PhaseWare Knowledge Base Centered Customer Support

Customer Support can be a major challenge for most small to medium sized companies. The biggest challenge for software companies concerning customer support usually centers around areas of specialized knowledge. Usually too few people have an expertise in many key areas of a software product. Some of these areas are just in-depth understanding of product features, other areas are undocumented installation and implementation processes that are instrumental in supporting the product.

I see the problem being that key people are protecting this information in order to be “King” at these companies or this information is never extracted from the knowledge brokers into something that is usable. Without a tool to harvest this information into a searchable database that can be integrated into daily customer support process these companies are in critical danger of being limited by this person or group of persons.

The solution is to invest in a customer support tool that will let each incident that is logged be either linked to an existing knowledge base article or let that incident be the genesis of a new knowledge base article. I call this a 360 degree knowledge base centered customer support model.

There are many benefits to this model. One being that everyone can participate in adding to a knowledge repository that can be utilized multiple times to solve similar problems. The return on this investment is easy to compute.