Summary

The benefits of KCS are profound. The initial benefits are a result of knowledge workers' efficiency gained through having access to the collective experience of the organization. These benefits are about improving our effectiveness at the transaction level: handling requests or incidents. 

However, far greater benefits are realized as we leverage the collective knowledge of the organization beyond the transaction level to enable increased success with self-service and to identify improvements in our offerings, processes, and policies. These improvements include both internal process improvements and external improvements that reduce customer effort and increase customer success.  It is the Knowledge Domain Analysis that enables these organizational-level benefits, the value of which is far greater than the initial transaction-based benefits.  

One of the powerful features of a double loop process like the KCS Solve and Evolve Loops is that continuous improvement is inherent in the model. It is the Knowledge Domain Analysis, as part of the Evolve Loop, that drives continuous improvement and organizational learning.

A key element of sustaining and maximizing the benefits of KCS is providing the knowledge worker with visibility to the impact of their contribution to the knowledge base.  Knowledge Domain Analysis plays a vital function in identifying the impact of knowledge workers' contributions.  To this end, leadership must support the KDE role and communicate the benefits that come as a result of having a robust knowledge base.  KCS is a delayed-gratification model; it takes time to reach critical mass in the knowledge base, time to change requestors' behavior to use self-service, and even more time to see the benefits of root cause analysis and corrective actions on pervasive issues.  Knowledge Domain Analysis can only successfully happen as a result of knowledge workers capturing and reusing what they learn in the process of solving customer issues. 

The value we create in the support organization can not solely be measured inside the support organization.  Some of the benefits of KCS will be realized through improvement in the operational efficiency of the support organization.  The biggest benefits are realized outside of the support organization and therefore hard to measure. Improvements in self-service success and the impact of removing pervasive issues from the environment that reduce customer effort and improve the customer experience are challenging to measure. The Consortium for Service Innovation has ongoing work on a measurement framework that addresses these challenges.