Moving known issues out of the Agent-Assist channel and into the Self-Service channel is a key benefit of deploying KCS, yet many companies struggle to do this effectively. A common challenge companies face is identifying those articles that are Self-Service candidates.
While conducting recent Knowledge Domain Analysis Workshops, we discovered one of the main reasons why identifying Self-Service candidate articles is so hard: often, agents are linking reference articles to cases, as opposed to resolution articles. While in our last blog we stated that it is valuable to link both resolution and reference articles, it is the frequency of article reuse – links to the resolution articles – that give us actionable information about what issues our customers are encountering.
We need to ensure that we have a way to identify which of the attached articles is the resolution article. Fortunately, more and more of the KCS v6 Verified and Aligned tools are able to distinguish between these two types of article links.
Once we are linking resolution articles accurately to cases, an effective method to identify and remove the most common known issues in the Agent-Assist channel (by making them accessible in Self-Service) is to perform the steps outlined below.
Step 1
Run a report with the following fields:
- article id
- number of cases article has been linked to
- article audience (internal or external)
- number of article external views
- number of article internal views
Sort the report so that the articles with the most case links are on top. These are the articles that will have the most impact in the Self-Service channel. Start at the top, and work your way down.
Step 2
If the article audience is internal-only, investigate ways to make it visible to your customers also. Many tools allow you to put internal-only information in a separate field in the article template, with this field being only visible to agents. Companies that perform this practice well report that their percentage of internal-only content is in the low single digits. Companies that don’t do this practice well, especially the ones just starting their KCS journey, report that the majority of their articles are internal-only.
Step 3
If the article is viewable externally, compare the external views to the internal views. If the internal views are higher than the external views, check to see if the article is solution-centric rather than issue-centric. It might be a great article on how to change a battery, but if the customer is searching for “my car won’t start,” we have an opportunity to improve the way we capture customer context.
Step 4
If external views are higher than internal views, but the article is still being linked to many cases, then most likely the article is not consumable by the customer. Better structuring of the article and the solution often resolve this issue.
While improving the findability and usability of top-linked articles will improve customer success with Self-Service, don’t stop there! Review the top articles linked and the top self-service articles viewed periodically to see how things shift, and use this data with Development/Engineering to see if these issues can be eliminated from the product or service.
We hope these tips help you deliver more answers to customers through Self-Service. We would love to hear in the comments section below additional best practices that your company uses to identify and move known issues out of your Agent-Assist channel.