysis

Cloud Computing Risk, Governance, & Compliance

March 2010 • SaaS • SOA • Web 2.0 • September 2010 • Email Management • E-Records • Risk Management •
❯ Mobile Computing ❯ E-Discovery
❯ Collaboration ❯ Information Governance
❯ Hardware as a Service ❯ Document Life Cycle Management
❯ Open Source ❯ Retention Management/Archive
❯ Software-less Computing Devices ❯ Legal Hold
❯ Peer-to-Peer ❯ Security
❯ Cost Management ❯ Business Continuity

Enterprise Content Management SharePoint Solutions

April 2010 • ECM • EDMS • DRM/KM • October 2010 • EDMS • CRM • ECM •
❯ Web Content Management ❯ Web Content Management
❯ Document/Image/Forms Management ❯ Collaboration
❯ Digital Asset Management ❯ Business Process Management
❯ Green IT ❯ Enterprise 2.0
❯ Regulatory Compliance ❯ Blogs, Wikis, Forums
❯ Storage/Archive ❯ Enterprise Search
❯ Records Management ❯ Enterprise Portals
Enterprise Search/Information Access Knowledge Management
May 2010 • Classification • Taxonomies • Categorization • November 2010 • EDMS • ECM • BI/CI • E-Learning •
❯ Unstructured Content Management ❯ Content Management
❯ Text Mining ❯ Document Management
❯ Content Management Systems ❯ Enterprise Search
❯ Autocategorization ❯ Classification/Taxonomy
❯ XML/Authoring ❯ Collaboration
❯ Internal/External Search Strategies ❯ Expertise Location
❯ Litigation Support/Discovery Support ❯ Project Management/Modeling

Enterprise Social Networking & Collaboration Email Management

June 2010 • Enterprise 2.0 • Web 2.0 • Wiki • Collaboration • December 2010 • EDMS • ERM • CM •
❯ Customer Relationship Management ❯ Electronically Stored Information
❯ Partner Relationship Management ❯ Regulatory Compliance
❯ Blogs ❯ Electronic Document Management
❯ Human Resource Management ❯ Security/Privacy
❯ Customer Experience ❯ Storage/Archive Solutions
❯ Collaboration ❯ Enterprise Search
❯ Virtual Teams ❯ Litigation Support/Discovery Support

KMWorld Best Practices White Papers

Direct • Objective • Content-rich
Visit these White Papers on the Web at: www.kmworld.com/publications/white papers
 For more information on the companies who contributed to
this white paper, visit their websites or contact them directly:

Consona IntelliResponse
450 East 96th Street, Suite 300 425 Adelaide Street West, Suite 200
Indianapolis IN 46250 Toronto ON M5V 3C1
PH: 888 8 CONSONA or 317.249.1700 PH: 866.454.0084 or 416.214.9337
Contact: info@consona.com FAX: 416.214.9958
Web: www.consona.com/crm Contact: sales@intelliresponse.com
Web: www.intelliresponse.com

eGain Communications Corp. Parature, Inc.

345 E. Middlefield Road 8000 Towers Crescent Drive, Suite 800
Mountain View CA 94043 Vienna VA 22182
PH: 800.821.4358 or 650.230.7500 PH: 877.GO.PARATURE or 703. 564.7758
FAX: 650.230.7600 FAX: 703.564.7757
Contact: info@egain.com Contact: sales@parature.com
Web: www.egain.com Web: www.parature.com

InQuira Inc. Vivisimo, Inc.

900 Cherry Avenue 1710 Murray Avenue, Suite 300
San Bruno CA 94066 Pittsburgh PA 15217
PH: 650.246.5000 PH: 866.296.8484 or 412.422.2499
FAX: 650.246.5036 FAX: 412.422.2495
Contact: www.inquira.com/contact.asp Contact: vivisimo.com/about/contact-vivisimo.html
Web: www.inquira.com Web: www.vivisimo.com

Produced by:
Kathryn Rogals Paul Rosenlund Andy Moore
KMWorld Magazine 561-483-5190 561-483-5190 207-236-8524 Ext. 309
Specialty Publishing Group kathy_rogals@kmworld.com paul_rosenlund@kmworld.com andy_moore@kmworld.com

For information on participating in the next white paper in the “Best Practices” series, contact:
paul_rosenlund@kmworld.com or kathy_rogals@kmworld.com • 561-483-5190

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