Practice 3: Capture

Capture the experience of resolving issues. The requestor's perception of what is happening, the environment in which it is happening, and the resolution to the issue all provide important, actionable insight.

Responders should not try to assess the future value of a KCS article. If the issue is worth solving, it is worth saving. Our goal is to create a knowledge base that reflects the collective experience of everyone interacting with the knowledge. The completeness of that experience reflects, through patterns and trends, the requestor's and responder's experiences.  If we selectively ignore issues by not capturing them, the patterns over time are less valuable.

Up to 80% of KCS articles will rarely or never be reused. Of the remaining 20%, some will be reused a lot. The reuse pattern of articles always fits the 80/20 rule: 80% of the issues are solved by 20% of the knowledge base.  Why create them all, if most are not going to be used? Because we cannot predict the future value of an experience. 

Reuse patterns of articles for self-service are different than they are internally. There are those issues for which requestors will use self-service and are happy to find an answer, but they would not bother to use the assisted model (open an incident) to get an answer. Data from Consortium Members on the activity in the assisted model vs the self-service model is a ratio of 1 to 10 (assisted to self-service activity).  Requestors will use a good self-service mechanism ten times more often than they will use the assisted model.  This data is based on customer facing support organizations in high tech. For more information on what makes for a "good" self-service mechanism see Self-Service Strategy in Measuring Self-Service Success.

Support organizations in high tech see less than 3% of the total customer demand for support (see "Understanding Demand" in Measuring Self-Service Success). 97% of support demand is served through self-service or online communities and social media. While we in support may have the best intentions, we don't have the context to make a judgment about the future value of what we learn from an interaction.

Because of this, we capture all the knowledge worker experiences by linking, improving or, if it doesn't exist, creating articles. If the question is worth answering or the problem is worth solving, it is worth having in the knowledge base. Capture it and let the other KCS processes improve the quality of the articles that turn out to have value. If we implement KCS properly, the reuse, improve, or capture activity does not add to our handle time.  The future value we get from reuse can dramatically increase our capacity, as well as our speed and consistency, in providing resolutions.

If the issue is worth solving, it is worth saving.