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. Common Across Systems. Many enterprise applications require taxonomies to work properly. Since these enterprise applications are managed by different groups, it’s natural that each taxonomy will start out different and […]
self-service
Lessons from the 2014 ASP “Ten Best Web Support Sites”
Every 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, including […]
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Some good reasons to put your knowledge base on the Internet–and some outdated myths that keep it locked up behind a customer login today.
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. (Do […]
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 […]
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 […]
How Self-Service Fails
Often, 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 […]
Resource Roundup
Sometimes we find so many good things that we can’t help but stand back and let others speak. This is one of those weeks. So, without delay, some links we love. 1. In a recent installment of his Eye on Service blog, John Ragsdale tells a sad story that’s all the sadder because it’s so […]
Communicating KM to Customers: IBM does it right
Our friends at IBM Information Management just shared a wonderful video they’re using to communicate about their KCS practices to their customer base. Have a look on YouTube. (ed. note: link updated March 2014). Some things I love about this video: It’s short. It gets all the big ideas across in three minutes. As someone […]
