Last time I looked at the role of Collective Intelligence in Social CRM, and the relationship of these models to managing the growing volumes of user-generated content - and delivering more relevant and timely information at the point of service interaction, or purchasing decision or search. In a way that perspective is a top-down approach, is influenced by the Wisdom of Crowds idea and powered by some of the excellent work and solutions from vendors like Baynote.
As mentioned in that post, I've also been looking at various Social KM use cases and how support organizations can take an alternative 'bottom-up' approach to socialize their online support and evolve their KM programs. The goal here is looking at the various flavors of blending social models with online knowledge delivery. This work like the previous exercise was helped along by one of my clients, in this case nGenera. In fact, if you like the ideas here, there is a much more complete discussion of the trends, requirements, use cases, and a nifty self-assessment in a White Paper we just completed. You can download a copy here (requires short registration).
Starting with an assumption that basic company support or product forums are currently in place, along with a customer-facing knowledge base, I've mapped out three (initial) social KM use cases. The first involves adding simple collaboration (via chat), and targets online help, assistance and even proactive offers based on what a visitor is doing on the site.
The second uses social channels to promote and socialize the KB (and forum) content, 'push' out solutions and updates on Twitter, and recruit users in public forums to visit the corporate support portal or community (maybe this is actually two separate use cases, but for simplicity let's say it's one).
Finally, the third aims to overlay rules and structure to steer and harvest (largely unstructured) community interactions, add some structure, and provide guidance and federated search so all content is available and more useful to customers and agents.
The following illustration summarizes each of these use cases along with some of the key activities and outcomes. What do you think? What would you add?
Great to see this post, Allen! I’ve been wondering exactly how KM will shake out in our new “social” world. I look at KM as a very broad category that really touches on virtually every part of an organization. KM is about answering “how do I help people find answers to what they are looking for?” - whether it’s an explicit document or whether it’s an implicit process or fact that is locked up in someone’s head. If it’s the latter, how do I make this usable for others? That’s where social and collaborative technologies really come into play.
We’re potentially talking about a tremendous amount of quantity of unstructured data. Technology alone won’t do it. The need to have someone providing some curation of the material into Best Bets and/or Best Practices is even greater when talking about adding the social element. This doesn’t have to come at expense of having open dialogue and engagement. Just that when someone asks a question, I think to have a vetted answer that comes back is best. (Example of curated material: Think Wikipedia…constantly being cleaned up but still openly contributed too).
As with any social media effort, there also needs to be a clear corporate policy (who responds to customers’ posts about service issues? How will you go about mining this information and using it? How will you determine what information to push out via Twitter and FB?).
Your three use cases are right on track, IMO. I see plenty of technology and process challenges with implementation, and lots of opportunity for M&A and OEM on the technology side. Good times!
Posted by: BSStoltz | 10/21/2010 at 10:33 AM