Get Everyone on the Same Page
There are significant quantifiable benefits to adopting Knowledge-Centered Support (KCSsm), the industry best practice for capturing and leveraging knowledge within your organization. KCS helps organizations:
- optimize available resources by solving problems faster and building organizational learning
- enable customer success with self-service
- and improve products based on knowledge captured
Over 20 years of experience have shown that there is a direct correlation between people’s understanding of KCS and the benefits realized. The degree to which people in your organization truly understand the KCS concepts – why KCS is important to the organization and what’s in it for them personally – relates directly to the degree to which the organization realizes the maximum benefits from doing KCS.
Success requires change
KCS success is directly impacted by how often (and the quality with which) Support Analysts integrate use of the knowledge base into their problem-solving process. Analysts should be searching before solving, reusing articles and linking them to incidents. They create new articles only if one doesn’t already exist. When done properly, these activities do not add to the incident handle time! Success requires a behavior change for the Support Analysts. How do we encourage these new behaviors across the organization?
Lasting behavior change (and therefore long-term KCS benefit) results from Analyst understanding and buy-in, which are promoted by leadership, coaching, and training.
Leadership – mostly a matter of communication
- Create a compelling purpose and engage people in that purpose
- Communicate why KCS is important to the organization and what’s in it for the Support Analysts
- Describe what success looks like and provide the right measures
Coaching – mostly a matter of influence
- Change behaviors, integrate KCS techniques into the problem solving process
- Deal with objections and help people understand the concepts
- Promote the creation of findable, usable knowledge articles
Training – mostly a matter of understanding and buy-in
- Create a motivation to study – “what’s in it for me”
- Provide context on why we are doing this and direction on how to do it
- Enable a sense of individual accomplishment or mastery
Adopt in waves
KCS is most successfully adopted in waves: groups of Support Analysts who learn KCS together, as set out in the KCS Adoption Guide. Finding ways to scale communication, influence, and understanding can be daunting. Training and certification by KCS Certified Trainers and the KCS Academy can help. For program/project managers, KCS core team members, and managers of Support Analysts who are doing KCS, KCS Practices v5 is the highest certification level in the industry. Passing this rigorous exam indicates a thorough understanding of all KCS concepts and Practices as well as an understanding of the best practices for KCS adoption.
I’ll be talking about a new training program with Melissa George of the KCS Academy and Ron Muns from Certification Game during the February 25 webinar: KCS: Riding the Waves of Adoption. We’ll also discuss how to plan for an adoption that will last, including:
- KCS benefits and drivers
- an overview of the waves and phases of adoption
- the importance of training support analysts
Here’s to a successful year of Solving and Evolving,
