2014 Leadership Committee Meeting

Monday, December 15

Welcome and introductions
What are the two or three biggest challenges you face in the next two years?

• Avaya -  Gaining trust by 1. Reducing risk and 2. Increase realization of product value.
• Sage -  Intelligent Swarming, reputation models for analysts and customers, Knowledge domain expert function.  How do we get people to transition from calling to support services (web), (Mike's 18 step program).
• Alcatel-Lucent - Drive revenue, focus on trust of customer, and give them the confidence to use, maintain, install product (Avaya "While you were sleeping".  Leverage the KCS content, and deploy to other teams. 
• Salesforce - Increasing the value of KCS articles.  Handle 30% growth with same resources.  Need to integrate an acquisition. 
• PTC - Proactive/Preemptive support, products will be smart connected products through use KCS articles and data collection, the internet of things.  Merging social sites and support.
• BMC - Getting consistent support across all product lines, swarming across all product lines.  Reboot of KCS program, how do you clean up knowledge base.  Automation and tools to support KCS and IS. Median days to close and how to use KT to shorten the diagnostic process (Avaya suggests to automate a lot of the diagnostic process, 172 tools)
• Cisco - Drive a KCS like model into all services, leveraging the reputation model.  Drive an integrated resources management, capacity planning, a complete bench, common staffing skills.

Action Items;
Find a new name for self-service (known solutions)
Don't use deflection
Authoring in the workflow, can Avaya competency model
Managed services, cloud margins (how to pay and combined services, need huge volume at low cost).  
Add the margins to the Value Stack model.  Humans should only be answering "known"
Is is so easy in the SAS model to switch, how do we build stickiness.

Your average time to solve - includes all all interactions, cases are not relevant anymore.    

• Math Works case study internal knowledge base and everything is in the community.
• Delivering Support Knowledge to the Customer Community with MathWorks

Cisco use Salesforce and Drools rules engine to help with IS matching. Using a customized version of Lithium, it has a knowledge engine and when knowledge articles is created it does not lose all the contributors.  Contributors get reputation points.  50% of the engineers are not Cisco employees, they are treated as Cisco employees and get the same reputation points.  Partners use the same tools and knowledge base.  To get reputation points you have to collaborate or create KCS articles that get reused.  

Expanding KCS into managed and professional services.  How do we capture at the point of interaction. Assertion, that there is more value in knowledge from professional services.

The Value Models
    The Value Stack
    Measuring using the Funnel and the Cloud Model
    The Value Erosion Model
    The Value Add  or Value Realization Model
        Understanding the customer engagement - Sage value erosion vs value add

Tuesday, December 16

KCS Initiatives discussion - What questions do you have about KCS? 

• How to get more value from KCS articles
  • Benefits of KCS (download, view)  - all driven by the responders behaviors in the A-Loop
    • Improve ratio of support cost to revenue and keep customer and employee SAT and loyalty
      • Achieve growth without increasing head count
    • Internal productivity
    • Self-Service success - benefit of solving pend up demand they would never open a case for
    • Product, process, policy improvement - based on patterns in the knowledge base, takes longer but biggest benefit
  • Challenges with getting responders to search and link when they know the answer
    • Quick click, make it easy to search and link when it is not adding value
  • Critical Enablers
    • Leadership and Communication
      • Requires the leaders to be adamant, patient and persistence
      • Many times have to retrain/replace middle management, and support engineers
      • Change management (30% of the effort) at the 1st line.  The team has to report into support
    • Support the process changes through tooling
    • Coach
    • License and Certification - degree to which responders understand WIIFM
  • Successful self-service on the web
    • 90% of what you know is available in 90 minutes
    • No dead ends
    • Marketing the web site
    • Findabilty
    • Mike Runda's 15 steps to get requestors to go to the web first
      1. Web-site-make easy
      2. Get all known solutions on web
      3. Automate Tier 1 (Ava Conversive real time natural language Chat), answers 70%
      4. Run speech analytics on the agents, real time, good training tool for learning moments
      5. Segment incoming into small groups (by function), work on each one (advertising live-agents on the web)
      6. Put go to web message on hold for first small group
      7. Engineers in that queue walk all calls thru web first, help customer login
      8. Add YouTube video to web support
      9. Add chat to web experience, add VOIP, add live video, keep in channel
      10. Start using call back SW for Sev. 4 then Sev 3, then Sev 2 for that customer segment
      11. Ask why still they are still calling?
      12. Add Emergency Resolution team, and hot button for Sev1 outages
      13. Add escalation button to each SR
      14. Why still calling?
      15. Contact each customer that is still using phone, work on their company policy to use web, teach them to use the web
• KCS Topics not yet discussed
  • Leverage KCS Content to do predictive/proactive
  • Gamification of KCS
  • Deploy KCS to other non-support groups (managed services, professional services)
  • When to archive content

Intelligent Swarming  - What questions do you have about swarming?

• Should we change the name from swarming to collaborative support model (what is the outcome) *
• What are the dependencies - with or without KCS, reputation model
• What is everyone else doing with swarming
• How do you design the swarm groups for adoption (topic, product, category)
  • Then how to do create dynamic swarm groups
• How did Cisco get to IS (what is the path)
• How to build reputation/profiles *
• What measurements do you have to change *
• How to get the managers to relax and let them swarm *
• Change management *
• What roles have to change (managers) *
• What is the role of the swarm group
• When do you have people leave the swarm to answer calls (Exception Management)
• When do you swarm in the tool vs getting together (sycronized vs async)
• Do we need swarm coaches (some swarm too quickly vs who waited too long) *
• Handling objections
• Lessoned learned
  • Let the responders design the system
• Tools to support the swarm
• What are we trying to achieve (Speed to Expert, Improving the Customer Experience, minimize handoff, time to resolution, getting the right person to handle it), Increase in employee sat)

        * represents topics for the May program team meeting

Customer Success Initiative Predictive and Proactive Support

• Predictive customer engagement model how to maximize value realization
• PTC using the internet of things and what they know about their customers Axeda and Thingwerks
• Influence techniques for support to influence business
• Develop rules and analysis
• Articulate the value of CX improvement

Summary of Executive Summit 2014: a “value stack” for support.

• Designing from trust: the differentiator for creating value.
• The right approach for the right work: using the Cynefin Model to distinguish obvious, complicated, complex, and chaotic situations. 

Design Cafe Session 

• Group discussions on topics for 2015: definition and scope

Wednesday, December 17

Update

• Evolution of KCS: a new structure for the Practices Guide
  • Updates on the methodology
  • Review and agree on the KCS Principles

KCS Certifications - value from Sage case study

Looking for a few good thinkers: articulating the value of the Consortium

• Business value – revenues, margins, kick start support for the next year, sustain growth of your people
• Best practice sharing, and what didn’t work
• Support 2.0 doing it the same ways, ways to accelerate in a profound different way to accelerate you changes
• Don't need to hire additional head count in order to growth
• Gather financial benefit
• Get presentation from Mike at Avaya
• Outcomes – KCS is the heart 
• Summary of events and work done in 2014
• Member Survey
• Member buddy program

Themes and topics for 2015 Member Summit: The Collaborative Launch Pad (Rancho Bernardo Inn, San Diego, March 16-18) 

Mindful Engagement, Meaningful Engagement, value added engagement, Engagement the matters (space matter), work on only new
Avaya - Meaningful Engagement
Mindfullness - leaving your ego at the door and asking for help and offering help in a non-competivie way, principle of IS
PTC - present data scientist and the predictive customer engagement, the internet of things, what is function of a KDE and a data scientist
2 hours KCS Practices v5 certification review and certification exams

Upcoming Events

• Program Team Meetings
• DeepDive topics and schedule
• 2015 Executive Summit: Chatham Bars Inn, Chatham, MA 

Next Steps

Predictive customer engagement or Executive Summit Topics 2015
    New ideas to drive revenue or margin?  Add this to the value stack.
    Proactive Support and Engagement - is this to protect existing customers or a managed service to create revenue
    Customer loyalty and trust, reduce risk and increase value realization

Automation of problem solving tools
    Exploring a framework for problem solving or automated diagnostics) - having a call

KCS across all services (1st new KCS technique is Professional Services)