Harnessing Intellectual Capital with LiveTime Knowledge Management

One of the primary goals of any business, especially in customer service, is to keep it running smoothly at all times regardless of changes in personnel or call volume. Capturing the knowledge of your employees is key to ensuring that problems are solved only once. The cost of human capital in solving the same problem again and again can become a huge impediment to growth and efficiency, not to mention job satisfaction.

Let’s take a look at how these costs can be dramatically reduced using LiveTime’s Knowledge Management capabilities, an integral part of LiveTime Service Manager and LiveTime Help Desk.

Integrated Search Engine

The key function of any service desk is to not only reduce call volume but capture the intellectual capital of the organization so that the information can be reused. This ensures rapid resolution for the customer, reduces costs and ultimately improves efficiency.

Traditional service desk software relies solely on attribute based searching of the underlying database for matching and correlating responses from previous requests. LiveTime takes an entirely different approach, leveraging a modern search engine to correlate responses from the knowledgebase against every incoming request. This has many advantages.

Firstly, every request, its corresponding notes and attachments (including Word, RTF, PDF, Powerpoint, Excel etc.) are included in the search index. With more information available, LiveTime is able to more accurately determine the best solution for each request. Results also improve over time as knowledge grows within the system.

Secondly, since the search engine has been embedded across every major process you can use it to search across any type of request, knowledge article, note or attachment to find the specific information you are looking for. You may remember a comment you wrote to a colleague in the past that you need to locate or a specific article with certain key phrases you remember. This also includes all incoming comments and attachments from customers, via email, attachments, customer portal and web services. There is virtually nothing you cannot search using simple key phrases. In addition, the search syntax includes fuzzy logic and Google style term selection, so you can refer to specific attributes within the search criteria using the “attribute:” syntax.

Empowering Users

Once you have been using LiveTime for several weeks, and built up a critical mass of solutions you will be able to leverage this information with your customers. Simply turn on the customer portal and the “force search” option to ensure that all requests pass through the knowledgebase as they are created. This ensures that customers are given appropriate suggestions and solutions to the problem before being submitted to a technician for review. If a customer finds an adequate solution, they can simply apply it and the call will be recorded and closed, eliminating the need for a technician at all.

Over time you will find that the knowledge will improve to a point where a good proportion of calls will not even require intervention by a technician at all. These numbers can be easily measured using LiveTime’s built-in KPI reports and directly translated into cost savings for your organization.