To contextualize your understanding of knowledge management, we will end with a brief case study. In the age of e-commerce, few brands have a more commanding presence than Microsoft. For millions of people and hundreds of thousands of companies around the globe, Microsoft operating systems and software applications are indispensable components of their work and home environments. But that extraordinary presence comes with an equally compelling challenge. As a direct consequence of the company’s scope and market penetration, Microsoft must grapple with one of the industry’s most daunting customer service loads. This vignette dramatically shows the benefits of knowledge management using an organizational memory.
“Last year our customer satisfaction data identified two areas for im- provement in the customer care arena,” noted Helen Pickup, Director of Microsoft’s Customer Care Centre in Glasgow, Scotland. “Customers were finding it difficult to contact us and, once contact was made, the experi- ence was inconsistent. In order to address this we put together a strategy that focused on both access and service.”
Microsoft’s strategy encompassed two important tactical moves. First, the company’s three major contact points were consolidated into a single channel for all customers. Second, customer service represen- tatives were trained as “knowledge brokers,” tasked with handling in- quiries across all products, programs, and services, rather than relying on a procedure that routed the customer to an appropriate specialist. “The overall goal,” according to Pickup, “was to drive up first contact resolution and improve the customer experience.”
“From the outset,” Pickup continued, “it was clear that this strategy relied on us being able to implement a knowledge management sys- tem that would put all the information on our products, programs, and services at the agents’ fingertips.” After reviewing a number of technologies, Microsoft engaged Project Techniques, a consulting firm, to help evaluate and identify the best solution. Microsoft’s call center outsourcer, Thus PLC, also participated in the evaluation process.
The first step in the process was to identify the type of organiza- tional memory that would satisfy Microsoft’s requirements. Project Techniques reviewed the relative merits of each of the main knowledge management technologies: knowledge-based systems, natural language search, and case-based reasoning (CBR). The goal was to find a tool that would provide both technical and nontechnical agents with easy, structured access to the knowledge base. This led them to select CBR over the other available technologies.
Following an extensive evaluation of CBR applications, Microsoft chose eGain’s CBR product, which captures the full range of customer service, sales, and support data in a single organizational memory and deploys that information across the entire contact center.
Furthermore, support agents can use different levels of the product based on factors such as user expertise, the customer’s situation, or the communication medium (for example, online customer self-service, live Web collaboration, and email).
One of the most important advantages offered by CBR technology lies in its natural, conversational interface. Support agents are provided with information structured to mimic the way people think and speak. Other information retrieval applications, such as keyword search sys- tems, typically are not equipped with sophisticated search refinement capabilities. As a result, keywords often return too many hits, and mis- spelled or incorrect keywords return none. With CBR, when the agent fails to find a solution on the first attempt, the application will ask a further question designed to refine the search, similar to the way peo- ple engage in conversation.
Once the application was deployed in the call center, Microsoft managers discovered another important by-product of CBR technol- ogy, namely, its user-friendliness. “The implementation allowed us to place the information that was needed to handle a wide variety of calls at the agents’ fingertips,” stated Thus PLC’s operations manager. “This reduced our reliance on training and accelerated the speed at which our agents were able to get up and running in the new model.”
Within nine months following the implementation of a CBR knowledge management system, Microsoft reported:
■ a 10 percent improvement in overall customer satisfaction rating;
■ a 28 percent increase in “first-time-fix” success rate;
■ a 13 percent increase in the “agent is informed” customer survey score;
■ a significant reduction in the time required to train new agents, as well as to elevate existing agent skill sets to the expert level;
■ a much wider range of customer care issues handled by individual agents, who also delivered more consistent responses, regardless of the problem.
Summarizing Microsoft’s venture into knowledge management, Helen Pickup declared, “We are confident that knowledge manage- ment is key to success in the customer care arena. We expect to con- tinue investment in this area.”
Conclusion
This chapter has introduced you to knowledge management. A bibli- ography of knowledge management literature is included at the end of this book if you would like to read more on this subject. You should understand that knowledge is worth managing: it is valuable to orga- nizations, and it should be treated as a corporate asset. However, knowledge is not always tangible like a patent or other intellectual property; much of it is difficult, perhaps impossible to codify.
The key points you should take away from this chapter are that:
■ Knowledge is not static; it evolves. Any knowledge management sys- tem must be able to support the acquisition, analysis, preservation, and reuse of knowledge as a continual cyclical process.
■ Knowledge exists in two forms: explicit knowledge that can be cod- ified and tacit knowledge that cannot always be codified. If a knowl- edge representation is too formalized, much tacit knowledge will be lost. Thus knowledge representations for knowledge manage- ment systems must be flexible and discursive.