How to ensure the quality of a knowledge base ?

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Comment by Valérie Maillet on July 20, 2010 at 2:54am

Thanks a lot for all your feedbacks.
We have started to deploy training, communication, and tracking of basic errors on a regular basis. In addition, we also put mandatory the field for revision date.

Comment by Jean Van Court on June 29, 2010 at 3:04pm

Hi Valerie. I feel as though I'm showing up late to the party, but I hope your question is still a relevant one. Your question is pertinent to many, since the fear of having outdated or wrong information in the knowledge base is one that many share. Your customers demand information your brand stands behind, and staff need a reliable source for answers needed in their everyday lives, whether supporting customers or each other. My company provides a robust KB solution, but I'm going to try to address your question without sounding like a sales pitch.

I agree with Charlie Isaacs that there is no magic pill to ensure a quality KB. It takes regular maintenance, realizing that it is always going to be a work-in-progress and is never 'done'! Archiving data that has not been viewed in X number of days is a great way to unclutter your knowledge base so that active and valued content is readily available in searches. Online reporting is vital to run weekly so you can determine searches conducted and when no results were found so that you can take necessary action. Ratings and comments are tremendously valuable to ensure that your KB evolves with real-world usage.

But how do you get people involved to make your KB better? By motivating, recognizing, and rewarding people (your stakeholders, defined by you as staff, partners, customers, etc.) to contribute to the KB, share their wisdom, earn points, and be recognized for subject matter expertise.

Putting the burden of keeping a KB current on the shoulders of a few is a recipe for disaster. Instead, incent all stakeholders to participate, BUT importantly, retain editorial control so that the KB still goes through the review process dictated by the content and its intended users. Some content can't risk being wrong for a minute!

If you'd like to discuss further, please feel free to contact me. Cheers!

Comment by Arielle Hoffman on February 12, 2010 at 6:39pm

User testing can also be helpful. If you have a solution that you've published recently, ask your call center staff to use the solution when they are on the phone with a customer. Or, ask your electronic support center to use the solution via email and follow up with the customer to make sure the solution resolved the issue.

We have a public KB available for our consumers and one quality measure we have is the following:
All customers who contact us by phone or email get a case close survey. The survey asks them if they checked our online KB prior to contacting us. Every week we run a report showing all cases by issue for those cases where the customer indicated they checked our online KB first. This helps us identify two quality issues: 1) We need to add information that isn't there; 2) We have information that is there, but our customers don't recognize it, so we need to modify it and make it easier to find.

One success metric we use is comparing the rate of requests for help by issue over time. If I've published a KB article, or made it more prominent for our consumers, I will track the rate of contacts requesting help for that issue in our phone/email center.

Comment by Srinivas Kottamasu on January 7, 2010 at 3:05am

I think the vital success factor for a knowledgebase is to ensure that _every_ support engineer contributes to the knowledgebase. Creating knowledgebase articles should not be an asynchronous activity ("I will write the article when I have time"). It should happen as the engineer is developing the solution. There is no need to sanitize the content before it is posted for general availability. We are writing a KB article here, not the product manual. In the absense of a KB article, your engineer is giving the solution to the customer anyway!!

Please refer to my blog : http://www.mindtree.com/blogs/why-do-so-many-km-initiatives-fail-in-technical-support-ts-operations

Please feel free to contact me if you need.

Regards,
-Srinivas

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Comment by Charlie Isaacs on October 8, 2009 at 12:26pm

There is no magic knowledge tool that I know of. However, there are combinations of tools and features within KM offerings that you can use to improve the quality of your KB and the solutions within the KB. All solutions require some human intervention to ensure quality.

There are features within KM tools that can be combined to provide a good quality improvement strategy:
- feedback (you can vote whether or not the specific solution answered the question, and if not, provide a recommended fix via a text box)
- most popular (the solutions that are least popular might require some work)
- case linkage counts (solutions not linked to any cases might have issues)
- others

There are other features that can improve the quality of your KB, for example an option to “find similar solutions” to prevent duplicate solutions. There are also tools that can intelligently scan the KB to determine whether you have duplicates.

Nothing improves quality like a good authoring process. In other words, do it correctly the first time. For example:
- the author should check the KB to see if a solution already exists before entering a new solution.
- the author should use a pre-designated template to enter the solution.
- the author should spell-check and grammar-check the solution
- there should be a workflow process set up so the solution goes through a review cycle before final publishing
- analytics should be leveraged to highlight knowledge gaps (null search results from your launch points)
- etc.

All roads, however, lead to human intervention. Your first step is to make sure that you have quality-oriented people inserted into the process somewhere (everywhere?)

Comment by Thierry Craps on October 8, 2009 at 5:14am

Hello Valerie,

At SWIFT, we rely on a dedicated group (knowledge base coordinators representing each support centre) and my team (acting as a central one). We have defined various processes such as:
- Peer review
- Quality review (English, compliance with business writing rules, etc.)
- Annual maintenance review. For this one, we based oursleves on various metrics:
a) number of hits so the most viewed (check accuracy of the information) and the less viewed (check the relevance of the information) are considered.
b) If major release of application are foreseen, all tips addressing the previous release are reviewed.

Hope it helps...do not hesitate to contact me if you need more information.
ThC