The best way to show the world that you’re qualified to lead a program for AI-ready content is to become KCS v6 Practices Certified. People who have this certification really know their stuff. That’s because the certification exam is challenging: not only must you know the principles of KCS, you need to be able to apply them.
Fortunately, to complement the recommended certification workshop, the Consortium for Service Innovation offers helpful resources for those preparing for the exam. The most useful of these is the Study Guide, which lists all the exam objectives. If it’s not in the Study Guide, it’s not on the exam. Each objective links to the relevant section of the Practices Guide or another official publication that holds the answer. Master the Study Guide, and you’ll crush the exam.
Well, almost every exam objective has a link. There is one exception: “Identify violations to the KCS Practices.” This blog post is here to fill in that (ahem) “missing link.”
Violation is kind of a judgy word, but here are some gaps we’ve seen in KCS implementations. Not following these best practices can cause serious setbacks for your program, its knowledge articles, and your customer experience.
Do your team members
- Consistently search or prompt while resolving cases? If not, we’re not taking advantage of what we already know. Even if we think we know a resolution, things can change quickly. In KCS, we “search early; search often.”
- Link cases to relevant articles? Forget case closure codes! Accurate attachment of articles to cases lets us see what specific issues customers are having. This enables us to take action to fix them. If team members don’t link, we’re flying blind.
- All contribute to the knowledgebase, if they have knowledge to share? If people can come up with a new answer to a question, a new way of accomplishing an objective or a new resolution to a problem, they ought to be sharing what you’ve learned with your colleagues, customers, and AI systems.
- Capture knowledge while working cases, rather than later? It’s daunting to have to go back to document something that happened last week or last month. Memories get fuzzy, and who has the time? In KCS, we capture as we go—it’s not a separate task.
- Improve knowledge as they use it? As many of us have experienced, creating a knowledge base is way easier than keeping it up to date. In KCS, every use is a review. That is, every time we use knowledge, we update or improve it if needed. Once again, it’s not a separate task.
- Approve their own content? Imagine you’re an expert who just learned something useful. You want to tell your colleagues and customers ASAP. You don’t want to wait for an editor to wordsmith or for another expert to second-guess you. In KCS, once you’ve demonstrated that you know the rules of the road, you share what you learned, immediately. The article doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be useful—what KCS calls “sufficient to solve.”
- Understand that knowledge is a big part of their job? The only way that you’ll get your team members to do all the things we’ve just described is if they think it’s important—not just a nice-to-have. As leadership expert Simon Sinek says, “Start with the why.”
If this isn’t all happening, sure, let’s call that a violation. But more importantly, let’s just make it right. (We can help.)
ps – I made a video about these potential violations quite some time ago—check it out!
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