The Customer Knowledge Integration Initiative
Knowledge management has for long been on the business and IT agenda of most CSPs. Yet, in the pursuit of converged customer service operations, the evidence point to the emerging area of knowledge integration which can significantly enhance an organization's ability to accomplish operational transformation.
In the current environment, customer service information resides in multiple product silos, groups and organizations making it difficult if not impossible to understand and manage the customer experience. The integration of this information relies on a combination of highly knowledgeable specialist individuals and loose SLAs between various customer service groups.
While this approach has been sufficient in the past, the increasing rapidity of new product and service launches, and the demands of converged operations are outpacing this person-dependent knowledge integration. A new kind of knowledge model which acts as the customer service blueprint for each new (or existing) service is required. This new knowledge integration model will integrate disparate operational silos of information and create an organizing force that can form the basis for converged operations.
Knowledge management was about archiving the best practices of the past.
Knowledge integration is about architecting the operations of the future.
At many CSPs, information available at the customer, network and application layers is not easily shared across organizational boundaries, if it is shared at all. Knowledge integration can be the critical force in transforming a customer service organization into an agile and responsive one that can deal with the complexities of new IP-based services.
An example in the context of IPTV service: Mr. Brown has IPTV service at home and frequently uses features such as digital video recording, caller ID and interactive content. He notices that the caller ID feature of the IPTV service is not displaying the caller’s phone number and reports the problem to his service provider. Customer service operations in the current model typically carry out a modest diagnostic check and pass the fault to the second/third line for further investigation. The second line must have deep insight into the complex caller ID function on IPTV to diagnose, localize and resolve the fault correctly. And as the complexity of the service increases, the second line must liaise with numerous departments to coordinate the resolution process. This process has many handoffs and delays the overall repair cycle time.
Who owns Mr. Brown's service experience? Is it the network access team? The IPTV second line support team? Or the telephony / advanced features support group? When one takes the challenges posed by convergence to their next logical step, it is clear to see that a different, customer-centric approach is the only one that makes sense for the CSP deploying triple- and quad-play services. The right knowledge at the right time, in the hands of the front-line customer support personnel (and the knowledge model) and pro-active teams, together with management incentives that foster customer advocacy rather than "pass-the-buck" service will actually deliver lower operational cost AND an improved customer experience.
With knowledge integration, CSP service operations teams will spend less time on inter-group handoffs, re-tracing steps in diagnosing problems, and increasing the likelihood of solving problems when they first appear - and in some cases even before they are reported by the customer.
Comments
I agree with the fact that CSPs need more integration than they have. This will also help them identify new business opportunities.
For instance, companies such as Visual Sciences are helping them with data mining and marketing opportunities with web-analytics. If this data is further seamlessly integrated with rest of the consumer data, they would have a super information grid as envisioned in the EPIC 2014 movie of Google. (http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/)
However, I disagree with the future/past relation. Knowledge integration is an essential activity and thus, a subset of Knowledge Management and not a disjoint set.
Posted by: Manik Patil | June 14, 2007 02:51 AM