This paper was created by the Consortium for Service Innovation, an association of over 70 leading technology service organizations and support technology providers seeking to find innovative ways to meet the needs of the support industry. Support organizations are faced with multiple concurrent challenges: to improve efficiency and control costs, while at the same time expanding to meet increased demand. Customer satisfaction and technical expertise must also be retained within the context of cost efficiency and growth. Consortium members work together to create models and standards for support organizations to use to help lower costs, increase support quality, and improve customer and employee satisfaction.
Knowledge-Centered Support is a vision for leveraging support transactions by creating knowledge that empowers the business. Customers contact support to request and receive solutions¾the specific knowledge about how their product needs can be met. Solutions represent both what is needed by the customer, and what is gained by the support organization as support requests are handled. Leverage is obtained through a system that can capture the solutions generated by the customer support process, and make them available for reuse throughout the support organization. This allows support to harness the knowledge power of its employees and customers to improve both quality and efficiency, and scale the business, while effectively managing costs and resources.
The effective capture, maturation, and reuse of solutions can be achieved through a Solution Management system. This system provides the infrastructure, processes, and organizational support necessary to capture, create, and deliver solutions to drive the business. An effective Solution Management system achieves the following benefits:
This paper provides a framework for designing an effective Solution Management system. The system describes effective principles and practices in managing solutions across all dimensions of the support business: Culture, Content, Process, Quality, and Technology. Each dimension contributes to the “Knowledge-centered environment” in which knowledge creation and collaboration are seen as an opportunity to add to the collective capability and value of the entire organization. The principles describe the goals and focus of Solution Management, but do not prescribe a specific implementation methodology. Solution Management can be implemented with a variety of techniques and tools, depending on the objectives and resources of a specific organization. Transition considerations are also provided, within the context of a standard Plan-Do-Study-Act implementation cycle.
<Support organizations are tasked with doing more with less¾to extend their capability and efficiency in the face of diminishing margins and rising costs. All support strategies and services are dependent on the effective transfer of knowledge. Without a strategy for harnessing the support transactions themselves to build and develop knowledge, support organizations will encounter increased limitations in their capability to optimize and evolve, as the number of customers and the cost of doing business rises. The product of support is knowledge, embodied in solutions. Organizations that learn how to capture and leverage the potential of the support process through solutions will be able to grow their business, satisfy more customers, and attract knowledge builders. Organizations that fail to leverage knowledge will lack a primary tool in obtaining competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, and organizational empowerment.
This paper is intended for support executives who wish to understand the Knowledge-Centered Support vision, support managers and analysts who want details on the Solution Management system, and project managers who need information on how to implement the system. Several case studies from Consortium members are included to help show how the principles and ideas reflected here have empowered companies to become knowledge-centered.