February 2002 Meeting Recap
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Bob Moalli, HDI New England Regional Director and RF Moalli Consulting firm founder, shared his experience implementing Knowledge Base tools at the February 2002 HDI New England chapter meeting. The main goal, he told us, is to resolve calls while keeping your Help Desk staff at their desks. Each organization must ask if this goal is right for their organization. Is the solution “center” what they want and is the goal to keep calls from going to second level support technicians. Once a decision is made to centralize, knowledge base sources can be considered as help agents. To accomplish this, you can buy packaged knowledge bases or you can create your own. If created, contents can come from a variety of sources. Should you decide to use your own call data, remember that too often technicians complete their call solutions without enough detail. One sentence completes the resolution. For example, “Fixed the problem.” is a common entry. Pros to knowledge base implementation include the following: Tools are delivered to all technicians quickly Training costs are minimal Cons to knowledge base implementation include: This is a cultural process and changes are required There may be problems loading the Knowledge Base An entire team is required to implement and maintain it. Pointers Gather requirements, provide justification, and write up acquisition requirements and time frames for implementation. Engage agents at the beginning of implementation discussions to ensure their cooperation. Make sure they use the tool from the beginning of the implementation and aid in the knowledge base design. As customer questions are received in anticipation of inclusion in the knowledge base, ask questions, for example: What changes did the user make? What software is in use, etc? Ask what the symptoms are. What is a fact – software, hardware, error messages. The major goal is to get a solution bank to technicians fast. If the call is solved in real time, the knowledge base is available to the next person in real time. The questions asked will become part of the solution. One attendee asked how they could “cut down on calls that come in by taking the knowledge base closer to the user” Compaq had that vision but Bob thought that calls doubled with knowledge base use. He mentioned that as one of their customers you could search their knowledge base. Smith College and the University of Massachusetts have a front end to their web site in which you can log a ticket and search through information. Another attendee asked if “Client Web front ends should differ from what the Technicians use?” The answer was “yes”. Clients may use a thin client access, more drop downs, and more information gathering at the front end. The major goal is to ensure that the solution bank gets to the user fast. Benefits of knowledge base use include faster more relevant solutions, improved customer satisfaction and empowerment and recognition of analysts. Responses become more efficient after reuse. There is a reduction in training costs/time and quicker long-term solutions are provided. Solutions as used become better as they are modified and added to. However, Bob said he was never successful at totally convincing the organization to complete it. He wanted to get Level 3 technicians involved and capture information at that level. He also wanted to get to Level 2's who want to progress to Level 3. Cooperation at those levels was lacking. He thought a possible solution might be to integrate the knowledge base and the call system together. Then use solutions from the call system. Implementation considerations include creating a pilot team to develop the process and workflow. Your staff won’t want to change as this is a big culture change. He suggested that you pre-load solutions by looking at your top 10 most repetitive calls. One size does not fit all. Use your own questions and answers. Pull in your Level 1's immediately. Take your best people and capture information. Convince them that there will be less employee burn out. Create a realistic plan. Perhaps start with a password reset tool, etc. Implement to a pilot group first. Let the pilot group learn as they go. Seed the knowledge base with 150 questions. You will then move forward quickly. The road map to success includes the establishment of a core team to build rules for development. Make connections to Level 2 and 3. After Bob’s pilot team saw the initial knowledge base, no one wanted to participate. The company had to pay overtime to get developers and participants. The project took a lot of up front resources to get rolling. Everything was examined from standards, on writing solutions. These solutions were rewritten many times. Bob had a group of dedicated analysts who wanted to see the project work. The rolling out, though, had to be done in “small bursts” They developed a detailed deployment plan. Training was done in 16 modules. They thought they would train in three days but finally had to settle for four-hour sessions at different times. Sometimes, the training was presented in 90-minute segments. There was a need to proceed slowly with the training. Some people took a long time to write an entry in the knowledge base. Coaching was staggered. In the first few weeks there was lots of coaching. Later, four hours per day was enough. A QA team should be selected because knowledge bases should be updated every 90 days. New products roll out often. Technicians can QA their work with notes or modify solutions on the fly. A suggestion is make good QA people coaches to more inexperienced people. An attendee asked how you would judge the success of the knowledge base. At first, he said, the company didn’t see success. Later they started getting a higher rate of closure on initial. Overall, Bob didn’t think anyone has yet to adequately measure the success. HDI-NE Home Page Underwritten by GroupSoft Systems, Inc. HDI-NE Chapter is solely responsible for the content of this site. |