Knowledge Centered Support: The Framework For Service Desk Transformation
Knowledge Management is fast emerging as a way to mitigate this challenge. Effective use of knowledge significantly improves self-service experiences for end customers, and generates faster and more successful outcomes for those issues which still reach the service center.
However, effective implementation of Knowledge Management is still proving to be a significant challenge in the industry. Organizations often struggle with either of two significant challenges: building a knowledge base, and using it successfully once it’s there.
It is often difficult for support teams to find the time to capture good knowledge, especially if it is not formally entrenched as a priority for them. Some enterprises have addressed this with a dedicated knowledge team, but a team like this is unlikely to have sufficient subject matter expertise in all areas. As a result, they still rely on input from those over-worked specialists.
Even where knowledge has been captured, making good use of it can be a challenge. As Katrina Pugh and Nancy M. Dixon put it the HBR Article on Knowledge Management, Don’t Just Capture Knowledge—Put It to Work: “what’s the point of capturing organizational knowledge if it’s going to be tossed into some file and forgotten?” This effect can be exacerbated in organizations who have addressed the content creation challenge by embracing wide participation or even crowdsourcing: noise can overwhelm the signal, making knowledge difficult to find.
Each of these issues creates a negative cycle: support teams are unwilling to spend time searching a knowledge base if they don’t expect to find answers.
Knowledge Centered Support, or KCS, is one solution to this challenge.
