Lynchpins - DB Kay & Associates

KCS At Work: Daktronics Does It Right

1 May

There’s nothing like hearing about KCS from someone who is actually doing it—and benefitting from it. Our friends at Daktronics just sent this great email along, and kindly gave us permission to share it on the blog.

Daktronics is a South Dakota-based manufacturer of LED signboards, from high school football scoreboards to major league arena installations and Las Vegas spectaculars. Their technicians have to be conversant with a very broad range of products, including complex hardware and software. This makes KCS a natural fit for them, and they’ve done a great job of adopting it.

Anyhow, on to the message, from a technician who was on call overnight:

I wanted to share a win with you guys.

I had worked a long day yesterday, about 10.5 hours. I go home, set up for being on call at night, and wait for the phone to start ringing. Doesn’t take long and I get my first hit. I work with the customer for approximately 20 minutes and schedule a call back for 30 minutes later. In the meantime I’m needing to log off of our network to do some connection testing for a different customer’s secure network (I can’t be tunneled into our network and theirs at the same time) Shortly before I start this adventure I received an IM from one of our Customer Trainers in Australia. She had some questions about [a product feature] not showing up: they were created but wouldn’t show up in [the software]. I’m going to be very blunt here, “I’m pretty bad at the software parts of our product” end quote. When she initially asked me about this, my first thought was “aaawwww crap, I have no idea.” So we restarted some services and checked a few other overall basics. In the meantime I started searching the KB. I found very few articles describing anything close to my issue. Then I broadened the search by using just a few more keywords. Wouldn’t you know it, a bright light came shining down from the KCS Gods and delivered the right KB article right into my lap. I had called the trainer about 5 minutes earlier so all I did was walk her through the article. After completing the steps (which took all of 15 seconds) her reaction was “OH, THERE THEY ARE, THEY SHOWED UP!!!!!!!! YEAH!!!!!!” I was then able to still test my network connectivity for the other customer, and still make my 30 minute call back. Now if that’s not awesome, I’m not quite sure what is!

Hope this brightens your day as much as it brightened my night last night. Have a great day!!!!!!!!!!!

Summer Reading! Lessons Unlearned

By: David Kay 0 Comments

26 Jun

Just because a book is full of really great information doesn’t mean it can’t be fun to read. For example, take John Ragsdale’s wonderful first book:

Lessons Unlearned: 25 Years in Customer Service. John Ragsdale (@john_ragsdale).

Unlike the books I’ve reviewed earlier. I’m not even going to pretend to be objective here: I’m a big fan of John. He’s familiar to many of you as Vice President of technology research for TSIA; he came to that role having worked on the front lines of service delivery, as a manager, as a vendor, and as a Forrester Analyst and VP of their CRM research practice. So if it has something to do with service and support, he’s seen it, he’s done it, and he has a great story to tell about it, too. Lessons Unlearned is refreshingly free of corporate-speak; while he writes as a member of TSIA’s leadership team, what comes through is John’s warm, authentic, and positive voice.

Oh, and does that voice have some things to say.

For support professionals, he has a great section on metrics, showing how to use them in combination to assess what’s happening and to inform good conversations, rather than using measures blindly or in isolation to reward and punish. He also describes support employee archetypes—the Slammer, the Geek, the Socialite—that will have you smiling in recognition of the uncannily accurate portrayals of your colleagues…and perhaps yourself.

One section that should be required reading for anyone involved in a technology procurement exercise is “Selecting Technology,” which turns common practice on its head. (When you’re thinking back on a successful relationship with a technology vendor, did the 327 requirements in your RFP really end up being the high order bit?)

As a reformed product management and marketing professional, I especially enjoyed the advice to vendors about dealing with analysts and launching a successful startup. If anyone can figure out how to ship this book back to me in 1998, I’d appreciate it.

OK, there’s no mistaking Lessons Unlearned for 50 Shades of Anything. But you’ll enjoy it nearly as much, and you won’t have to hide it behind a copy of The Economist, either.

Leadership in Action: The KCS Commitment

By: David Kay 0 Comments

8 Jun

We wrapped up a KCS design workshop at Carestream Health yesterday. We closed with an exercise I love: the participants spent the last hour presenting what they’d learned, done, and planned to executives. This solidifies the learning, and it’s far more meaningful for executives to hear from the people who will be doing the work than from a consultant or program manager.

The team did a great job. Then, at the end, one of the execs, Arnaud Marie, started asking more questions. He asked to see their benefits slide again. “On a scale of one to five, where one means disagree and five means absolutely strongly agree, and something in between is something in between, hold up your fingers to show how much you believe these benefits will really happen.” The participants held their hands up, and looked around the room to see what the others had done. Everyone…everyone had held up five fingers.

Then Arnaud said, “There’s no wrong answer to this. You can say whatever you want and it’s totally OK.” He made eye contact to make sure people saw that he was serious. “Again, hold up your hands to show how committed you are to this program…1 is ‘no thanks,’ and 5 is ‘200%—when I get back to my office, and I’m busy with all my other work, I’m going to fight hard for this program, even when there are problems and setbacks.’” Hands went up, and again people looked around the room. It was all fives.

“OK, let’s make it official.” Arnaud went to our flip chart, and wrote a short phrase. “I want everyone here to sign it, and I’m going to keep it in my office. I’m going to sign it first.”

It was an electrifying moment. Having taken three minutes, zero dollars, a few carefully chosen words, and an action, a leader transformed the people in room from an enthusiastic group to a committed KCS army.

What have you done to inspire your colleagues to action? What can you do?

(HT to Arnaud for permission to share.)

Communicating the What and the Why: Intuit Does it Right

By: David Kay 0 Comments

5 Mar

Effective, persistent communication is the cornerstone of KCS. Team members need to be engaged emotionally—to feel like they’re part of a big, important quest—and practically—knowing exactly what they need to do.

Rather than saying anything more about this, I’m going get out of the way and let one of our customers show you. Having participated in end-user training to kick off Wave I of a brand new KCS initiative, I was delighted to be cc:d on this fabulous email that program manager Joe Young of Intuit’s Virtual HR team sent to the new KCS candidates. My notes follow.

Congratulations! We have launched KCS for Intuit HR with an initial wave of nineteen participants. That’s pretty amazing to me. Just imagine how quickly we will be able build a central repository of shared knowledge with that many really knowledgeable people. (1)

KCS Mantras

Tight Focus on Specific Question  This will be hard for many of us. (2) KCS is not about writing articles that detail many variations. The focus is on that one question from that one person. If you did not include a detail in the chat, phone, or case, it does not belong in the article.

Good Enough  Perfection is the enemy of the good. Don’t dither and don’t agonize over the “right” wording. Get the essence of the issue into an article, save it, and move on. (3)

Create Articles “In the Moment”  When creating new articles, customer context is key. Use the words that the customer used in describing the issue. Don’t “improve” the wording. And don’t wait until you “have time to write.” You will lose that customer framing.

UFFA  Mindset shift. On every question that you get, walk through these steps:

Use It: Search for an article that addresses the question in [our tool] (4). If it exists, use the information. Capture the ID and paste in into the [incident tracking system] case.

Flag It / Fix It: If the article you find could be improved, Flag it for improvements (Candidates) or edit it directly (Contributors).

Add It: If you determine after searching that no article exists that answers this specific question, write one using [our authoring environment](4). Do it now, even if people are waiting on the phones or chat. Senior leadership (copied on this email) understands that our service levels will dip as we populate this new resource. The benefits we derive will pay back a hundred-fold. (5)

Training Materials for HR KCS

I had a request in the last training session to provide the decks we used for the online training. I almost attached to this email, and then realized that a better way to model the new behavior we want to see would be to post these files in our repository.

I have created an article that contains two training decks and the current version of the Content Guidelines. I am sure everyone on this email will have no trouble locating it. (6)

Job Aid

I have laminated versions of the Quick Reference sheet. It’s the first two pages of the Guideline document, two-sided. If you would like a copy to have at your workstation, let me know how to get it to you. (7)

Coaching Assignments

Expect to be contacted by your assigned KCS coach shortly, if this has not already happened. (8) [T]eam members should expect to spend an hour a week with their coach through the Candidate process. [People taking escalations in] the first wave will likely have more customized arrangements based on their situations. Look for further communication.(9) [List of coach assignments followed.]

David’s notes:

What a clear, compelling vision—who doesn’t want to be part of that?
It’s OK to acknowledge that we’re building new skills, and that it can be hard. This “sufficient to solve” guidance for Solve Loop content is, ironically, often hardest for your best and most thoughtful team members.
In its crispness, this paragraph models KCS style at its finest
In the original, this was an actual link to the appropriate tool. Nice.
When leadership acknowledges that they’re willing to take a short-term productivity hit, they rarely actually have to
It seems like a little bit of a trick, but putting information people want into the knowledgebase really is a good ice breaker.
Simple, helpful laminated cards with the quick reference guide are both useful and a tangible reminder of the program. This is especially useful for a highly distributed or homesourced group.
Often, after training, I feel like participants are still somehow waiting for permission to start doing KCS. Taking the practical step of setting up the first coach meeting often supplies the needed incentive to start.
No one communication, even one as good as this, does the job on its own. This message closes with a reminder to all of us that communication is the job that never ends in a KCS program.

ps – Know someone who is coming to TSW in Santa Clara? We’re running our popular one-day Introduction to KCS the day following, May 10^th, at the TSW site. Enjoy another day in California: send a colleague, or come join us yourself!

Hack Your Knowledgebase

By: David Kay 5 Comments

16 Feb

We all hate our knowledgebase tools sometimes. We might like the people we work with at the vendor, and there are those really cool features, but…seriously? I can’t just get a list of all the articles Joe has written? I can’t use bullets without ruining the formatting? I have to hit “publish” three times after I’m finished with the article? It makes you tear your hair out, and you sometimes get the impression vendors have no idea how their products are used in the real world.

As a knowledge program manager, every time you meet with a KCS coach, or sit down with a staff member, you get both barrels about the technology. “Search doesn’t work—why can’t it be like Google?” “It’s too cumbersome to author in the workflow.” “It takes a half hour to create a KB article even after you’ve captured the information in the case.”

It’s easy for consultants, industry pundits, and even program managers to say it shouldn’t matter that much—that many knowledge programs have succeeded with technology that’s no better, or even worse. It may be true, but it’s not very helpful to say to a complaining colleague.

Based on some recent experience with customers, I’d suggest a different approach. Tell your team to hack their knowledgebase.

No, I don’t mean hack in a bad way. I mean hack, like, figure out how to make it their own. Come up with new clever ways of using the system. Devise workarounds. Write a script. Show off, and have some fun! You have smart people in your organization…maybe all they need to use the tool better is permission, and encouragement?

As program managers, we helped implement the tool, and we built the training content, so we come to think of ourselves as the experts. But we’re not, really, at least, not compared with the people who use it every day. Here are some things I’ve seen end-users figure out, all within the last three weeks:

How to use a “hotkey text” feature to automatically paste a template into a new article (a workaround discovered by two different users in two different systems)
How to eliminate rich text formatting problems by slightly changing the content standard
Metadata entry that can be skipped, because no one ever looks at it
How to generate “reports” that aren’t available in the reporting system by cleverly using an administrative interface
How to keep a shared stash of article IDs to link for common issues

These MacGyver moves all came about because users were frustrated with the tool, and rather than complaining, they rolled up their sleeves and did something about it. As a program manager, you’re not always in a position to figure this stuff out. But you can prod and encourage would-be hackers, recognize their contributions to the program, and most importantly, make sure that everyone on the whole team knows when a colleague has come up with a better way to do things.

You are not a scalable model

By: David Kay 4 Comments

26 Apr

We mean this in the nicest way, but you don’t scale.

You’ve put yourself in that process step with the best of intentions.

You’re going to write the Content Standard by yourself because everyone else is so busy, and it really has to get done quickly.

You’re going to review knowledge before publication because you want to make sure customers have a really good experience.
You’re going to encourage people to flag content so you can improve it when you get a chance.

Fortunately, but inconveniently, this knowledge management initiative is about to be come bigger and more powerful than you planned. Trickles of customer-facing knowledge will become torrents. Occasional suggestions will morph into a buzzsaw of continuous improvement. A small core team will turn into everybody.

At that point, you won’t be helping. You’ll just be in the way.

The only way to scale is to engage everybody. Everyone should define processes and measures; everybody should review content with every use; everybody should update and improve content.

It’s tempting to do it all yourself, because aligning the entire organization with your mission is much harder. That is, engaging others is harder until doing it all yourself becomes impossible, at which point the train wreck has happened and it’s too late to engage everyone.

Communicate unreasonably, create the community, and erase your name from every individual step of the process.

ps – as readers of this blog, you’re already in the Inside Crew. So if you’re going to be at Technology Services World (TSW) next week in Santa Clara, or if you’re in the area and just want to stop by, here’s an invitation to join us with our partners Stone Cobra, The Vergis Group, and Kepner-Tregoe at an Inside Crew event near the convention center. Please join us! dbk