Technical Support Management

Service and Support is one of the most knowledge intensive roles in a high technology company. It has been an early adopter of knowledge management methodologies and technologies. Using Best Practices, effective knowledge management has high leverage in the ability to provide fast, accurate resolution to customer issues. This is one area where industry work has been done to provide well documented best practices – Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) developed and maintained by the Consortium for Service Innovation.

To learn more the first step should be to review the KCS Intro - Power Point Presentation.

Initially the focus should be on building and improving the repository of internal usage material. Once a critical mass of base information is in place, it can selectively be made available to certified partners, and to customers. There will always be information that is proprietary, or confidential that will be internal use only.

Content Sources:

From R&D - Product Specifications QA Testing Results, Bug/Defect Database, Product Documentation

From Training - Customer Product Training, Internal Product Training

From Support - Solutions extracted from cases (KCS methodology), Tips & Techniques, Patterns, Test Lab Environment and setup. Source code access, Debugging Aids, Customer Environment Configurations, Forums

From Partners - Relevant Product information, Access to their support

Accuracy & Currency: Some level of accuracy checking is helpful for externally published materials – see KCS for guidelines. Equally important is timeliness checks as information can become dated or meaningless over time.