Category: Self Service
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The Care and Feeding of Taxonomies, Part 3: How to Design Them
Having said why it’s important to get taxonomies right, and what makes a good taxonomy, I should let you know how you can do taxonomy design on your own. In our taxonomy workshops, we facilitate organizations through this design process: We find two days to be a good length of time to devote to this process,…
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The Care and Feeding of Taxonomies, Part 2: What Makes a Good Taxonomy?
Now that we’ve seen why taxonomies are important, it’s time to discover what makes for a good taxonomy. Effective and useful taxonomies have the following properties. Now that we’ve discussed what makes a good taxonomy, in our next post we’ll discuss practices for creating and maintaining one.
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The Care and Feeding of Taxonomies, Part 1: Why Should I Care?
This is the first in a series of four blog posts about taxonomies. In this one, it’s my job to explain why what sounds like an incredibly dry topic really makes a difference. In succeeding posts, I’ll describe what makes a good taxonomy, provide a step-by-step approach to creating yours, and lay out some common…
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Lessons from the 2014 ASP “Ten Best Web Support Sites”
in Self ServiceEvery year, it’s a little like Christmas in the summer: the Association of Support Professionals releases its flagship report, The Year’s Ten Best Web Support Sites. (You can get your copy here.) Companies submit papers describing their support websites, their key features, challenges, lessons learned, and business results. Then a panel of expert judges,…
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Free Your Knowledge Base
Some good reasons to put your knowledge base on the Internet–and some outdated myths that keep it locked up behind a customer login today.
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Metrics Myth 10: Contact Deflection = Clickthroughs Times the X-Factor
Industry surveys ask. Colleagues ask. IT asks. Executives ask, incessantly. “What’s your contact deflection rate?” Let’s leave aside for the moment that contact deflection isn’t the primary reason to expose your knowledgebase to your customers. Let’s also leave aside the fact that it’s both practically and philosophically difficult to count things that didn’t happen. …
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Little Data
You can’t escape hearing about Big Data right now—it has replaced “cloud” as the current hot buzzword in tech. The idea is pretty simple: it’s easy to gather huge volumes of data from Internet clickstreams, scientific instruments, roadway sensors, and all the other collectors of digital information in the world…but it’s not always easy to…
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Keeping Two Sets of Books
I learned a great best practice for organizational change this week at the Consortium for Service Innovation’s executive summit in beautiful Chatham, Cape Cod: Keep two sets of books! No, not in the bad way—not like Enron—but to enable change. Several industry leaders are keeping two sets of books to track performance on their current…
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How Self-Service Fails
in Self ServiceOften, the first step in making something work really well is to figure out how it can fail…and then making sure it doesn’t. In the case of self-service, most studies show that customers are successful less than half of the time (sometimes far less.) So clearly, there’s plenty of failure to eliminate! Here are some ways…