This is part five of a six-part series on each of the Categories of Focus suggested by the new standard Open Customer Metrics Framework (OCMF). Learn more about this modern, open framework and its five categories of focus in my first post on this topic.
OCMF suggests that executives should spend about 20% of their time on knowledge management – the “Knowledge/Collaboration category”.
For those of you keeping score at the office, this is the *same* percentage focused on customers and employees. Yes, it is that important. Your employees know this.
Klever’s State of Knowledge Sharing 2016 survey asked the following question: “If people in your workplace were sharing knowledge as well as they possibly could, it would improve productivity by:”
Nearly 50% of respondents believe that their organization could be at least 30% more productive if they shared knowledge better. Think about that the next time you think knowledge management is too fuzzy a concept to address.
OCMF Knowledge/Collaboration Category (20% focus time)
One of the struggles with knowledge-sharing is that most executives don’t understand how to manage it and measure it. Here we’ll tackle the best ways to measure it, so you can create a baseline against which to measure future improvements.
As far as managing it, fundamentally, you have to create an environment where people want to share knowledge as part of their workflow. Or, they simply won’t do it.
Let’s walk through the intent behind the knowledge/collaboration measures for executives.
The first two measures address getting most of the knowledge that your organization has into the hands of your customers as quickly as possible. The third looks at how much of your knowledge is ‘reused.’ The fourth reveals how easy (or not) teams can collaborate with other groups. The fifth looks at how well you are harvesting actionable information from your knowledge articles.
- Measure Level Zero Solvable –take the actual words your customers use when they contact you via phone and use these as search terms on your website or online community to see what percentage of issues could have been solved by your customers if this information were available online. (Of course, if you can’t find it, neither can your customers. If it doesn’t exist, this becomes your first improvement to make.)
- Time to Publish. This is a measure of how fast it takes to go from known internally to available externally. (Think minutes, not weeks, and start whittling it down on the new content your team needs to create. Done is better than perfect.)
- Ratio of New vs Known – of the issues that come in, what percentage are solved using content you already have in your existing knowledge base?
- Collaboration Effort Score will give you a sense of how easy or difficult it is for teams to interact across groups. This is an emerging measure that is best handled by a survey question. Something like “Department X makes it easy for me to collaborate with them”.
- Percent of knowledge-driven suggestions that are accepted closes the loop between actionable information from reviewing your knowledge article usage and reports and your doing something about it as an executive.
A big opportunity is to embed knowledge-sharing techniques outside just the support
organization. (This will help the Time to Smile and Time to Customer Value measures.)
Get started today:
- Learn how your measures stack up against the Open Customer Metrics Framework with a free OCMF self-assessment (released under a Creative Commons license) from Klever Insight.
- Join the Open Customer Metrics Framework LinkedIn group and share your journey.