Imagine using up to 87 sources of information on more than a dozen technology platforms to answer a customers question. Over 200 customer service representatives did just that.. everyday.. until they were consolidated into a simple knowledge management solution.

1. Knowledge Management
A Case Study by Diane Jacobsen
curiosita, LLC
January 2011
Background: A major Automotive Manufacturer had over time (mostly due to organic growth)
created multiple content repositories in almost every functional area of their business. Many
of these data repositories and web sites were designed without a strategy, master plan or
consistent standards. The result is that Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, Engineering, and
Product managers have a difficult time accessing and acquiring accurate and trusted
information, and have no way of knowing which version of the truth is the most recent or
cogent. Not only is the accessing of good, managed information key to a company's
performance, but the costs involved of the wasted management time, poor Customer Service
numbers, care and maintenance of multiple information sources can easily impact the bottom
line and skyrocket out of control.
For example: the Customer Service desk had 87 separate sources available to them to
answer customer questions. Of these sources: 70% were accessible on a number of
individually managed web sites, 20% within applications or internal data bases, and 10%
were buried and “maintained” by a single subject matter expert (SME).
Desired Solution: Access to everything in one place with a "Google like" search interface
and function. Design the system to have a single point of management and control, while still
allowing for a multiple group of users to have timely and consistent access.
Design Approach & Testing: Utilizing the design thinking process context phase, the team
worked closely with Customer Service representatives to understand the current process and
barriers to call resolution including the identification of all content sources; prioritizing the top
20, then rapidly developing low fidelity prototypes of the user experience.
Then, the ideation phase created a user-centered design in order to consolidate the
information into a single dashboard experience. Prototypes of these design concepts were
created as low fidelity prototypes for evaluation by multiple end-user groups, adjacent
stakeholders, and executive sponsors. In addition, the process created a robust taxonomy,
controlled vocabulary, and metadata model to ensure consistent data formatting, tags with
access to source, version, and improve findability using search technology.
To ensure adoption of this new solution, the team developed a Organizational Change
Management (OCM) plan aimed at all affected stakeholders, which included a
communications plan, a training plan, and a phased development and deployment strategy.
This approach was designed to providing the most appropriate content (of greatest value) that
resulted in raising the completion percentages of Customer Service calls within the first
contact.
Copyright 2011 curiosita, LLC All Rights Reserved 1

2. Result: A consistent site experience with access to all 87 original sources of information was
designed to provide a common database that yielded a single point of access and search, by
a multiple number of uses. After the OCM plan was implemented, the results of this design
thinking approach was significant and measurable:
• There was a 100% adoption rate by end users.
• An increase in customer satisfaction metrics over 2X our starting baseline within 12
months of deployment.
• A significant reduction in call escalation.
This holistic, Design Thinking driven solution was so successful it was deployed to other
departments and became one of the most impactful Enterprise solutions for product
knowledge management throughout the company. Five years later, it remains a valuable
success story to management, as well as a template for both existing and future systems.
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For More Information, please contact:
Diane Jacobsen, Principal
curiosita, LLC
Seattle,WA
email: dianej@curiosita.biz
web: www.curiosita.biz
Copyright 2011 curiosita, LLC All Rights Reserved 2