Support and Education

All about Updates

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:51:00 GMT

My last entry was about the expansion of our KCS initiative to support Consona’s ERP customers and since it has been going so well, I would like to post an update to it. However, since it has been a while since I’ve talked about our original initiative for our CRM products, I’d like to update you on that as well. So, this blog will be a split of our two phases of KCS.

Support for ERP products (Compiere, Cimnet, Relevant, Configuration Solutions, and Intuitive ERP)

Our pilot team expanded late in December to include our second largest ERP product and support team, Intuitive ERP. With this addition, the pilot team has hit the ground running and after we started doing KCS in production, we have seen some pretty rapid expansion and growth of our knowledge management environment. We also have some very savvy KCS support representatives that have moved up the KCS ladder to become certified and even one at Publisher level! Our next move will be to add in some customers to test out the new self-service knowledge base so we can get feedback on search results and the content everyone has been working hard to update and add over the last few months.

It has not been without some challenges though. We are finding that not having an integrated CRM system has led to a disjointed workflow where the support analysts have to remember to enter an article ID manually to the case so that it can be linked. This has led to a lower linking rate than our initial expectations. We have added a universal checklist for everyone to follow as well as moving the field to enter the article ID to the main screen which we hope will help us improve this metric. The good thing is that it still is climbing (albeit slowly) so we are hoping to have it climb at a steeper rate after these changes have been in place for a bit. Here’s a look at our trends.

Support for CRM products (Knova, Onyx, SupportSoft, and Service Gateway)

Last we talked; we were starting to develop our b-loop content for the CRM products. Since then, we have also completed a New vs. Known study that gave us some very, very interesting information about ourselves! We will be discussing it in more detail in the Consortium for Service Innovation’s Deep Dive discussion scheduled next week if you are interested.

I think the most exciting piece of information that came out of our New vs. Known study was that we are on the right track in terms of focusing on the b-loop content. What our study showed was that on average, 90% of our support cases are new. Plus, the reasons for this revolve around the uniqueness of our customers’ environments and deployments of our software. Therefore, the value of b-loop articles were much higher for these products compared to the traditional a-loop articles that solved a single issue since that single issue had a low chance of being repeated. We also found that one of our ERP products is similar to our CRM products and we have now changed gears for that product as well towards the b-loop content. We might not have come to this conclusion so soon if we hadn’t done our study.

We plan to do another New vs. Known study later this year and have some changes we are planning to make based on the lessons we learned from this one. One of those changes is to add a question about our b-loop content to see if it is helping resolve issues. We of course will be looking into ways to report on this through our metrics and also hope to glean some good feedback from our peers in the Deep Dive discussion. Hope to hear you there!

Expanding our KCS Initiative

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:44:00 GMT

Hope you all had a wonderful end of 2011 and are looking forward like I am to the New Year! I would like to take a break from my previous blog entries that talked about our current KCS initiative for our Knova, Onyx, SupportSoft and ServiceGateway product lines and talk about a pilot program we have been running for a few months now. We recently decided to expand KCS to the rest of the Consona product suite and I thought it would be fitting to tell about it in my first post of 2012.

We kicked off the new pilot with four of our smallest Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product lines in September 2011. Two of them had never used a formal knowledge management system and the other two had been using an old tool called eFAQ but had very few articles created in the last several years. After conducting the initial training on our Knova product, we began meeting regularly to discuss any issues the pilot team members were running into and also to discuss how to move them forward with KCS.

The current plan is to start out creating internal-only articles through the first half of the year and then branch out to expose articles to customers in our self-service portal as support analysts become certified KCS Publishers.

We are very interested to see how KCS impacts the support operations of the ERP product lines compared to the initial set of products. The type of support ERP does is more end-user in nature with a slightly higher volume. We think that this may actually be more in the “sweet spot” for KCS than the initial products, so we are hoping to see even bigger successes with them.

In a hallway conversation this week, one of our support managers was telling me how easy it was to create an article in Knova and after it was published, he searched for it and actually found it! It was so exciting to see the enthusiasm just by being able to find an article you authored. It gave me a renewed optimism for our KCS initiative as a whole.

Something else that has been encouraging is that our Executive Team is incorporating several KCS metrics in the top level Consona Operating Plan. The two we will be reporting on at this level are: Linking Rate and Article Reuse Rate. We are tracking a dozen more at the line manager level, but we felt these two would give a good overall view of our KCS progress. The hope is to add one or two more around self-service later in the year.

Below are some baseline metrics we have gathered for our pilot team. I plan to share these throughout the KCS implementation so you can see our progress.

Looking forward to an exciting year ahead with KCS!

Overcoming KCS Plateau, Part 2: The B-loop Initiative

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:47:00 GMT

By Laurel Poertner and Tola Begbaaji

In order to help overcome our KCS plateau, and in response to the feedback from our KCS survey, we started an initiative in August to develop B-loop (or Evolve-Loop) content for our knowledgebase. We named some Knowledge Domain Experts (KDEs) for our support teams, and then spent about a month developing the processes and tools that we would use in creating this content. As a part of this, we estimated that these articles would take approximately 8 hours to create.

Once we completed the process development, we created lists of desired B-loop content, based on the KDEs knowledge of content gaps in the knowledgebase, as well as on article internal reuse rates and content feedback (see screenshot below). We then passed the content gap lists to the various support teams for review and prioritization, to ensure that this was a collaborative process. We also decided to set up a SharePoint page for our B-loop initiative to provide visibility to all support team members of the planned B-loop content and the B-loop process.

The process we developed for B-loop article creation is as follows:

Article usage & Content Feedback:

· Convert any support cases with high reuse to KB articles – this was needed because we are spidering support cases, and we found that in some instances the support cases were being linked to existing cases

· Verify that content for high-reuse articles is good -

o Root cause analysis: for instance if an article about “how to rebuild an index” is being used a lot, we might need to create a B-loop article on “why do indexes get corrupted” so that we can address the root cause of the problem.

o Create proactive articles for new versions (e.g. if we have an article with a high reuse rate on SQL 2008, then we should plan to create a similar article for SQL 2012 once we know it is being released).

Filling Content gaps:

· Content gaps are determined based on Analytics and KDE domain knowledge

· Content gap lists will be maintained and updated on SharePoint as the content is created (Speaking of SharePoint, if you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend watching our recent webcast with TSIA, “Can’t we Just Use SharePoint”)

· Other people on the team (non-KDEs) may be product experts who could contribute to or create B-loop content, and will be offered the opportunity

· Each support team will produce X number of content gap articles per <time period> until the list is exhausted

B-loop content rollout:

• B-loop author will schedule a brown bag session to review the content with the members of the support team

o This will provide the initial review, opportunity for additional enhancement, and also notify the team that the content is available.

o The brown bag session date will serve as the deadline to complete the content.

o Once content has been reviewed/updated, it can be published.

Using these processes, our KDEs were able to create 5 new B-loop articles over the last month, from multiple product lines. Each article took approximately 8 hours to create, so this confirmed our initial estimate. The “training session” approach was very well received by the support team. Overall the feedback from the support team on all of the articles has been very positive so far. We also conducted a “lessons learned” review with our KDEs and documented best practices from the initial set of articles, which we will be applying to future B-loop articles.

Our next phase in our B-loop initiative is to decide whether we need a formal content standard for the articles as well as to evaluate reuse counts to see how the articles are being used by support teams and by customers. We will also be looking more deeply into our self-service analytics to determine further content gap, and determining where we can expand on our use of resolution flows and tailored search experiences.

It is our hope and expectation that as we add these information-rich, detailed articles to our knowledgebase, it will increase the value of our knowledge for all constituencies, and provide renewed energy to our KCS program. Just like overcoming a weight-loss plateau, this may be the kick-start to even better levels of KCS efficiency!

When to create a Knowledge Article?

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:58:00 GMT

In the August blog entry, we wrote about some KCS challenges and overcoming a plateau. One issue we discovered after talking with the KCS coaches was that Support Analysts and Engineers sometimes had a hard time determining the exact time they should create the Knowledge Base article within their support workflow. Our Knowledge Program Manager spent a great deal of time with the Support Managers and the KCS Coaches to document the Support workflow and come up with a set of guidelines for our Support team to use to help them make this determination. Below are the guidelines that were drawn up by one of our Knowledge Domain Experts, Steven Bend and one of our Support Managers, Ed MacDonald.

Guidelines for whether an Incident needs a Knowledge Base Article:

1. Use your judgment.

The knowledge base belongs to you. Ask yourself, “Do you think this knowledge belongs in the knowledge base? Is it something you or another agent (including future hires) might find useful? Is it something we could push out to the external site and a customer would find useful?” Just remember, an article doesn’t have to be re-used many times to be useful.

2. Revise an existing article instead of creating a new one.

Make sure there is not already an article covering this incident in the knowledge base. If there is but it does not cover your situation precisely, consider revising the existing article rather than creating a new one.

3. If the answer can easily be found in existing documentation, release notes, or policies, do not create an article.

Sometimes customers ask questions that can be answered by reading the documentation.

4. If you don’t fully understand the nature and context of the incident yet, delay creating an article.

This is a change from the strict KCS philosophy of creating content immediately. Searching immediately may still be helpful, but don’t feel compelled to create “place holder” articles any more.

5. If the issue and resolution are clearly defined, create a new article.

Error codes/messages and reproducible problems are very specific situations, and it is valuable to document them. Because they are so specific, they are very easy for future users to find in a search, and they can save a lot of time. In the worst case scenario, an error code might be extremely generic (almost useless) with no consistent root cause making an article seem pointless. However, it usually takes a little digging to determine a message is useless which makes the fact noteworthy. More often however, there is at least a hint of what to do next in which case it might also lead to a good diagnostic (B-Loop) article.

6. If the issue and resolution require complex troubleshooting, either create it or add it to the list of B-Loop content to be created later.

Articles that discuss how to troubleshoot complex issues are valuable, but they take a good deal of time and understanding to write well. If you do not feel you have the time or knowledge to create such an article, you should feel free to just add it to the list of topics (B-Loop content) to be developed later.\

Our hope is that these guidelines will cut down on some of the articles that were being created initially and then scrapped because they should not have been created in the first place. It should also improve the quality of the articles that are created and help to get them available to other support team members much more quickly.

There were several other things that we identified that contributed to our plateau that I will be highlighting in the next couple entries. Stay tuned…

How to Overcome a KCS Plateau?

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:10:00 GMT

In the May blog entry, we wrote about the results of a survey we conducted with the Support team on how KCS has impacted their work in Support. Even though the overall results were positive (over 90% reported experiencing benefits from KCS), we are still experiencing a bit of a plateau with our KCS progress. Since the last blog, we have been working hard to overcome this plateau and would like to share some of the action items we identified from our survey results and our progress with them.

Guidelines for when to create a Knowledge Article: Our Knowledge Program Manager collaborated with our coaches to draft a document that outlines some guidelines for when to create knowledge articles. There were some questions from our team specifically around our defect process that needed to be clarified. We outlined rules around creating an article when a defect was logged and also gave specific examples for when not to create an article. Examples of this included license key requests, password requests, and self-service portal requests.

Training on creating quality articles: One of our KCS coaches took it upon himself to put together an hour long training session on how to create good, quality articles. Everyone on the support team attended the training and said that it was extremely helpful to them when they are trying to capture knowledge in the workflow and organize their complete thoughts.

Schedule a KM Operational Effectiveness Audit: We worked with our own consulting team to review our knowledge model to make sure that we were getting the most out of our internal knowledge management system. Since Knowledge Model development and tuning is a never-ending process, we plan to make this a regular activity to keep our KM system in optimal condition. Below is our report card:

General Observations

Overall, KM documents seem to be well categorized. The only test which came out poorly is Document Tagging Accuracy, which is the result of poor or irrelevant Navigation Choices. There is at least one set of duplicate Navigation Choices (Installing Consona Knowledge Management and Installing From Consona Knowledge Management) and some Nav Choices which could be removed manually through the Visual Search Manager of Consona KM Administrator. A complete examination of all Nav Choices is an area for the Knowledge Manager to explore, or folded into a future health check.
Given that most docs have relevant segments, some of the KM segments are very general and articles with only general segments should be examined if they can be tagged with greater precision.
The Customer Dictionary should be examined and likely modified (terms removed, other terms added as per advice given elsewhere).
KSMs should be examined more closely, particularly with an eye towards attaching more accurate tags. As tags used in a KSM spider apply to all docs in that spider, this may mean splitting generic spiders into several so the docs can be more accurately tagged.

B-loop content focus: Our next phase of our KCS initiative involves looking at the support cases and knowledge articles that are the most reused as well as focusing on proactive support. Below are a few action items we have identified that we will be working on over the next few months:

Review article usage report to find articles that are good b-loop candidates.
Create a content feedback report to review which articles have generated a lot of feedback.
Focus on finding article patterns by doing searches on specific topics to see what content is currently available.
Come up with a list of items that need B-loop content, based on our knowledge of the knowledge domain and the content gaps that are there.
Knowledge sampling – measure articles against the existing AQI and technical accuracy.

Our hope is that all of these activities will stimulate our KCS initiative and provide our support team with some additional focus on what we started over a year and a half ago.

The management team believes these items will be what is needed to move off the plateau and up to the next phase of KCS for our team.

Knowledge Centered Support – of the people, for the people, by the people

Tue, 24 May 2011 13:55:00 GMT

by Tola Begbaaji

“Support analysts manage the problem solving process that drives the KCS benefits.” (quote from The KCS Academy Leadership Workshop)

At 18 months into our KCS journey, we decided that it was time to gather feedback from our support personnel about KCS and how it has impacted their work in support. To conduct this survey, we chose to interview each support analyst individually one on one, and we gathered their comments about KCS processes. The interviews were conducted by support personnel who are “out of the chain of command” so that we could ensure the feedback was as candid as possible.

Overall, the survey results were extremely positive, with over 90% of analysts reporting that they have experienced benefits from our adoption of KCS. In case you are thinking about implementing KCS, and wondering what effect it will have on your support personnel’s perception of their workloads, I decided to share with you a few excerpts from our KCS survey: a couple of the charts and analyst comments are listed below.

All in all, I am happy to know that KCS has been perceived as a positive addition by our analysts. Having motivated and trained staff is one of the key points in the balanced scorecard, and in addition to the management benefits of seeing our KCS metrics moving in positive trends, with KCS we are also seeing employee satisfaction move in positive trends as well!

KCS Survey Excerpts

*Majority of the analysts (90%) agree that the KCS methodology has been helpful to them.

A few quotes from this question:

“Able to resolve issues based on previously documented cases.”

“ Templates are great- KCS structure of creating articles has helped in collecting thoughts, becoming prolific and creating some quality articles.”

“Easy to identify duplicate issues & resolve them quickly. Also prevents replicating KCS articles for the same issue.”

“Can be used as a way to increase product knowledge when every new issue tends to be different.”

*Majority of the analysts (74%) do not find the actual writing part of KCS to be difficult.

A few quotes from this question:

“Coaches help in writing and modifying complex articles.”

“The template makes writing easier by providing different sections for each item (root cause, environment, etc).”

“Saving articles provides guidance to new members on what an article should look like.”

“Editing is not a problem….Time is! Resolving customer issues is top priority, and articles second.”

Q1 2011 Update

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:43:00 GMT

Consona’s Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) project continues to progress, and I would like to share the latest achievements with you as well as give you some insight on the direction we are headed.

We pulled everyone from our Support team together a few weeks ago to have a KCS anniversary meeting to reflect on the last year’s worth of KCS accomplishments. Below are a few highlights:

Over 2,000 new solutions created with an average solution quality index of 93 percent! To put this in perspective, our entire knowledge database started out with only 200 articles and we had been using it for about five years.

Over the entire year, more than 50 percent of our closed incidents had knowledge solutions linked to them.

Our solution reuse rate peaked at 23 percent and is making its way back to this level and is expected to surpass it in a few months.

Nearly 75 percent of our entire team has advanced in KCS this year with 25 percent achieving Publisher status!

There are many reasons our KCS initiative has been so successful, and I would like to share some of them with you in case any of you out there are either in the middle or are just beginning a KCS project.

Executive and Support Line Management involvement and sponsorship

Strong coaching team that champions KCS and provides consistent feedback to agents

One streamlined KCS verified product — Consona KDS :-)

Metrics and operational achievements are reviewed every month by the Leadership Team

Recognition throughout the company

Along with striving for 100 percent of the support team to be KCS Publishers, we are also looking at a few other items to add to our project this year. We have some goals to learn more about collaboration and the Adaptive Organization as defined by the Consortium of Service Innovation (www.serviceinnovation.org).

We are also branching out our knowledge management initiative to other groups within Consona, starting with Global Services. We will be creating new microsites, forums and document types to support this new initiative. This will enable further knowledge sharing between departments.

Check back to see how we’re progressing and feel free to share your comments and questions!

KCS on Another Level

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:58:00 GMT

Consona’s Knowledge-Centered Support project continues to progress and I would like to share the latest achievements with you as well as give you some insight on the direction we are going.

I am happy to report that we have several support agents that have achieved KCS Publisher (Level 3) status and we are looking to have quite a few more this month. We are asking our KCS Internal Publishers (Level 2) to meet the criteria to qualify for Publisher status:

1.   Maintain Level 2 standards
A.   Participation rate of 60%
B.   90% Solution Quality Index
2.   Have 10 solutions with a 100% score on the following new
criteria for external solutions
A.   Does not include any specific customer data references.
B.   The resolution has been confirmed to resolve one customer issue OR the resolution was provided with no customer response for 7 business days and the agent has a reasonable confidence level in the resolution.
C.   Solution is focused. It shows work, effort and reads like a unit.
D.   The resolution does not contain any steps that create unnecessary risk to system functions or data. Any necessary steps that have some level of risk to system functions or data include a clear explanation of what the risk is and how to minimize it.

There are lots of reasons why publishing KCS solutions to our customers is very positive for Consona CRM support and I would like to expand on a few of them.

1.   Having more KCS publishers on our team will help us improve our self-service support portal for our customers by having additional knowledge content for them to search on. Not only does it save our customers time, it allows our support team to focus on issues that are new to us and not spend time resolving issues that someone else has already resolved and documented in the past.
2.   The next reason, if not the most important, is that with publishing comes feedback. We get to see if our resolutions can help more than just one customer. Also, customers help us refine our solutions so that they can be the most effective for all ... which is a good segue for the third reason.
3.   Visibility. Once we start publishing more articles and receiving feedback, we can start using our new Knowledge Driven Support analytics to help pinpoint areas of the product and our processes to focus on improvement.
4.   Another reason is how much closer to our customers this can bring us. Not only will we be receiving feedback from our users—and being able to view trends and other analyses to target areas of the product that can help customers the most—but we also increase the communication between Consona and our customers! In this social era, that is so important.
5.   This brings me to another feature of the Consona Knowledge Driven Support product that we will be leveraging even more in the coming months: forums. One huge advantage to this is that forum posts are included in our searchable content, so if customers have a question or are looking for a particular topic, they might get the answer from another customer instead of from an article.
6.   We are currently planning on expanding our forums to our Consona Customer Management customer base and will be announcing this in the next month or so.
7.   Finally, as the first production user of our Knowledge Driven Support product, all our agents are becoming intimately familiar with its features in a real-world environment, which will leave them well-prepared to support the product as our customers adopt it.

Aligning with KCS principals has made for an extremely positive journey for our entire team, and for me personally it reinforces the direction that Consona has taken with our Consona Knowledge Driven Support product. There is a reason they’re called ‘best’ practices, and I believe it.

July Update

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:13:00 GMT

Consona’s own Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) project continues to progress and I’m happy to share our latest successes and lessons learned. We have just promoted another 50% of the CRM Support team to level 2 KCS status where they do not require additional reviews from the KCS coaches and can publish articles internally.

Now that we have the majority of our Support team at level 2, we are starting to focus on the next milestone, KCS Level 3 – Knowledge Publisher. People who achieve this level can immediately publish new content to our customer facing knowledge base without further review.

This also puts us in a great position to use the new Consona Knowledge Driven Support system scheduled to go live on August 2nd! With knowledge articles being published to both Customer Management and Knowledge Management customers, it will give them even more reason to go to the self-service portal to search for knowledge as a first step. Our support analysts will also be able to take advantage of one of the great features that captures the search history so when a customer does not find a solution, we can help fill those holes with more articles.

Below is an update on our metric trends so you can see our progress. Participation rate is the percentage of cases that are linked to a new or existing knowledge solution. The % Known is the percentage of known articles that are being re-used.

As we start publishing more articles and reusing articles, we will start to see the number of new articles go down and the % Known go up. We also anticipate Search Volume will go up starting in August since we will have our new Consona Knowledge Management system available to all Customer Management customers. With new published solutions being added, we will encourage our customers to send us feedback on our articles so that we can complete the feedback loop and fully refine all of our knowledge solutions. There will be a feedback button at the top of each article to do this.

Thanks for reading my blog and feel free to send me any feedback or questions to laurel.poertner@consona.com.

Practicing What We Preach

Thu, 20 May 2010 15:36:00 GMT

Like many of our customers that support complex, high-tech products and services, our own service and support operation is moving to a Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) model. Transforming our operations to this model has been a fulfilling and educational experience and I’d like to share my experiences with you through this blog. Here is my first update on the progress we have made.

We have several people that are currently publishing new articles to the self-service portal and just this week about 30% of our team has achieved level 2 KCS status – which means they do not require additional reviews from the KCS coaches, and can publish articles internally. The criteria we used to determine how team members moved to level 2 is as follows: Solution Quality Index (SQI) is greater than 90% for the whole previous month; Participation Rate is greater than 90% (at least one case must be closed) for the whole previous month; the coaches agree with the assessment. We picked these criteria to ensure that we are focusing on quality solutions that are being created and that we are also seeing results with resolving cases. Additional criteria say that team members must remain at this level to keep their level 2 status because it enforces that the KCS methodology is not just something you achieve once, it is something you adopt into your daily processes and keep as a top priority.

All of this is starting to pay off and I would like to share a couple metric trends with you so you can see our results. Participation rate is the percentage of cases that are linked to a new or existing knowledge solution. The % Known is the percentage of known articles that are being re-used.

We will continue to evaluate our team members every month until everyone is at level 2 and then move on to having everyone at level 3 where they can publish articles externally to the self-service portal. With new published solutions being added, we strongly encourage our customers to send us feedback on our articles so that we can complete the feedback loop and fully refine all of our knowledge solutions. There will be a feedback button at the top of each article for you to do this.

As we continue to implement these processes and take advantage of the features in our own KCS product suite, more updates on our KCS journey will follow. Thanks for reading my blog and feel free to send me any feedback or questions to laurel.poertner@consona.com.

March Update

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:11:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that all of the projects I wrote about in my last post are still going strong and we are seeing some great progress and benefits. The first is our Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) project. The entire CRM support team has embraced this new methodology and has expanded our internal knowledge management system by adding 3 times as many solutions in the last three months compared to everything we added last year. We have also tried to be a little creative with offering some incentives to the team for producing good, quality solutions that other team members will reuse. One incentive has been a box of Girl Scout cookies each week for the highest voted knowledge solution by the KCS coaches. Two boxes have been awarded so far and there are a few more to go. With these quality solutions, the team is starting to reuse them for other support cases and all have commented to me that their cases are getting resolved more quickly because of it. Our next milestone is to start certifying support engineers as KCS Level 3 analysts, so they can publish their solutions on our self-service support portal. As soon as that happens, we will be making an announcement so you can start searching for content on problems or product questions.

The second project my team is engaged with is our internal implementation of our Knowledge Driven Support (or KDS) product which is currently on schedule to go live in May, hoping it goes as planned. We have a test system up and running with a copy of our data with which our Support Engineers will start performing the user acceptance testing (UAT) phase of the project, in a few weeks. The team is looking forward to enjoying the benefits of having both the Knowledge Management (KM) and Customer Management (CM) input screens all on one UI so they can increase their productivity even more. As it gets closer, we will schedule some web sessions with customers so you can get a feel for the improvements on the Support portal before we go live. Some of you may also be aware of some of our products being run in the Consona Cloud hosted by Amazon’s Web Services; you will get a chance to see how it performs. All of our testing so far has shown that it performs faster, but we will let you be the judge and would like to get your feedback.

The third project, our rollout of new Consona CRM education programs, is well on the way. We are gearing up for the new Customer Management version 7.0 release in Q2 and our first class will be a “What’s New in Consona CM 7.0” to highlight all the changes with the new version. We are also in the process of recording our first KM self-paced training class. Below are a few classes to look forward to in the coming months:

CM 6.0

OPS/email management
Using Business Rule Manager
Scripting with Onyx

KM 7.3

What is a Microsite for Knowledge Users
What is a Microsite for Knowledge Administrators

Thanks for reading my blog and feel free to send me any feedback or questions to laurel.poertner@consona.com.

About the Consona CRM Support and Education Blog

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:13:00 GMT

Laurel Poertner’s Consona CRM Support and Education Blog will discuss the activities happening in the Support and Education departments to keep customers and interested parties updated on our internal projects, process changes, technology updates and new initiatives. Everything in this blog will be focused on the customer experience and how we are constantly improving our communication and interaction with our customers.

Laurel Poertner is the Vice President of Support and Education for Consona CRM. In this role, Laurel leads the entire support and education team across all of Consona’s service and support solutions.

Welcome to the Consona CRM Support and Education Blog

My name is Laurel Poertner and I will be your host of the new Consona CRM Support and Education Blog. In this column, I plan to post updates on many of the activities we are working on within the Support and Education department. I’ll be letting you know about new initiatives we have planned for the coming year, new projects, and also some of the process improvements that help us communicate and interact better with our customers.

Since this is the first blog, I would like to introduce myself and give you a little background about me. I work out of our Kirkland, WA office about 10 miles north east of Seattle. I live about 8 miles north of Kirkland with my husband and 19 month old daughter. Before she came into our lives, I used to snow ski, go hiking in the beautiful Cascade Mountains and lot of other outdoor activities. Now, I get my exercise chasing her around the house as she explores and pushes the limits I try and set for her!

I have been with Consona for 10 years as of January 24^th. I actually started on the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) side of our business. ERP targets the manufacturing sector and I worked for a company called Intuitive Manufacturing Systems before we were acquired by Consona in 2006. When I started at Intuitive in 2000, I was hired as an implementation consultant. I implemented our software at various manufacturing facilities for over 2 years and then the Manager of Support position became available. I was eager to reduce the amount of traveling I was doing so I jumped at the chance.

I made quite a few changes and improvements to the Intuitive ERP Support operations and one of them was to start (from scratch) a virtual education program. I single handedly taught about 25 different virtual classes on a rotating basis every couple weeks all the while managing the Support team. After Intuitive was acquired by Consona, I took over Support and Education for the two biggest ERP product lines (Intuitive ERP and Made2Manage), a staff of about 45 people. Then, in January 2008, I moved over to the CRM business unit and took over Support and Education for that team where it was two main products (Onyx and KNOVA). After the acquisition of SupportSoft in July 2009, our team has grown to about 40 people in five different countries around the world (US, Canada, Belguim, India, and Japan). We have since rebranded and now support the following products: Consona Customer Management (formerly Onyx), Consona Knowledge Management (formerly KNOVA), Consona Dynamic Agent, Consona Live Assistance, and Consona Service Gateway (all formerly SupportSoft).

Now that you have some background on me and hopefully can see that I have had some experience in Supporting software as well as implementing it and finally managing teams, I would like to tell you about some of the things we are working on for 2010.

The most exciting project we have kicked off is our KCS (Knowledge Centered Support) project. KCS was developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation and is a best practices methodology that Consona CRM adopted in December 2009. If you would like more detailed information from the consortium, please visit www.serviceinnovation.org. To summarize, KCS is a process for working support cases and creating knowledge at the same time. It is the effective capture, structure, and reuse of support knowledge to solve problems. We believe that this proven methodology will improve our effectiveness in supporting our customers. This is not just coming from me and the Support and Education employees, it is something that the entire Consona CRM business unit has embraced and we are designing our software products around it. So, who better to be the guinea pigs than our own support and education team! In fact, it is rapidly becoming a household name in the ways of support processes at major high tech companies. Companies like: Symantec, Dell and Blackberry are members of the consortium and are actively using KCS. I will have more updates to come on this since we just kicked it off last month and it is a new process for us.

To go with our KCS initiative, we also have a project where we will be upgrading to our own new CRM flagship product “Knowledge Driven Support ” (which by the way is KCS Verified) in the middle of 2010. We are very excited about this project and it will make everyone’s daily activities run much smoother. We plan to upgrade the rest of the team that is using ExpertExchange to KDS towards the end of the year depending on how the first part goes. The biggest advantage for us in using KDS is that everything is on one screen for the support agent. Right now, with our older version of Consona Customer Management, we need to keep the Consona Knowledge Management window open, AND we have to set up a user defined field to capture the new knowledge article numbers that are created for each case that the agents are working on. With the new product, everything can be done through the Knowledge Management screen and it will be automatically linked to the case. Another great feature is that it will keep track of the search history so our support agents will be able to see what customers tried to search on before contacting support. This will give us some great information to help customers find solutions easier once we know how they are searching for them.

A third and final project I will talk about in this initial blog post is the launch of our new education program. Tim Leavitt, our Manager of Education has been working hard on implementing a new Learning Management System (LMS). This new system will allow us to display all of our various education offerings to our customers as well as being the primary method for registering for classes, downloading recordings and providing feedback to Consona. We are starting out with three types of training: computer based training (or recorded classes), online virtual courses, and classroom courses. To view these new offerings you will need to log into Customer Central which is currently only available to Consona CM customers. We are actively trying integrate this with our other two support portals. All of our support reps (including me) have access to the LMS and would be happy to show you a demo of what is to come if you’d like. Just let us know!

There are a lot of things to talk about with these three projects, so I will be posting updates on each of them so you can see how we are progressing. I will also be talking about some other topics like: metrics, the different phases of KCS, and some upcoming education offerings.

Thanks for reading my blog and feel free to send me any feedback or questions to laurel.poertner@consona.com.