KCS Glossary

Principles and Core Concepts

A principle is a deep or fundamental belief:

• A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning
• A moral rule or belief that helps you know what is right and what is wrong and influences your actions

KCS principles apply to multiple practices: principles are the basis for, and manifest themselves in, multiple practices.  Principles don’t tell you how to do something, they tell you why we are doing what we do.

A core concept is based on one or more principles. Core concepts are more specific and more numerous than the principles.

A Technique

Techniques describe activities or how we do things, details on what we need to do (actions, implementable)

• A skillful or efficient way of doing or achieving something
• A more granular level of detail than a Practice
• A collection of techniques make up a Practice

[A]

Activities
Leading indicators that count activity (# of articles created or reused). Activity alone is not an indicator of value.

Add it
Creating a new KCS article in the workflow, if one does not exist. 

Articles
The collective experience of the support organization in solving problems and answering questions. Articles can include a variety of issues: usage or "how to", configuration, interoperability, performance, defects, procedural, or diagnostic information.

Author
The initial creator of a KCS article.

Average work time to resolve
Number of minutes consumed per incident in developing an answer, fix, bypass or workaround.
Determined by dividing the total minutes worked by the number of incidents resolved.

[B]

Balanced Scorecard
A method of goals and metrics that links individual and organization goals. Examines performance from multiple points of view. (see The Balanced Scorecard by Kaplan and Norton)

[C]

Call deflection
The number of customer issues solved through self-service that would have become incidents (this is a subset of self-service customer success)

Candidate Knowledge
Search words become part of the knowledge base as standalone article or part of an existing article.

Capture
A Solve Loop practice. While solving the problem, the knowledge worker captures the customer's context.

Cause
The underlying or root cause of the problem.

Citation
Reuse of your articles by others

Closed loop feedback
Insight generated by the Evolve Loop that continuously improves the customer experience as well as the information in the knowledge base.

Coach
KCS role that supports the development of KCS Candidates and KCS Contributors.

Communication Effectiveness Indicators
Used to assess the level of buy-in and understanding across the organization

Compelling purpose
The purpose of an organization; people should connect with it on a personal, emotional level.

Competency profile
Percentage of knowledge workers at each level of the KCS competencies: KCS Candidate, KCS Contributor, and KCS Publisher.

Content
Knowledge that is captured and findable. Knowledge content may be in the form of text, pictures, animation, audio or multi-media (video with audio). Various forms of content that solve a specific issue, including KCS articles, white papers, documentation etc. This content must be searchable, answer the specific issue in the context of the audience asking, and in a maintained repository.

Content Health
An Evolve Loop practice focused on article structure, content standards, content quality, and article life cycles.

Content Standard
A formal document which describes decisions the organization has made about KCS article content and structure.

Content Standard Checklist
Provides the structure to ensure a KCS Contributor understands and can create articles based on the criteria defined in the KCS Content Standard.

Contribution Indicators
How often a knowledge worker is reusing, modifying, or creating a new knowledge article.

Contribution Index
The ratio of the number of times a knowledge worker appropriately contributed as a percentage of their total opportunity to contribute.

Context
Captured in the Solve Loop, it is the description of the needs and experiences of the requestor in their own terms.

Cost per incident
Total support costs divided by the number of incidents closed

Creator
The author of a KCS article.

Cross-functional measures
Measures to which multiple functions within the organization contribute. For example, product improvements require support to capture the interactions and recognize trends to give development credible input on high leverage opportunities for product improvement. Development must execute on these opportunities. The measure is shared by support and development. (See Transforming Performance Measurement by Spitzer)

Cultural Health
Knowledge workers' attitude with respect to trust, commitment, conflict resolution, accountability, and focus on results.  Measured through surveys.  See Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Customer loyalty
The level of emotional connection a customer feels towards the company: a longer-term measure of overall relationship. Indicators include renewal rate, new product/upgrade adoption rate, and reference ability.

Customer Satisfaction
Transaction-based measure of the degree to which we have met the customer expectations. This is a short-term measure of the customer experience with support. Indicators are speed or average work time to resolve, "percentage first contact resolution," technical knowledge, and politeness of the knowledge worker.

[D]

Data
Unorganized words or numbers.

Demand-Driven Visibility
As articles are found and used they are improved. Articles are migrated to a broader audience as they are proven accurate and useful.

Employee turnover rate
Internal attrition rate at which knowledge workers are leaving the support organization.

Environment
An element of a KCS article that contains product information or technology (hardware, software,network, etc.) the customer has that is relevant to the issue. Has anything been changed recently?

Evolve Loop
A continuous improvement process that integrates individual and organizational processes.

Evolve Loop content
Content that is created outside of the workflow from a collection of articles created in the Solve Loop. Includes FAQ's, Hot articles, and Root Cause Analysis.

Exception
Any type of issue including:

• "How to" or Q&A
• Interoperability issues
• Configuration issues
• Defects
• Diagnostic procedures
• Procedural

External
Indicates a KCS article is available outside an organization. The audience metadata field is set to either partner, customer, or public.

Executive sponsor buy-in
The executive champion for the KCS program, who understands KCS and is vocally committed. This is a qualitative measurement, but may be judged by the willingness of the champion to present the plan for the project to executive management, to host a kickoff with the project team, and to support communication efforts with email and other outreach.

Findability
Term used to describe the effectiveness of a search to returning relevant results.

Findable
A search engine returns a relevant KCS article.

Fix it
A KCS Contributor or Publisher modifying an existing article in the workflow.

Flag it
A non-licensed user commenting on an article so that an authorized knowledge worker can modify it.

[I]

Improve
A Solve Loop practice. Knowledge maintenance and updates happen through real time, demand-driven reuse and review.

In the moment
Knowledge is shared and created while solving an issue.

Incident
A request for an answer to an exception or issue, tracked through an incident management system, CRM, or call-tracking tool.

Incident volume
Number of incidents, cases, or tickets opened over a period of time.

Information
Organized data without an associated action

Interaction Network
Anyone in contributing to support including employees, partners, customers, and players in on-line communities and social media.

Internal Feedback
Sharing of information with knowledge workers; i.e. Monthly assessments, Content Standard Checklist assessments, and feedback attached to articles.

Issue
A question, problem, exception. The motivation for people to interact. A field in a KCS article template where the question from requestor is recorded. Any type of interaction or exception including:

• "How To" or Q&A
• Interoperability issues
• Configuration issues
• Defects
• Diagnostic procedures
• Procedural

Just-in-Time article quality
Everyone interacting with the knowledge base is responsible for the quality of the articles; the articles are updated as they are being used to solve an issue.

[K]

KCS
Knowledge-Centered Service

KCS article
Is the physical document living in the knowledge base.  It contains the issue, environment, resolution, cause, and attributes.  It represents the collective experience of the organization in solving problems and answering questions. KCS articles can cover a variety of issues: usage or "how to," configuration, interoperability, performance, defects, procedural or diagnostic information.

KCS Article Confidence
The process a article undergoes as it matures (work in progress, not validated, validated, archived).  Article confidence indicates how sure we are in the resolution and content standard of the article.

KCS Article State
A combination of article confidence, audience (formerly visibility), and governance.

KCS Article Audience
Audience that the article is available to. Internal, Customer, Partner, Public.  Formerly called article visibility.

KCS Article Governance
User or user group who can create and edit articles.

KCS Candidate
Provisional contributor to the knowledge base; a basic user of the knowledge base who is familiar with capturing and structuring content. Can create internal articles and modify their own but cannot modify others.

KCS Coach
KCS role that supports the development of the KCS Candidates and KCS Contributors.

KCS Contributor
Creates, modifies, and reviews articles for publishing to a defined audience.

KCS Council
A cross-functional group that meets on a regular basis providing a forum for the continued improvement to the content standard, workflow, technology integration, and feedback systems.  Early in the adoption process, they are focused on the implementation activities.  Later on the journey, they are focused on continuous improvement.

KCS Publisher
Publishes content to an external audience.

KCS Verified
Software tools that have demonstrated certain criteria set forth by the Consortium.  Currently Verified tools are listed at the Consortium for Service Innovation.

Knowledge
Knowledge is the by-product of an interaction and information upon which we can act. Information that has an action associated with it and a context and experience related to its use. Information becomes knowledge at the moment of use. Gained through interaction and experience. Attributes of knowledge include: Constantly changing, Never 100% complete or 100% accurate, validated through use, experience, and interaction.

Knowledge base
A technology built for the storage and retrieval of a collection of knowledge

Knowledge Domain Analysis (KDA)    
Evolve Loop activities performed to maintain knowledge base health and assess and increase knowledge base impact.

Knowledge Domain Expert (KDE)
Looks after the health of the knowledge base, has both technical expertise and extensive understanding of KCS processes.

Knowledge worker
People whose responsibilities include the use of information to make decisions and take action. Anyone who does intellectual work as opposed to physical work. People who use data and information to make judgments and decisions and/or take action. Knowledge workers can play the role of responder or requestor. Often used to refer to people doing Solve Loop work. 

[L]

Lagging indicators
Qualitative outcomes: a measure of value.

Leaders
Define the vision of success within the organization; they support knowledge workers in determining the workflow and the content standard.

Leadership & Communication
An Evolve Loop practice concerned with communication, promoting an understanding of KCS, and the performance assessment model.

Leading indicators
Quantifiable activities: should be measured only to identify trends.

Legacy Data
Old knowledge content, usually stored in disparate systems and not structured according to KCS standards.

Licensed Users
KCS Contributors and KCS Publishers

Linked
Attaching content that solves an issue from a request.

[M]

Metadata
Additional fields in KCS articles used to capture information such as article state (confidence, audience, governance), date created, number of times modified, history, number of times article has been reused etc.

[N]

Network
The collection of people and content who would benefit from interaction and shared experiences, not limited by any artificial boundaries or structure like role, department, division, or company. Intended to include all relevant people and content in the domain including employees, partners, customers and others.

Not Validated
A KCS article state that indicates low confidence in the article content or structure.

[O]

Organizational Value Indicators
Used to assess operational efficiency, self-service success, and product, process, or policy improvement that benefit the financial state of an organization.

Outcomes
Lagging indicators, difficult to measure. Outcomes are the end result of activities and are an indicator of created value.

[P]

Percentage first contact resolution
Percentage of incidents resolved on the first interaction. Used as a customer satisfaction indicator as well as an employee proficiency or process goal.

Practice
The KCS Practices organize what we need to do. The Practices are the application or use of the principles and core concepts in organizing the activities.

• Practices help us organize the techniques (how)
• Practice include examples of how to do things (like implementing a balanced scorecard or value footprint) that are applicable across multiple techniques or functions, ie. tech support, HR, financial services.
• Practices are made up of a definition and techniques. Techniques are details of the Practices that can often be accomplished in many different ways.

Problem
The situation in the customer's words. What are they trying to do, or what is not working?

Process Integration
An Evolve Loop practice focused on designing and optimizing the KCS workflow.

Process Adherence Review (PAR)
PAR is an indication of how well a knowledge worker is following the Solve Loop practices.  Formerly called Process Integration Indicators or PII.

Product improvements
The rate at which suggestions for product, documentation, or service offering improvements are implemented by development: an indicator of influence. (Number of RFEs accepted by product development)

Profiles
The people in the system: profiles include information about who knows what.

Published
The article is available externally as indicated by the article audience attribute.

[Q]

Quick Reference Guide
A one-page document that provides knowledge workers with a brief overview of the content standard.

[R]

Ratio of known to new
Reuse of existing articles versus new articles created in the knowledge base.

Readability
Articles are easier to read by using complete thoughts instead of complete sentences.

Requestor
A knowledge worker seeking information/knowledge or resolution to an issue.

Resolution
The element of a KCS article that contains the fix.

Resolution capacity
How many incidents can the support organization handle in a period of time? Indicators are incidents/month/analyst or average work time to resolve (work minutes, not elapsed time).

Resolution or Fix
The steps required to solve the problem or answer the question or request.

Responder
A knowledge worker offering knowledge or providing a resolution to an issue or assisting in the development of a resolution to an issue.

Reuse
How many times an article has been applied. Article reuse is a valuable method of measuring an article's value.

RFE
Request for product enhancement

[S]

Search Indicators
A indication if a knowledge worker is searching early  and often.

Searching is Creating
Content used for searching is saved and is used to enhance existing articles or frame new articles.

Self-service success
The percentage of time users find what they need on their own through a self-service mechanism.

Self-service use
The percentage of time requestors use self-service before they submit a request.  Can be web based or integrated into the user interface.

Service
We use the term “service” in its broadest and most generic form.  Service is the business of helping others be successful and productive in their endeavors. In the process of getting work done, there is network of interactions: “requester - responder” or “customer - supplier” relationships. These interactions happen within and across all business functions. The interactions are not bounded by company boundaries or individual roles; they happen between companies, customers, and partners across all information-intensive industries and institutions.

Solve Loop
Represents the individual workflow that is driven by the problem solving process.

Structure
A Solve Loop practice: involves breaking down the problem or issue description into the appropriate information and structuring it according to the appropriate format.

Subject Matter Expert (SME)
A person who is an expert in a particular area or topic.

Support Analyst
Someone handling a customer exception or issue.

Support cost as a percentage of revenue
The ratio of support costs to total company revenue.  Used to normalize the cost of support in a dynamic environment. Other possible ways to normalize the support costs include against products shipped, licenses sold, customers subscribed (cross functional measure).

Support Organization
A group of individuals within an organization who handle exceptions.

System of record
A case, incident, email, and any type of recorded interaction of a request and response.

[T]

Tacit Knowledge
Implicit information that should become explicit in during the conversation with the requestor.

Time to adopt new/upgraded products
Rate at which customers adopt new releases or products.

Time to close
The elapsed time from request open to request closed.

Time to proficiency
The number of weeks or months required for a knowledge worker to work with a high degree of independence: the learning curve.

Time to publish
Time from initial issue discovery to the time an article is available externally.

Triangulation
Reflects the intangible nature of value - the idea that the creation of knowledge cannot be directly measured or counted. Involves looking at things from at least three different perspectives: Trends in Activity, Results/Outcomes, and the Article Quality Index.

[V]

Validated
A KCS article that is considered complete and reusable. We have confidence in the resolution and it complies with the content standard.

[W]

Work- in-progress (WIP)
An incomplete KCS article. The problem or question has been captured but the resolution is not known.