Socialtext

Service and Support organizations in market leaders including Symantec and Microstrategy have implemented the Participatory Knowledgebase solution in partnership with Socialtext. It enables the call center or help desk to capture & organize together knowledge from customers & internal processes. Time to resolution is reduced through unstructured search, browsing through tags and social discovery. It enables the organization to sense and respond rapidly to exceptions to business process and turbulent markets.

The Problem of Structuring Knowledge

Today, 75% of organizations' knowledge gets stored in the email inbox. Other knowledge gets stored in rigid databases, shared drives, content management systems, or published on web pages that quickly become out-of-date. For employees, finding the information they need is difficult or impossible, and with employee turnover the problem only gets worse. Wikis provide a simple-to-use structure for capturing and organizing content into rich knowledgebases where the structure of the application emerges out of use in the flow of daily work. This cuts in half the time spent by employees searching for critical information -- and fosters active participation and contribution.

Call Centers and Help Desks

Timely access to the relevant up-to-date knowledge is critical in many areas, but especially to call centers, where success is literally measured in seconds. Call center agents need to quickly put their hands on the precise knowledge required to solve a customer's problem. This is especially challenging when the calls in question deal with exceptions, and agents can't simply rely on the standard "script". Precious minutes drain away as agents try to figure out who has experience with these exceptional questions or try to solve them for the first time.

Call center managers are finding their traditional knowledge management systems increasingly poorly equipped to handle exceptions. Rigid information taxonomies, complex templates, and elaborate approval processes delay by as long as 6 weeks the process of getting knowledge from an agent's head to the system. And in many cases, agents are so frustrated by their systems that they do not contribute at all.

A wiki-based Participatory Knowledgebase can solve this problem. By making it really quick and easy (and fun!) for agents to post questions, comments, tips, and tricks, the wiki dramatically accelerates the rate at which new knowledge is posted and disseminated. In such customers as Dell and Symantec, for example, we have seen knowledgebases grow to thousands of pages in relatively short periods of time. The result is not just a valuable knowledge asset, but a reduction in average call time by as much as 10-20%.

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The Participatory Knowledgebase Practice

Socialtext has a unique understanding of the social, cultural, and organizational challenges of launching a participatory knowledge base, We have built a comprehensive suite of capabilities to help our customers with all aspects of successful implementation, including strategy-setting, business analysis, training, and impact evaluation. Our Professional Services team works hands-on with customers, leading them through our proprietary SPRING methodology (Structure, Populate, Review, Invite, eNcourage, Garden). Developed over the course of hundreds of customer launches, our methodology and tools ensure the establishment of an active, growing knowledgebase within three months of project start.

Key Socialtext Capabilities

* Customized Socialtext Dashboards for participants to manage information flow
* Socialtext People for social discovery of expertise
* Unstructured web-like search
* Advanced tagging
* Smart persistent searches with RSS feeds
* Enterprise integration and administration

Rapid Implementation

With Socialtext Professional hosted service or the Socialtext Managed Service Appliance, working with Socialtext Professional Services, your organization can achieve business results in as little as 30-60 days.  Read recent press coverage from CIO Magazine and ZDNet describing the Participatory Knowledgebase use-case.  For further information about Socialtext Services, please contact us to get started.

Free Article Download from MIT Sloan Management Review
Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration

Case study of how German investment bank used Socialtext to fundamentally shift the way knowledge work is done.
by Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard

[Get the article]