Behind the Knowledge-Centered Service Curtain with Lana Kosnik

Transcript

Pete Wright:
Hello everybody, and welcome to Connected Knowledge from Upland Software on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright. What happens when you wire an organization to value knowledge specifically as a key asset? What happens to processes and systems when they’re focused on creating, capturing, sharing, and reusing institutional knowledge in the work of the contact center? Lana Kosnik is the KCS Knowledge Management Practice Manager here at Upland. Over the better part of a decade, she’s honed a skillset in training and coaching and teamwork and business development and sales and content and knowledge management. Today she’s going to pull back the curtain on the benefits of the knowledge centered organization. Lana Kosnik, welcome to the show. Let’s kick it off with a definition of terms. We’ve talked much about knowledge management around these parts. But what does it mean to transform that into a knowledge centered organization?

Lana Kosnik:
Great question. So, KCS stands for Knowledge Centered Service and it’s a methodology developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation. Some people say consortium, some say consortium, so it just depends on your preference. But the consortium is a nonprofit organization with members that form an alliance of companies focused on innovation around customer and employee engagement, as well as productivity and success. So, they’ve been around for 35 years and they’re doing the work of figuring out how to put theory into practice for everybody. And KCS utilizes a set of practices for consistently capturing information in a way that’s both structured enough to be useful and dynamic enough to suit the rapidly changing environment of technical support.

Pete Wright:
Okay. So, what does that mean in practice? That’s a lot of consortium knowledge that you just dropped on us. But what does that look like in practice? What does an organization look like that has become Knowledge Centered Service oriented?

Lana Kosnik:
So, once you as an organization that has adopted KCS, you’ll see operational efficiencies throughout the business. A lot of times support can increase their capacity between 20 to a hundred percent. So, it’s like a big jump. You’ll also see self-service success. So, customers are able to actually find and use items in your self-service platform, which is huge for contact centers because the less calls you’re getting, the more customers are satisfied.

Pete Wright:
More capacity each individual operator has, right?

Lana Kosnik:
The more capacity each individual.

Pete Wright:
Awesome.

Lana Kosnik:
Each agent then has the time to work on new interesting issues as opposed to doing the same things over and over and over again. So, if you have interesting work, there’s also employee satisfaction there.

Pete Wright:
Sure. And they stick around longer, I imagine. Retention goes up.

Lana Kosnik:
Exactly.

Pete Wright:
Okay. So, that’s one of the most interesting angles of this is that we’re not just rewiring the organization around knowledge as a key asset as we talked about. But we’re rewiring our understanding of the role of support in the first place. That feels big.

Lana Kosnik:
It’s huge. Well, that’s the thing. And to put it into contact center terms—the level of change here is if you remember before ticketing and after ticketing. It’s how we do work. It’s not, “well, this is a program that we’re going to try and see how it goes.” We have to shift entirely how we’re working and make it important. So, there’s a shift completely in the understanding in the role of support. So, with KCS in place, agents become resolution experts for new issues and they are facilitators of connections for known issues. The work that agents do really feed the network of knowledge that informs how successful customers will be with self-service and what improvements we can make as an organization based on article use.

Pete Wright:
I think the implication of that is really compelling. It’s that it makes it so these service agents are not just churning out pre-written content, they’re feeding back into it. And I think that’s a thing that it sounds pretty fundamental to that rewiring of how we think about support. That support isn’t just helping people with stuff we already know. They’re learning and feeding back into the organization at the same time. Is that fair?

Lana Kosnik:
That’s very fair. One of my favorite concepts with KCS that sets it apart from different things from just regurgitating information from person to person is grabbing the customer’s context at the time that the interaction happens. So be it chat, call, however that interaction is happening, the agent is capturing the context and searching for it. And by doing that, we’re seeing “do we have something already here? If we do, we’re able to use it right then.” So, we’re able to give them a quick answer that’s also complete with everybody who’s touched that answer. So, it’s the most complete and most accurate up-to-date answer they’re going to get versus what you might know from off your head.

Pete Wright:
And the fact that we’re tapping into the knowledge of the comments. You have more people feeding into that. That has to have its own benefits, I imagine.

Lana Kosnik:
It’s a huge benefit. But on top of that, with the context kind of aspect coming into it is that we’re seeing, “do we have this already in our knowledge base?” And then if we don’t, we can add it. And so if we’re using the customer’s words to search things and to create things, then customers are able to search and find things in their own words.

Pete Wright:
In their own words.

Lana Kosnik:
So, I like to say in this situation, customers are more likely to search “can’t log in” versus “unable to authenticate via SSO.”

Pete Wright:
That’s a good one. Maybe only on this show is that a laugh line, right?

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah, exactly. Hold for laughter.

Pete Wright:
Yes, hold for laughter. Well, okay, so let’s turn this around to the implications toward the organization, right? So, we’re talking about is not simply, “Okay, now call center agents, I know you haven’t never done this before. Now you’re going to start feeding in all this information into our system and go.” There is an application of a methodology. We have to learn how to do this. Can you talk me through what it means to learn how to do this? How is the actual act of rewiring us into this new sort of KCS methodology, how is it going to impact me as a business leader in a call center? What are the things I’m going to have to implement and train against to make sure that people understand and are able to adapt?

Lana Kosnik:
So as a business leader in a call center, the big things that you’re going to be concerned with or be mindful of when doing a KCS adoption is making sure that: A) you understand the concepts behind it. You want to understand the big picture, what’s going on. There’s going to be a shift in how we do things from an older management model to more of a leadership model. And what I mean by that is that we’re not hovering over people as much as maybe we did in the past. We are not micromanaging as much. We’re more focused on trusting and getting our agents, our knowledge workers, coached in the workflow. And now we have a KCS workflow that combines our tools with our knowledge base, with how we’re using our ticketing system. And that has been created with the input of knowledge workers, of agents, so that we’re not asking them to over-engineer anything. We’re not asking them to do something they can’t do. We’re asking them to have some ownership and responsibility for what they’re doing every day. That’s a big shift for…

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s a big shift. And you said something a second ago that was provocative to me, the first thing you said, the very first thing is managers need to make sure they understand this. I don’t think someone like you, an educator in the space, actually tosses that out first without having run into scenarios in which people try to implement a methodology that they don’t understand. Is that a fair assumption?

Lana Kosnik:
No comment.

Pete Wright:
I don’t want to out anybody.

Lana Kosnik:
No, no, no.

Pete Wright:
That’s not my interest. But I do think it’s important to share the-

Lana Kosnik:
I think that it’s… Yeah.

Pete Wright:
The lesson here is that understanding the methodology before you implement it is probably pretty critical. That feels big.

Lana Kosnik:
It is a big thing because if you are there to motivate people and to make space for this new methodology, but you don’t really understand the nuts and bolts of it, how are you going to know your place in it? So, there has to be understanding at different levels in different ways. So there’s going to be your leaderships, your executives, but then there’s also going to be the management, the people who are making sure that their knowledge workers can do the thing that we’re asking them to do and are responsible ultimately to the executives that their knowledge workers do do the thing.

Pete Wright:
And that point specifically—if you don’t understand it as a business leader, as a unit leader, as a department head, as a center manager, you can’t manage against it, even if your people embrace it. That seems to be an ecosystem question that you can solve to close that particular loop. Okay.

Lana Kosnik:
Yep. A little knowledge goes a long way. And I guess Knowledge Centered Service there, a lot of knowledge goes a long way.

Pete Wright:
We get it. Okay. Let’s just say we’re ready to start. When you’re working through implementations, how do you approach teaching organizations how to look at success? What does success look like?

Lana Kosnik:
Oh yeah. What we do in KCS is before we start an implementation, we’ll have a planning and design phase. So, that’s really where we want to sit down and iron out “what are the tools that we’re using? What is our workflow? Who’s informing all of these things? Who’s doing what?” But then also we have our strategic framework, and that’s going to align what success looks like to us. “What are our values? How does KCS support those values? And what are the measurements we’re using to determine if we’re reaching those kind of goals?”

Pete Wright:
And how well do you feel like KCS adapts to solving specific pre-KCS problems? Right? I imagine call centers are going to come in and say, “Hey, we need help and we have problems X, Y, and Z. Are we going to be able to measure against those problems? Or does KCS rewire the organization so thoroughly that we just have to start from scratch? Like here are new baseline metrics that we need to start planning against.”

Lana Kosnik:
Well, the nice thing about KCS is that, and especially the metrics with KCS, is that you want to use a variety of metrics. So, it’s really the way that we use measurements is a little different than what has been done historically. And we want to have a focus on where is value being created and how do we do that? That takes time and energy and an actual person. You can’t just pull them. So, there are things that we can pull from our old historic metrics, but usually what we’re doing with those is we’re looking at trends. So we want to track trends and activities. So, activities are numbers that are easy to pull, but they’re also easy to game and manipulate. If I say I want a hundred percent link rate, meaning I want every ticket to have an article linked to it—well, I didn’t say the right article.

Pete Wright:
Right. Let’s just start putting articles.

Lana Kosnik:
If I say I want to increase my modification rate because I want people to be reviewing articles, the intention there is good, but if I’m telling them I’m expecting this.

Pete Wright:
Right. So is the edit ticket, tap space bar, save ticket.

Lana Kosnik:
Exactly. It’s the, “oh, I added a period somewhere and save it.” Modification rate up. People will find a way to game things.

Pete Wright:
And this gets to something, the things we’re pointing out. We’re laughing about them and we recognize that there are call centers that may have had those problems. But the real issue, the thing that’s most provocative for me is that everything you’re talking about gives so much agency to the call center operator, the agents, that they’re probably less likely to resort to gaming the system to meet arbitrary metrics. Is that what you see?

Lana Kosnik:
Exactly. So, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to use a variety of metrics, at least a combination of five to nine different metrics. And those five to nine, we should be looking at trends and activities. So, activities are those older metrics that are easy to pull, easy to solve. So, we want to look at trends there to see if things are going well, things are not, obviously we want to still look at them. But then we also want to look at their goals. So our goals and our outcomes, those are things where it takes a coach or a KCS program manager or somebody with a more human touch than just a machine pulling out things. This is to see, okay, so when they did link their article, they did it right, they picked the right article.
I’m reading through the ticket and seeing how they’re doing and seeing how that article relates to it. And then we’re also looking at our KCS outcomes, which are our process adherence review scores, and our content standard checklist scores. So we have checks in place to make sure that people are doing the things that they’re supposed to be doing. But we’re doing it in a sampling way, just like how you don’t read over every word for a ticket. We wouldn’t go over every single article or ticket.

Pete Wright:
In your experience, how long should, let’s say, a medium-sized call center expect to take to implement a KCS methodology? What does it take to get people trained up on it?

Lana Kosnik:
It really depends on how they start. And I know that that sounds like a cop out.

Pete Wright:
That’s broad.

Lana Kosnik:
That’s broad. So, if you’re doing everything in the I like to say in the happily ever after KCS way, it’s going to take a lot less time and be more efficient, but there’s more work in the front end. So, you’re spending more time making sure that you have the right tools and technology, that you have a workflow in place that’s been designed by your agents so that they can do it, and that you know what measures you want to pull and you know how they relate to each other. So, if you spend the time in the front end designing and planning this, once you get going, you’re going to start seeing benefits some within six to eight months. Just depends again, but we don’t like to put numbers on it because everything’s…

Pete Wright:
I sense your reticence on that front. That’s totally fair.

Lana Kosnik:
I don’t like to put a whole number on it. I like to make sure that we are focused on moving the needle. We want to try to make sure that… And sometimes you don’t really feel that until you start looking at the metrics that you’ve pulled. So, what’s important is before you start doing your adoption, you pull a baseline so you can see, “okay, these metrics that we decided we’re going to measure ourselves on that this is what’s creating value.” I do a baseline before the adoption so that I can see throughout the adoption, when am I doing well, how’s it going, and there’s movement.

Pete Wright:
Right, right. I mean, you have to be able to look back to see how far you’ve come. And speaking of all of this, you come bearing a gift, a gift of an example of an organization that has actually done this, right?

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Do we have a case of an organization that’s actually been able to make some change?

Lana Kosnik:
So Paychex, that is-

Pete Wright:
I know them. They’re big.

Lana Kosnik:
They’re big. They’re really big. They’re a provider of human resources, payroll benefits, outsourcing, and they serve over 590,000 clients with over 11 million client employees. So in 2007, they saw that they were going to get a boom in support needs, and they just didn’t know what to do. So that’s when they partnered up with RightAnswers and started their KCS adoption. So way back in 2007. So over the years, they’ve evolved it into a highly efficient operation where they’ve reported to us that because of the program and with a great tool, they’ve realized a $3 million per year ROI in savings.
The program has allowed them to manage a boom and support volume efficiently while finding a way to provide the most consistent and up-to-date answers to customers and those within the company. They’re also able to create a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing that started in their IT support program, and then it branched out to other teams until the company as a whole started using KCS to inform how they work. So. that’s really how it’s this good ripple effect where we’re going to start with a contact center. We’re going to start with your support team and then once you see that success, other teams start banging on your door.

Pete Wright:
Well, and I’ll tell you what I get out of this example is that that Paychex is able to, as a result of so much of this, be more resilient to spikes in support demand too. New product releases, new changes, those kinds of things—they’re able to absorb more efficiently with less impact across the center organization. That’s fantastic.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah, it is.

Pete Wright:
All right. As we get into what you do, let’s talk about some best practice. 8:00 AM, day one. It’s Monday morning, eight o’clock, I want to set up a KCS system that is long-term sustainable. What are you going to tell me to do?

Lana Kosnik:
Okay, so long-term sustainable. So to have a successful KCS adoption, you want to, I mean, first of all, obtain management buy-in, right?

Pete Wright:
It’s in there for sure.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah. So, we suggest having more than one executive sponsor to combat any kind of executive turnover. So having management buy-in from a leadership executive level, but also in a manager level too. And we want to put responsibility and accountability for knowledge creation in the hands of agents. So agents are the one creating knowledge, not somebody else after the fact.

Pete Wright:
So, this is in contrast to having somebody who’s a dedicated content creator who’s not answering phones or not addressing tickets.

Lana Kosnik:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Lana Kosnik:
Yep. There’s a place for product documentation and technical writers. There’s definitely a place for that in the knowledge management scope. It’s just not within the KCS scope. So KCS is focusing on reactive interactions. So, we’re reacting to an interaction and we’re capturing the context.

Pete Wright:
Got it.

Lana Kosnik:
And product documentation—they’ll have technical writers and they’re anticipating. They’re being proactive.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Lana Kosnik:
Don’t want to push them out of anything.

Pete Wright:
No, no, no. But it is a sense, you get that there’s going to be, I think, by nature, more content created because you’ll have proactive and now you’re introducing reactive content. That’s fantastic.

Lana Kosnik:
And with RightAnswers, we’re able to federate both into our tool and then search in one spot. So customers are really happy and it improves that self-service success there. Another thing that we want to really make sure to do is make time for agents to participate in KCS coaching. Now, what sets KCS apart is that it has this foundational focus on coaching that maybe other methodologies don’t. Coaching is really the cornerstone of success.

Pete Wright:
Working with KCS coaches, and I imagine trained managers as you implement?

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah. Well, the KCS coaches, the nice thing about coaches in the KCS realm are that they are actively working tickets. They should be knowledge workers as well.

Pete Wright:
So they’re a tier of staff in the call center?

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah. They’re working in the call center with you. This is something they do in addition to their job, not as their full-time job.

Pete Wright:
Right, right, right, right. Okay. Good, good, good. Okay.

Lana Kosnik:
It’s a lot easier to have instruction from somebody who’s in the same situation that you’re in and they can identify the needs that you might have.

Pete Wright:
Quickly.

Lana Kosnik:
Quickly. You want to make sure that people understand the big picture and benefits of why you’re asking them to change their behavior. So, we’re asking them to do these tasks. So, we want to make sure that they’re doing the test, but they understand why and they want to make sure that they feel like part of the process because KCS really is celebrating everybody who’s touching the knowledge as interacting with it and creating things. You’re part of it.

Pete Wright:
Right. Again, it goes back to that agency bit. You want to give people a stake.

Lana Kosnik:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
Okay. What’s next?

Lana Kosnik:
We want to make sure that we use a small group of agents to determine the workflow and the content standard so that they’re able to do it. We don’t want to over-engineer these things and make it impossible for them to do the things that we’re asking them to do. I wouldn’t know what would be impossible for them to do if I’m not actively doing it.

Pete Wright:
Right. Okay.

Lana Kosnik:
And then we want to, like we talked about earlier, just shift the metrics that we use to ensure that we’re focusing on value over arbitrary numbers.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Again, this feeds back into the don’t give an opportunity to game the system.

Lana Kosnik:
Right, exactly.

Pete Wright:
Tool. All right. You touch on something that I think is important to reinforce. Anytime you’re implementing a methodology, whether it’s a KCS methodology or project management methodology, Agile, whatever it is, you have to have enough stakeholders bought in and constantly marketing it internally in order for it to take. It takes, as you said, you, with great hesitance, said eight months. What I hear then is your organization isn’t going to turn in this regard organization-wide for the scope of years. You have to be committed in the long-term and constantly be selling these benefits, I imagine, or it will evaporate.

Lana Kosnik:
Yes, exactly. So it’s really important to think of KCS as a way of working and not a project. It’s not the next new bright, shiny thing that’s going to save the company or be fun to try. It’s something that you have to really invest in in order to reap the benefits. But once you do, wow.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right. You just wait.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah. You just wait.

Pete Wright:
Well, okay. So that allows us to turn to RightAnswers. You’ve dropped the name a couple of times during this conversation. Tell us about RightAnswers and what the product does and about Upland’s KCS experts.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah. So RightAnswers, I love it as a tool. It is a KCS verified tool, which means that the consortium has these specific requirements for tools to have the KCS verified term-

Pete Wright:
Badge.

Lana Kosnik:
Used. Yeah. Badge. And what that means is that KCS has to be baked into the way the tool functions. So, the tool functions in a way to encourage and support a KCS methodology in your system. So, RightAnswers is a really wonderful tool that allows us to store our knowledge and be able to search and bind the right thing in our workflow and in our lives. So, we have our support side, our support portal, as well as the customer portal that are able to access things. It’s a really great tool, and I can’t suggest it enough. I’ve used it for a few years working on our Upland’s SSO side. So our internal space, because Upland has 28 different products that they support. And so we do KCS with those products. Each product is its own adoption. Each product has its own RightAnswers space. So I’ve been using it internally for years and I can’t say enough good things about it.

Pete Wright:
That’s wonderful. Well, as we wrap up, where would you like to send people to learn a little bit more about it and the other resources that you offer?

Lana Kosnik:
Upland has KCS experts on staff in a variety of roles to offer training via KCS workshops as well as KCS expertise to our knowledge management services and product development. So, we’re always trying to get better. That’s the whole point. So I’m the primary KCS basic certified trainer. It’s a mouthful, but that just means that I teach a KCS V6 practices workshop and that gets people ready for their certification exam.
We also have more condensed KCS overviews, which are really great for those people in that management level. We also have a leadership specific one for those in the executive level and our coach development workshop, which is so wonderful. It’s a great time to really hone in on our coaching skills. It’s great for coaches in the KCS capacity, but it’s also really wonderful for anybody working with people, anybody managing, and getting in touch with how to listen, and all of those skills. Those workshops are available for the public to sign up. They are detailed descriptions of each workshop, as well as pricing and a form to register for the workshops at uplandsoftware.com/rightanswers/kcs.

Pete Wright:
Outstanding. That was a great pitch, Lana.

Lana Kosnik:
Oh, thank you.

Pete Wright:
I would just say congratulations on your first podcast. You did great.

Lana Kosnik:
Thank you so much. I couldn’t tell.

Pete Wright:
This has been really fun. Thank you for the education. Thank you for the tutorial on KCS. I certainly appreciate you and hope we gin up more excuses to talk on the show. Yeah,

Lana Kosnik:
I would love that. Thank you so much for your time.

Pete Wright:
Outstanding. And thank you everybody for downloading and listening to this show. We appreciate your time and attention. We’d love to hear what you think. Just swipe up in your show notes and look for the feedback link to send questions to us or any of our past guests, and we’ll do our best to get them answered. On behalf of Lana Kosnik, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you right back here next time on Connected Knowledge.