Introducing Klever Insight

The Klever Insight Manifesto

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We work with leaders in service and support organizations who believe that support is more than just taking care of a customer after they have a problem. We believe every company can learn how to listen to their customers, employees and their business and apply what they learn. We also believe that champions of these …

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Sophomore Slump at work – how do you compare?

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In the US, a sophomore is someone who is in their second year of college, with two more years before they (hopefully) graduate. The term ‘sophomore slump’ refers to the significant drop in morale many sophomores feel after the initial excitement of college (and the elaborate on-boarding process) is replaced by the reality of harder courses.

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Welcome to the Smartest Next Step in Taking Care of Your Customers (and Employees)

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Wow. It has been almost 30 years since I began a career dedicated to taking care of customers, and with the upcoming launch of Klever Insight Beta, I feel proud that everyone who takes care of customers can benefit from the next digital leap forward: with Klever Insight. The world’s first digital advisor for Customer Success and Support teams connects strategy to execution, so everyone always takes the smartest next step.

Strategy must be guided from the top, while the changes required are done by front-line managers. Klever Insight helps with both, plus places at your fingers the experience of an entire industry–because we’ve applied open-source principles to running operations. We’ve seeded the platform with customer success and support expertise and templates, and everyone who uses it helps to improve it–paying it forward by improving results for the next group of people that uses it.

Klever Insight:

  • Recommends the smartest strategic focus for your department or group, based on the success of other organizations and your ability to execute.
  • Guides managers to execute by doing just one small thing every day.
  • Measures success with an open metrics standard.

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An AI-powered HiPPO with Big Ears: A Better Way to Plan

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Quite often people ask me why on earth I decided to move from my (allegedly) lucrative consulting practice to become a tech start-up co-founder and CEO, with all the hard work, heartache and risk that it entails.  Well, because I experienced for myself and saw the pain my clients went through without the time, data and directions to actually do the right strategic work that would make a difference. Not to mention the constant struggle to properly implement it and sustain success (always a challenge), but also to prove it generated the right results.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the annual planning process, currently underway at many organizations.  My last post walked through my flawed past approach to annual planning, and in this post I’ll share my learnings and abject failures, all leading to Klever Insight’s birth.

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Executive’s Guide to the few knowledge metrics that matter

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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.

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Measures: Try Guiding, not Grading

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Look carefully what separates ‘success that lasts’ from ‘yet another shiny-object-turned-failed-initiative’, and you will often find the same root cause. Measures, and how they are used. Specifically if they are used to ‘grade’ people or if they are use to guide people to do better.

This was the same obstacle we noted in the last post — the one thing standing in the way as we moved from focusing on Knowledge to Knowledge-in-Action.

If you are what you measure, customer support/service (and if we aren’t careful, customer success) is in a terrible place because most of what we measure is based on outdated phone-based call center metrics from the last century.

The problem is that our world of customers and employees is complex, and we have no way of knowing what specific thing we did caused a specific outcome. We don’t have a way to measure what is important, so what we can measure becomes important.

Even worse, we often put ‘goals’ on activities — the predictable result of which is a set of bad behaviors with poor outcomes for our customers and our employees. We end up ‘grading’ people, and no one likes being managed that way.

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Introducing Klever Insight

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Klever Insight is the first-ever, interactive digital advisor that leverages company and industry expertise to help customer success and support leaders always know “the smartest next step” to best engage employees and customers.

Yup, that’s right. Software. What we always wanted to build.

Four years ago, we began a journey to build software that we wished we had when we ran complex global service and support operations. The journey hasn’t been easy and isn’t over. But this is a major public milestone that we will (modestly) celebrate.

So how did it start? Our first focus — Phase I of Klever Insight if you will — was knowledge-sharing. Why knowledge-sharing? An astounding 60 – 90% of what we do has been done by someone in our ecosystem before.

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