Relevant Knowledge Accessible

“[We wanted] the ability to capture our solutions in one database that could be shared between level-two and level-three engineers, . . capture and share the knowledge of one of our key partners, . . . provide our field technicians with a self-help application and prevent our high-end engineers from answering technical problems that were already identified and  documented.”

— Paul Comeau, Executive Director, Technical Assistance Centers, NextiraOne

Many support centers function in an information vacuum, incapable of accessing valuable information that already exists within the department, in databases, from business partners, or in publicly available documents. For most companies, potentially valuable information exists in multiple locations in multiple file formats, both within and outside the department.

Without access to information, the operatorsand users are faced with the daunting task of creating and continuously updating their body of knowledge to solve requests for assistanceand handle problems quickly, efficiently, and accurately. Apart from the significant duplication of effort that manual knowledge-creation requires, the effort often leads to missing, outdated, and/or erroneous information. Furthermore, in cases where access to existing information is possible, search technologies often aren’t rigorous enough to satisfy the demands of support agents, who are forced to sift through multiple semi-relevant documents to find the most appropriate problem-solving information.

Knowledge management systems comprise of information from a wide selection of existing sourcesand databases. The Web help-system must ensure that people can take advantage of content that has already been developed and approved for user manuals, employee handbooks, partner extranets, marketing communications, and a host of other sources.

In addition to information access, the knowledge management system must have the most relevant information from the available content. Although today’s search engines allow users to type queries in everyday language, word meaning, word order, and sentence structure are of little consequence when the search engine’s only purpose is to retrieve documents based on keyword searches.

Efficient police operation centers, need web-based self-service environments thatrequirecomplete, precise answers to questions. As a result, successful knowledge management technologies must be able to fully process natural language, interpret the meaning of words in the context of the query, rank possible responses, and return only the most relevant solutions.

Next: Key Manager Support