Shifting Left: Knowledge Centered Support for Improved Customer Service

Featured article by Nancy Van Elsacker is president of TOPdesk US

Reaching customers more efficiently. Educating users on the use of product and features. Engaging in conversations time and time again, covering the same ground. How best to bottle these conversations up and provide the best and most relevant information to the right users when they need the most appropriate information.

Members of internal helpdesk teams research problems others on the team have already discovered the solutions to. Addressing thousands of calls, many of them multiple and redundant. No matter the site of the support desk, more questions always will come from customers who have the same needs as the person before them on the queue.

Even with 40 or more support personnel handling more than 5,000 calls a month, one must always be on the lookout to catch and resolve issues as efficiently as possible, making services smarter, quicker and more scalable.

The kind of solution that we are seeing work to improve the availability of information to customers, reduce the time internal teams spend looking for answers to questions their colleagues are built around two principals: Shift Left and Shift Left Left.

By shifting left, customers can gain access to those needed answers and responses more quickly. Shifting Left means skilled technicians make their expertise and insight more available to less experienced colleagues and less experienced technical support staff can gain needed organizational knowledge and share it with their customers. In so doing, an entire organization raises itself to a higher place intellectually. “Shift Left Left” then is the next logical step in bringing information and resources to customers and users. The philosophy means providing customers with access to solutions and leading them to resources where they’re able to find the answers to their questions themselves on their own time and as needed.

While “Shifting Left” is an ideology, it takes much less effort organizationally to implement, deploy and manage. Organizations with a customer-first mentality that wish to serve their customers will likely, with greater probability than not, find success with this approach. The more known and understood, the better to be able to help others.

When Shift Left is in place, steps toward Shift Left Left are then able to be put in place and the process begins of bringing information to customers. What this means is that quality customer service designed to support one-on-one service needs to scale, and moving beyond individual calls and email responses, but more knowledge sharing vehicles must be driven. So, the obvious: a website with manuals (we implemented help.topdesk.com), a page that enables service for many customers at the same time, but contains mostly generic information about the company, the products and solutions and has less information about customer-specific situations, such as error messages, workarounds or updates. To implement Shift Left Left, the real heart of the issue, a way to share specific information with clients must be reached.

We soon encountered the concept of Knowledge Centered Support (KCS). Knowledge-Centered Support is a methodology developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation. He following is but one mere approach as an interpretation of this approach. KCS is a best practice approach for publishing and managing knowledge and assumes that the support department fills and manages a knowledge base with items that can be shared with end users. This changes knowledge management from a task done by specific people to a task for every person in the support department – as a part of solving calls. That’s the heart of the light bulb moment, in a nutshell.

Getting started with KCS

A project plan and a pilot group work well for implementation of the methodology. The pilots can be set up to examine if the KCS will help the support department work more efficiently, and best serve clients. (In our specific example, 10 of 40 support employees took part in this pilot.) The methodology, ultimately, should change the way the organization works, serves and disseminates information.

Weekly evaluations ensure the change in model is successful. Challenges can be discussed, as well as ideas for how to overcome them that will best benefit the client. Continual developments are made to optimize the overall program. Working through issues as a group and taking on individual challenges together means successfully managing these changes. Successes are discussed, too, and regular reports from the pilot are passed along to the department about the changes within the group and the effect on the work. This provides a milestone measurement for the project and how it’s progressing or stalling. The shared success, as you’ll likely discover, keeps the project top of mind within the support staff. This keeps energy focused on the changes for all to see, setting a barometer for what’s to come and keeping energy alive for the program to keep going. Also, this allows for the providing progress notes to the remainder of the team, to keep them excited, too.

How to Work with KCS?

For us, when applying the Shift method, we used TOPdesk’s Knowledge Base module. We made a separate branch in the knowledge base to save items that were created for KCS in a fixed and recognizable place. The knowledge base at TOPdesk Extranet features hundreds of KCS items. The moment a customer asks our support department a question, a call is logged. Based on this call, a support employee can search for relevant items in the knowledge base. When we find an item that answers the question, we add this to the call. When the item from the knowledge base is added, TOPdesk creates a link between the call and the knowledge item. This makes it possible to create selections and reports that provide insight into the way the item are used. Which items are used to resolve calls and which ones are used more frequently? If the item describes the answer, but is still missing essential information, we can add this before we share it with the customer; thus the items are continuously updated. If there not any items in the knowledge base that can answer the question then a new item can be created immediately when processing the customer’s question.

For us, the results are clear. Since the introduction of the KCS method at TOPdesk, we’ve written thousands of items with answers to customer questions. A large number of these items have been re-used many times to answer the same question. Using KCS has also shown us that we have come to grips with the Shift Left principle.

Knowledge is now centrally stored in our knowledge base, making it available to both first and second line operators. Operators with less experience are now able to find answers to the more difficult questions, helping them develop their knowledge more quickly. We have also seen that the average lead time of a call has reduced and fewer calls are escalated to the second line.

Writing a large number of items shouldn’t be a goal in itself. The real goal is being able to process calls more quickly and give users the opportunity to find their own answers to their questions on their own. During this process we saw that the number of new items decreased and the number of calls with links to current items increased. The availability of our department’s knowledge is now better than ever before. The pilot results were very positive. Using existing items helped operators process calls more easily and quickly. At the start of the pilot we were resolving up to 15 percent of the calls with information from an existing knowledge source; at the end of the pilot this came closer to 50 percent.

Because of the success of the KCS method during the pilot, we decided to get the entire support department to start working with it. But if you then want to start working according to Shift Left Left, you need to give your end users access to your knowledge. You want to give them the ability to search the knowledge base. In this way, customers will increasingly be able to find answers to their questions, and will no longer always have to contact the support department.

Nancy Van Elsacker is president of TOPdesk US, a provider of IT service management solutions. Follow @TOPdesk