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Next-Gen Knowledge Base #call-center #tools

Sandeep Jain <sandejain@...>
 

All,
I am a technology entrepreneur exploring building a Best-In-Class Knowledge Base (geared towards customer support). It seems existing KB solutions are just add-ons to ticketing systems and have ended up being just content repositories.

Some pain points I heard:
. Knowledge creation restricted to a set of people only (could be a pricing issue). Ideally partners, employees or even customers could be sourcing knowledge bites.
. Geared towards HtMl content and not audio/Video content
. Don’t understand the context of the customer — every customer sees everything in KB
. Integration with CRM, ticketing, communities, internal bug tracking systems is missing.
. Cannot easily setup creation/approval/publishing workflows
. Broken taxonomy
. Customers need to leave product dashboard and go to support.company.com to hunt for answers

Would love to hear perspective of this group,

Thank you!!

Sandeep

Susan Ostreicher
 

Hi Sandeep, 

Good luck with your project! I think Confluence (in combination with Jira Service Desk) would be a good product for you to benchmark against. From my perspective, it already does many of these things well. 

On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 2:33 PM Sandeep Jain sandejain@... [sikmleaders] <sikmleaders@...> wrote:
 

All,
I am a technology entrepreneur exploring building a Best-In-Class Knowledge Base (geared towards customer support). It seems existing KB solutions are just add-ons to ticketing systems and have ended up being just content repositories.

Some pain points I heard:
.. Knowledge creation restricted to a set of people only (could be a pricing issue). Ideally partners, employees or even customers could be sourcing knowledge bites.
.. Geared towards HtMl content and not audio/Video content
.. Don’t understand the context of the customer — every customer sees everything in KB
.. Integration with CRM, ticketing, communities, internal bug tracking systems is missing.
.. Cannot easily setup creation/approval/publishing workflows
.. Broken taxonomy
.. Customers need to leave product dashboard and go to support.company.com to hunt for answers

Would love to hear perspective of this group,

Thank you!!

Sandeep

Sandeep Jain <sandejain@...>
 

Hi Susan,

Thank you for your feedback!

In fact Confluence seems to be the predominant choice for “internal” KB though I have yet to come across it being used for “external” KB. 

Cheers,

On Jul 24, 2019, at 12:20 PM, Susan Ostreicher susan.ostreicher@... [sikmleaders] <sikmleaders@...> wrote:

 

Hi Sandeep, 

Good luck with your project! I think Confluence (in combination with Jira Service Desk) would be a good product for you to benchmark against. From my perspective, it already does many of these things well. 

On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 2:33 PM Sandeep Jain sandejain@... [sikmleaders] <sikmleaders@...> wrote:
 

All,
I am a technology entrepreneur exploring building a Best-In-Class Knowledge Base (geared towards customer support). It seems existing KB solutions are just add-ons to ticketing systems and have ended up being just content repositories.

Some pain points I heard:
... Knowledge creation restricted to a set of people only (could be a pricing issue). Ideally partners, employees or even customers could be sourcing knowledge bites.
... Geared towards HtMl content and not audio/Video content
... Don’t understand the context of the customer — every customer sees everything in KB
... Integration with CRM, ticketing, communities, internal bug tracking systems is missing.
... Cannot easily setup creation/approval/publishing workflows
... Broken taxonomy
... Customers need to leave product dashboard and go to support.company.com to hunt for answers

Would love to hear perspective of this group,

Thank you!!

Sandeep

Phil Verghis
 

Sandeep,

 

Long timer lurker here. On the tech side, many large enterprises use a framework from the non-profit Consortium for Service Innovation called Knowledge Centered Service (KCS).

 

They have a ‘KCS Verified’ set of vendors and ‘KCS Aligned’ set of service providers (we used to be one of the latter when we focused more on knowledge). In this link you will see an overview of the process. In particular, this link will save you months of interviews for a good start for what tech people (particularly external support) will look for from a tool.

 

Feel free to reach out if you have questions, phil@...

 

PS No financial arrangements with them…

 

Peace,

 

Phil

 

CEO & Co-Founder | Klever Insight | www.kleverinsight.com  
Using Augmented Intelligence – a human-centric application of artificial intelligence

phil@... | @kleverinsight | +1 919.641.9465

Research Triangle region, North Carolina

https://www.linkedin.com/in/philverghis

 

 

From: sikmleaders@... <sikmleaders@...>
Sent: Wednesday, July 24, 2019 10:41 PM
To: sikmleaders@...
Subject: Re: [sikmleaders] Next-Gen Knowledge Base

 

 

Hi Susan,

 

Thank you for your feedback!

 

In fact Confluence seems to be the predominant choice for “internal” KB though I have yet to come across it being used for “external” KB. 

 

Cheers,

 

On Jul 24, 2019, at 12:20 PM, Susan Ostreicher susan.ostreicher@... [sikmleaders] <sikmleaders@...> wrote:

 

Hi Sandeep, 

 

Good luck with your project! I think Confluence (in combination with Jira Service Desk) would be a good product for you to benchmark against. From my perspective, it already does many of these things well. 

 

On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 2:33 PM Sandeep Jain sandejain@... [sikmleaders] <sikmleaders@...> wrote:

 

All,
I am a technology entrepreneur exploring building a Best-In-Class Knowledge Base (geared towards customer support). It seems existing KB solutions are just add-ons to ticketing systems and have ended up being just content repositories.

Some pain points I heard:
.... Knowledge creation restricted to a set of people only (could be a pricing issue). Ideally partners, employees or even customers could be sourcing knowledge bites.
.... Geared towards HtMl content and not audio/Video content
.... Don’t understand the context of the customer — every customer sees everything in KB
.... Integration with CRM, ticketing, communities, internal bug tracking systems is missing.
.... Cannot easily setup creation/approval/publishing workflows
.... Broken taxonomy
.... Customers need to leave product dashboard and go to support.company.com to hunt for answers

Would love to hear perspective of this group,

Thank you!!

Sandeep

Susan Ostreicher
 

Hi Sandeep, 

You're right, Confluence does seem to be underutilized for public sites. I see it used most often by software companies, maybe because they're already familiar with Jira and because Confluence lends itself well to technical documentation. 

Devinti is one example of a public help desk integrated with a knowledge base. As you begin to fill out a request form, you'll see suggested Confluence articles based on the keywords in your subject line. Unfortunately, these articles don't seem to be browseable on their own. 

K15t also has a good example of a public knowledge base on Confluence, which is not surprising since they themselves provide several Confluence apps. But ironically, their help desk is on Zendesk rather than Jira Service Desk, so this doesn't illustrate the integration. :) 

Hope these are somewhat helpful!

 





On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 10:41 PM Sandeep Jain sandejain@... [sikmleaders] <sikmleaders@...> wrote:
 

Hi Susan,

Thank you for your feedback!

In fact Confluence seems to be the predominant choice for “internal” KB though I have yet to come across it being used for “external” KB. 

Cheers,

On Jul 24, 2019, at 12:20 PM, Susan Ostreicher susan.ostreicher@... [sikmleaders] <sikmleaders@...> wrote:

 

Hi Sandeep, 

Good luck with your project! I think Confluence (in combination with Jira Service Desk) would be a good product for you to benchmark against. From my perspective, it already does many of these things well. 

On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 2:33 PM Sandeep Jain sandejain@... [sikmleaders] <sikmleaders@...> wrote:
 

All,
I am a technology entrepreneur exploring building a Best-In-Class Knowledge Base (geared towards customer support). It seems existing KB solutions are just add-ons to ticketing systems and have ended up being just content repositories.

Some pain points I heard:
.... Knowledge creation restricted to a set of people only (could be a pricing issue). Ideally partners, employees or even customers could be sourcing knowledge bites.
.... Geared towards HtMl content and not audio/Video content
.... Don’t understand the context of the customer — every customer sees everything in KB
.... Integration with CRM, ticketing, communities, internal bug tracking systems is missing.
.... Cannot easily setup creation/approval/publishing workflows
.... Broken taxonomy
.... Customers need to leave product dashboard and go to support.company.com to hunt for answers

Would love to hear perspective of this group,

Thank you!!

Sandeep

vs_shenoy@...
 

Can you provide some context around what you are trying to achieve:
  1. Is your application strictly Customer Support? Will you also be handling Business Operations?
  2. Are you looking for integration with an existing CRM platform? If yes, what platform?
  3. Does your environment have an established team and process that will handle publishing, maintenance of content?
  4. How much content do you have internally vs externally?
  5. Is there a desire to move content to other channels - email, chat, self service?
Unfortunately, as Gartner rightly puts it, there are no all purpose KM tools. There are plenty of CS related KM tools but are heavily integrated into existing CRM tools. Example: Salesforce Knowledge, Oracle Knowledge Advanced, Verint Kana, eGain Knowledge. You may use other tools internally such as SharePoint or Confluence but from your description this may not work for various reasons - SharePoint is moving towards an internal collaboration focus (through teams) and is harder to expose externally for website support content, Confluence offers quick collaboration but has a weak Search and doesn't integrate well with other platforms.

As someone who has created and supported a Customer Support KBs in an internal and external setting, choice of tool is just part of the story. You need to have to a well thought out process and team in place to run the show. You can read about KCS here as someone else has also pointed out but it may not work if strictly followed depending on your environment.

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