In the pursuit of improvement, knowledge is key. Today’s knowledge management tools are more robust, and getting smarter all the time. But remember, a lot comes down to the human factor: a body of knowledge is only as good as the support professionals who use it, fix it, flag it, and add to it.
Real-time intelligence gathering via knowledge management tools, is creating greater opportunities to improve and expedite service. These days, knowledge management tools are designed to recognize and gather your end users’ metadata (including location, business line/unit, language, role, computing environment, etc.) and audit the user by recording the historical breadcrumb trail as the user navigates through the ticketing/self-service/knowledge management/portal/intranet sites. All of this data can be leveraged to:
- Recognize traffic patterns to provide specific and up-to-date knowledge
- Pre-empt future spikes with targeted training
- Reduce call volume via “smart” self-service and call deflection
Among organizations that segment support SLAs by business line/unit, geography, and/or language, “smart” self-service is trending. Upon logging in, the self-service tool identifies the user and makes available only the most relevant, pertinent content. If an outage has occurred or is in progress, or if call volume is up for a certain issue,
then the associated knowledge is pushed to top of the homepage and flagged as the most likely solution.
Innovations in knowledge management tools have improved, and also complicated, service and support. When it comes to knowledge management, improvement requires thoughtful deliberation to ensure that organizations are measuring the events and activities that are important to them—and that action is taken to ensure that ongoing improvements are actually made.