By Christina Mayr | Member and Liz Herman | Senior Member
In organizations that provide products and services to customers, knowledge should be identified, captured, leveraged, and shared throughout various departments and functions. When documentation, marketing, and technical support all interact with customers, successful knowledge management can ensure a competitive, well-performing company with loyal customers. However, this often does not happen for various reasons and results in what is known as knowledge loss.
Customers feel the effects of knowledge loss the most. When product documentation doesn’t solve a specific problem, the customer will turn to other sources, including online searches, user forums, and finally, calling customer support. What many of them find during their search for answers is that the official documentation doesn’t provide enough information to solve their problem, so after a long wait on the phone, customer support might be able to provide a non-documented solution.
This knowledge loss affects us as well. As technical communicators, we strive to write usable documentation that provides the best and easiest solution, which means being part of knowledge management initiatives within an organization. This gives authors indirect access to customers’ pain points that could be addressed by enhancing existing documentation or reaching the customer in a different way, such as through instructional videos.
When Extreme Networks, a networking solutions company, acquired another company, the two technical support centers realized they needed to manage their knowledge differently. This gave rise to the need for Knowledge Centered Support (KCS), where support staff write knowledge articles as cases come in. These articles address the customer’s specific concern and link to other sources, such as official Extreme documentation. These articles get linked to, reused, and improved upon, thereby reducing knowledge loss and enhancing knowledge transfer between two formerly disparate groups.
The new technical support group became known as the Global Technical Assistance Center (GTAC), and as engineers published knowledge articles for customer consumption, quality metrics started to improve as customers had a much better experience when contacting customer support, both on the phone and in user forums (moderated by Extreme).
When the technical writing group at Extreme (known as InfoDev) became aware of GTAC’s efforts, they quickly realized that they could acquire the needed access to customers. InfoDev crafted a plan to address these articles within the technical documentation with the goal to provide solutions in a less conspicuous way and possibly reduce the need for customer support.
Reducing the most expensive customer support points of contact is a goal of many organizations as phone support is particularly expensive. Technical writers can contribute to this effort by embarking on initiatives that transition high-volume customer inquiries to other customer service avenues, such as self-service portals that provide solutions to common problems.
In a case study spanning five years, one organization recognized that its high-volume calls were things that could be either automated (such as password resets) or handled via self-service inquiries (such as how to initiate a project). Technical writers should look for these types of opportunities to help organizations make their customer service outreach better and reduce overall costs. Finally, technical writers can investigate how customer support tools are used and look for ways to improve written support in self-service portals, wikis, and company blogs.
At Extreme Networks, the InfoDev team is doing just that. By being part of the GTAC process, InfoDev has an opportunity to see what users need support with. This allows the authors to not only assist in making GTAC knowledge articles better, but also transfer that knowledge into the official documentation. InfoDev also monitors customer discussions on the user forums and looks for ways to proactively address their issues through improving existing documentation or by creating different solutions to hopefully reduce the speed at which users become frustrated.
Today’s technical communicator must be aware of and engaged in the multiple resources customers use to find information and solve problems. By becoming involved in the knowledge management systems in your organization, you can improve the documentation and hopefully inspire lasting changes in the entire user experience.
Christina Mayr (christinaemayr@gmail.com) is the technical editor and content manager at Extreme Networks. She first became interested in knowledge management while working alongside engineers solving customer problems and decided to investigate this topic as part of her Master’s thesis. Christina is also the president of the STC Carolina Chapter.
Liz Herman (liz@lizherman.com), CPTC, is a director in the Health and Analytics Business Unit at Battelle and a knowledge management expert who advocates for effective communication and presentation strategies to expand knowledge sharing, enhance business relationships, fuel productivity, and increase profits. Liz received her PhD in Applied Management and Decision Sciences in 2009.
