Knowledge Management (KM) is one of the primary keys to success today. Those companies who fail at managing their knowledge will have very little chance to even survive. Most companies recognize this and have invested substantially in tools, training, and resources to improve their knowledge management skills. Unfortunately, most have not realized the ROI they had projected and hoped for.

Our work has given us a unique perspective and depth of experience with KM. We have worked with many of the largest corporations in the world, in many geographical locations (15 different countries). We have worked at every level of the organization, from the CSR or Help Desk taking the initial call, to the executives demanding that support become a profit center, not a drain on the company's finances. Our unique, and broad experience has led us to the following conclusions.

• The current, accepted support model is so flawed it is not sustainable into the future
• Knowledge Management (KM), Solution Centered Support (SCS), Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) and other strategies to change the underlying support model are incomplete, inadequate, and generally poorly implemented
  
• There are fundamental challenges interfering with the success of these strategies that are either being ignored, or ineffectively managed
  
• The costs of not solving these serious challenges are so high they can cause the entire organization to fail
  
• The primary root causes for these challenges have more to do with the underlying organizational culture than technology issues, although tools can either enable - or inhibit end results
  

These are some of the problems we observe in almost every company we have worked with:

• Managers generally have poor understanding of KM and are not fully engaged in the process
  
• Multiple employees involved on calls
  
• Only fraction of usable knowledge is captured, reused
  
• Capture takes place after call, not in the workflow, losing much of the content & value
  
• Tools poorly understood and not used effectively
  
• Calls are longer than necessary due to poor knowledge management
• First call resolution very low (from 5% to 30% on average)
  
• Customer experience is very inconsistent (70%+ of the time they get "I don't know", or wrong answer)
  
• Customers do not find high enough percentage of answers on web to fully encourage self-help over the web
  
• Poor handling of escalations results in loss of knowledge and inefficient resolution of issues
  
• Poor KM results in employees having high levels of frustration and low satisfaction (70%+ of the time they have to admit "I don't know" or they give a wrong answer - Ouch!)

For a slide presentation on the challenge of KM click here SLIDE PRESENTATION