In the services world, especially in support functions, the need to stay engaged, available, and collaborating has never been more critical. The spread of COVID-19 continues to force families, companies, and communities across the globe to look at their routines differently. Our professional lives have changed profoundly, very quickly, and executives and leaders are thinking about how to keep teams engaged and productive. Over the last ten years there has been an ever-increasing trend of flexible work environments as technology has allowed for distributed and remote workforces. In the last two weeks, the ten year trend has turned into a universal way of working.
Organizations that have adopted Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) and Intelligent Swarming are capitalizing on working practices that support a distributed workforce. How better to ensure seamless support and engagement with customers than having teams creating, updating, publishing, and re-using collective knowledge while collaborating on new issues, across time and physical boundaries?
Organizations that have adopted KCS and/or Intelligent Swarming support a distributed workforce.
The core goal of KCS is leveraging the value of the knowledge created in every interaction we have while solving customer issues, problems, or questions. I have yet to come across a corporate-level objective that is not supported by KCS: increased revenue, expansion in existing accounts, stronger customer engagement, customer success, improved customer loyalty, increased operating efficiency and margin are all supported by services teams capturing their knowledge and sharing it with everyone (internal and external). In these times of rapid change, leveraging our collective knowledge through KCS should be a strategic goal for all service executives.
Companies often make a big deal out of “Our people are our greatest assets.” Yet, we often put heavy and restrictive processes, goals, and measures in place that limit our people’s ability to contribute to a company’s success. People are creative and curious, and when engaged in a high-trust environment, amazing things happen. Intelligent Swarming is designed to increase and leverage the collective skills of people in solving complex, new problems. Proving to be a better way to align resources with work, it replaces the linear, low-trust model of escalation with a dynamic collaboration model that plays to people’s intrinsic motivators of mastery, autonomy, and purpose. With a highly distributed workforce, leveraging Intelligent Swarming enables organizations to grow employee skills, have higher levels of engagement, resolve issues faster, and provide a far better experience for all stakeholders.
Looking to the future of work and our workforce, we are entering uncharted times. Using Knowledge-Centered Service and Intelligent Swarming as part of a strategic plan will allow companies to meet these new challenges with a more engaged workforce that is creating high-value knowledge.
Thank you, Matt! Just shared with my whole KCS team.
Thanks so much Matt for this article, you pack a lot of gems in here. For some, the restrictive goals and measures are not obvious as those have been in place for the longest. Would love to see examples of value creation and team metrics that have been used successfully to empower people. Thank you!
Hi Margarita! Very good points and questions. The KCS v6 Adoption Guide has some suggestions about appropriate goals and timing for a KCS implementation, and Consortium Members have access to the Measurement Matters v6 paper in the Consortium Library, which covers a lot of ground. For Intelligent Swarming, measures are still maturing but emerging trends look at collaboration metrics like frequency of response, frequency of answers offered, and reputation models based on feedback mechanisms. The Intelligent Swarming Framework talks to these in the Measures of Success section.