Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) Refresher Training Proposal

By: Stacy Gronsky

Why are we doing a refresher?

We have identified the following in our current KCS practice:

• Mismatched content standards • Out of date information • Internal information going external • Formatting Issues • Inappropriately tagged articles • Unprofessional writing • Difficulties searching and attaching • Lack of accountability

Possible Causes Why we suspect these issues have occurred: • Time constraints • Shortage of headcount • Unhelpful supplemental resources • No accountability for couch or writer • Lack of quality assurance in process • Information not being updated

Audiences For Training

• Refresher for Certified Agents • Training for Coaches/Publishers • Uncertified Trained Agents • New Certifications • New Hires • Training for Client Services

First Objective: • Primary Objective #1: Agents will have a clear understanding of what Knowledge Centered Support

is and why it is important.

• Specific Objectives: • Agents will be able to reflect on KCS and how the accurateness of the documentation and information

used impacts their technical support role and the call time, quality assurance and Net Promoter Score (NPS) associated by confidently referencing and attaching solutions in the articles provided or writing a new article if a new solution is discovered.

• Agents will be able to justify the importance of KCS by associating the call volume with the quality and relevance of content that is published publicly in the support center by advocating self service to customers in pertinent cases.

• Agents will be able to understand the support center NPS score based on the customer’s needs as well as what they are looking for and unable to find if attempting self-service by having a dialogue with the customer and communicating to the knowledge domain expert.

Second Objective: • Primary Objective #2: Agents will have knowledge of the technical components of Salesforce article

management and it’s association with the support site. • Specific Objectives • Agents will be able to navigate article management within Salesforce including the location of articles,

the properties of articles and the various fields of articles by navigating seamlessly and imputing data correctly.

• Agents will be able to work around known issues and bugs in the publishing process by keeping up with communication of the senior agents and knowledge domain expert and publishing content accordingly.

Third Objective: • Primary Objective #3: Agents will be able to master the complexities of the search functionality of

KCS within article management, the support site and cases. • Specific Objectives • Agents will be able to perform accurate searches while on calls or while creating new content by

attaching the pertinent article for a given case and not publishing duplicate articles. • Agents will be able to comprehend the difference between Help Files and Knowledge Articles by

seeing the purpose of both types and attaching the pertinent option to their cases. • Agents will be able to define what a synonym is and it’s purposes within KCS by providing examples

of synonyms and listing synonyms in the internal section of an article as needed

Fourth Objective: • Primary Objective #4: Agents will write using the KCS Content Standards as documented in the

Knowledge Centered Support Content Standard Guide. • Specific Objectives • Agents will be able to follow the Content Standard as it relates to best practices, solution content and

article creation guidelines by formulating articles that are accurate, uniform and professional. • Agents will be able to understand the difference between publishing internal and external content by

including customer facing verbiage, information and links in the majority of articles and keep any internal information contained only in the internal field.

Fifth Objective: • Primary Objective #5: Agents will be accountable for updating, editing or archiving existing

information. • Specific Objectives • Agents will be able to take ownership of editing outdated or incorrect information by making changes

to articles they come across and documenting the changes made within the internal section of the article or publishing as a new version.

• Agents will be able to identify information that is no longer relevant, duplicated or invalid by archiving articles they see that no longer need to be agent or customer facing.

Learning Assessment •  Coaches for KCS writers

•  Previously peers, now Senior Agents and Knowledge Domain Expert

•  Quality Assurance •  On the job assessment and QA by KCS Coaches

QA STANDARDS

Does the article meet criteria contained in the Content Standard? Is the article written to be customer facing or marked internal only? Is the article free of any misspelling, typos or grammatical errors?

Is the article professional, relevant and clear? Are the article categories tagged correctly?

Is there an existing article that duplicates the subject matter contained in this article?

Program Evaluation Plan • Formative evaluation

• One-to-one evaluation • Small-group evaluation • Field trials

• Summative evaluation • Did the implementation of the KCS refresher improve the quality of the published articles? • Did the training make agents more secure about article writing increasing the quantity of the articles written? • Did the agents enjoy the KCS refresher training and find it beneficial for optimal job performance? • Did the cost to give the KCS refresher training to all agents outweigh the cost of lack of KCS training? • What was the ramp up time for agents after completing the KCS refresher? • What unexpected outcomes resulted from the KCS refresher? • Did the training reinforce the importance of KCS and why it is used in Global Customer Support?

Content Next Steps:

• The following slides contain the content that will be presented to six stakeholders of the KCS retraining.

• Feedback will be taken, discussed and implemented into training. • Supplemental content with be revised to match updated training • The revised training will be presented to a test group of six coaches and writers. • Focus groups with test group candidates will allow for critical changes to be made and issue the refresher training.

• The process will be repeated with the trainings specific to the varying audiences in future trainings. Some content will be altered, added or removed based on the group.

Agenda for KCS Refresher Introduction to KCS

Searching & Attaching

Content Standards

Salesforce Article Management

Why is KCS Important?

Resources

What is KCS?

Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) has four basic concepts as documented by the Consortium for Service Innovation: 1.  Integrate the creation and maintenance of knowledge into the problem

solving process 2.  Evolve content based on demand and usage 3.  Develop a knowledge base of our collective experience to date 4.  Reward learning, collaboration, sharing, and improving

http://www.serviceinnovation.org/kcs/

Searching and Attaching Searching While on Calls

Article Types

Writing Articles

Duplicate Articles

Searching While on Calls • Search KCS for the issue during the call

and not after. • Open the article and implement the

recommended solution. • Do not attach irrelevant articles. • Use the icon to filter article results • Use the icon to search alternate keyword

Case

Article Search Results

Article Types- What is the difference?

Help Files

•  Created by the Technical Writing team •  Definitive documentation of the features and functionality of the product

Knowledge Articles

•  An agent solution

•  may be an internal starting point to develop a work around •  may be a solution an agent discovered through trial and error •  may explain usability cases that are not intended or designed for but satisfy a need of our end users

•  The agent created solutions are used to provide feedback to the engineering team •  Exact same content as part of a help file broken down so that it only covers one specific feature/issue

What if there is no article written for an issue?

• If you are a KCS certified agent you can put yourself in the “KCS Work” status and write an article for the issue (queues permitting).  Make sure you reach out to the GCS-Managers, or a Senior Agent if the issue is urgent

• If you are not a KCS certified agent email your Manager and Senior Agent as well as the Knowledge Domain Expert to get an article written.

Duplicate Articles

• If you are writing an article, verify you are thoroughly searching KCS to avoid duplicated content.

• If you are publishing an existing article to the support site, verify there is not a similar Help File already published.

• If you locate a duplicate article, make sure to archive the duplicate article and make a note in the Internal section.

Content Standards Content Basics

Formatting

Internal vs. External

Solution Types

Content Must… •  Be Clear and Consistent- Always use the same words and terms to mean the same things as the

language and terminology of other similar solutions. •  Be Relevant- Directly applicable to the specific issue being addressed.

•  Be Meaningful- Captures meaningful knowledge that can be reused by others. The content should be written at an appropriate level of technical detail for the target audience.

•  Be Technically Accurate- Useful to customers, and technically accurate. Customers need to trust the validity of all the content within our knowledge base.

•  Capture the Kernel- Capture and document just the information necessary for problem solving.

•  Be Short and Simple- Good descriptions are short and to the point. Eliminate unnecessary wording.

Formatting of Content • Avoid User-Specific Information- Any and all customer-specific information must either

be removed or edited in a manner that will mask the identity of or information pertaining to the customer.

• Consistent Format- Content that is free of layout inconsistencies and typographical

errors conveys a positive impression of the organization. • Use Present Tense- Write in the present tense to avoid confusion. • Use Standard Fonts- Arial, 12pt, Black. • Use Hyperlinks- When reusing information include a hyperlink instead of re-

documenting.

Specifics of Formatting Content • Number steps that require an order, otherwise use bullets.

• No need for usage of punctuation after the numbered steps.

• One action for each step.

• Buttons to press should be bolded.

• Underline titles of numbered or bulleted lists.

• Field names should be italicized.

• Critical details and words should be capitalized.

• Additional information should be specified by bolding Note: and then including the information.

• Use <your host name> when you need to generalize a detail specific to an account.

Exercise: How can these steps be re-written so there is a step for each action?

Example:

Internal vs. External Content

• Verbiage- Always assume an article will be published to the external support site and use customer facing verbiage only, unless within the internal field of the article.

  If you are writing an article specifically for agents that will never be customer facing then you may use internal verbiage. (i.e. Department procedures, instructions or requests).

• Hyperlinks- Verify hyperlinks only point towards customer facing articles/websites when it is included in the article. If you need to include a link to an internal article do so in the internal section.

 When using hyperlinks use the link feature in article management instead of the URL itself.

• Screenshots- Do not include screenshots of internal information or internal admins.  Make sure you are including only crisp professional looking screenshots in articles.

Exercise: What changes can be made to this as an external article?

Example:

Solution Types •  How To: Responses to questions on how to do something or

requests for information. •  Troubleshooting: Addresses error messages customers receive,

and represent situations where some form of analysis is required to determine the solution to the presenting symptoms.

•  Billing and Account: Responses to questions on how an agent

or a customer can update or modify account settings, plan settings and billing information as well as provide company policy on account related matters.

•  Engineering Known Issue: Known product issues that have

been or will be reported to the engineering team. •  Service Disruption: Documentation of an outage and the cause

and message to customers once available.

Salesforce Article Management Salesforce Fields

Article Properties

Known Issues

Updating and Archiving

Title Field

The Title field describes the issue in a way that is easily searchable for agents and customers. General Guidelines:

• Title should be unique, descriptive and pertinent to the information contained in the article. • Quotes (“), hyphens (-), colons (:), and question marks (?) may be used. • Use title case (First word and all the main words have initial capitals and joining words lower case).

Summary Field •  The Summary field is used to elaborate on the title of the article. It appears within the search

results but not within the article itself. •  It should include a combination of the issue, cause and resolution if possible. •  In most cases this summary should also be included and elaborated upon in the body of the article

as an introduction.

Question Field

•  The Question field is the customer’s statement, question or account of an issue in their own words.

•  This should always be written as a question and never a statement.

Statement: Question:

Answer Field

The Answer field clearly sets forth the steps to take to resolve the issue addressed in the question.

The answer should:

• Tell the end user why they are performing the steps • Tell them where they should be in the interface • Tell them what they should do step by step

Exercise: What changes can be made to this article?

Example:

Internal Sections

Synonyms What is a synonym? A synonym is a word that has the same meaning as another word. Why are synonyms important for KCS? Customers and agents may search using alternate verbiage for topics and are not pulling up articles based on their search. What can we do about that? Think about what a customer might be searching for and add synonyms into the internal section of the article to make searching easier for customers and agents. If a word is commonly misspelled include the misspelling in Synonyms

What is are some synonyms for Cancel? Synonyms: unsubscribe, close, delete, remove, canceling, cancellation, unsubscribing, stop, terminate.

Article Properties

 Product(s) relating to this article (choose up to 8)

 What type of solution is addressed in this article (How to, Troubleshooting, Billing and Account, and Known Issue)

 What Operating system is affected: Windows OS, Mac OSX, OS, or Android

 Pertains to Help Files only, Do Not Configure

Channels: Do not check anything unless you have the ability to publish to the Public KB in which case you must check that box and change “Internal use only” to “No”

Updating and Archiving • Updating: You are accountable for updating/editing any article you encounter that is out of date, incorrect, or unformatted information.

• Archiving: Archive content that is no longer applicable and make a note under “Suggested Changes” what the reason was the article was archived.

Known Issues

Formatting Bug Plain Text Linking to Articles Internally

Known Issues- Formatting Bug Issue: When publishing externally from KCS to the Support Site the formatting becomes erratic Example:

Known Issues- Formatting Bug Continued Work Around: Change entire font, font size and font color even if it already shows correctly within the preview and then change it back to Arial, size and black under color.

Example:

Known Issues- Plain Text Issue: Content that is copied directly from the web or other applications keeps it’s formatting when being posted. Example:

Known Issues- Plain Text Continued Work Around: Paste content into Notepad and copy from there prior to using the content in Article Management. Example: Note: Do not copy text from external websites directly into a content template. If you must reference materials from an external website insert a hyperlink.

Known Issues- Linking to Articles Internally

Issue: If you are using Salesforce GCS Console to view articles you are unable to copy the URL of an article to send to a colleague directly from there. Work Around: You must go through the previous GCS Salesforce interface. It is recommended that you create a bookmark to this page for direct access.

Accurate Self-Service for Customers

Resolving Calls Quickly

Better Overall Experience for

Customers

Why is KCS Important?

Accurate Self-Service for Customers

Lower Call Volume

Resolving Calls Quickly

Shorter Talk Times

Better Overall Experience for

Customers

Higher NPS Scores

Why is KCS Important?

Resources Web Resources: To learn more about KCS visit the Consortium for Service Innovation: http://www.serviceinnovation.org/kcs/ For assistance with Title Case a helpful resource is: http://capitalizemytitle.com/ GCS Site: For a one page KCS reference sheet: KCS One Sheet (July 2012) A longer more in-depth Content Standard can be found here: KCS Content Standard (July 2012) Surfers: Follow these guidelines when writing about the SaaS division of Citrix and any of the services it produces: Citrix SaaS Style Guide (October 2013)

  Any questions, comments, ideas or feedback?   You can also email Stacy, Pam and/or Doug if you

think of something later that you would like to address.

  Thank you again for your time and valuable insight!

Thank You for Your Time!