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Home > Product Management > Knowledge Objects
Within a Knowledge Base, Knowledge Objects are units of information about customers' interactions with your product. What is the customer's experience, where do they run into problems, and how are these problems resolved?
Product Managers and Customer Care personnel can work together to create and manage these Knowledge Objects; eventually, as your company grows, you may wish to dedicate personnel to this task.
A format that I have found useful for Knowledge Objects is as follows:
A challenge with the Knowledge Base is creating enough Knowledge Objects that you have coverage of your product and "critical mass" to address the majority of issues that customers of the Knowledge Base have. There is no customer experience more frustrating than finding that the so-called Knowledge Base has no knowledge in it. Once way of getting to critical mass is as follows:
Knowledge Objects
Successful products and services grow like weeds. Typically, after a couple of releases, they become sufficiently large and complicated that a Knowledge Base or other searchable repository of information becomes necessary for storing information about customers' interactions with the product, particularly in those areas where the product usage is non-obvious. The Knowledge Base can be used by Customer Care personnel or perhaps by customers directly, depending on the interface to it.Within a Knowledge Base, Knowledge Objects are units of information about customers' interactions with your product. What is the customer's experience, where do they run into problems, and how are these problems resolved?
Product Managers and Customer Care personnel can work together to create and manage these Knowledge Objects; eventually, as your company grows, you may wish to dedicate personnel to this task.
A format that I have found useful for Knowledge Objects is as follows:
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SUMMARY OF ISSUE OR PROBLEM
Brief statement (1-2 sentences) of the customer-oriented issue that is addressed by this Knowledge Object. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. 2. 3. What are the specific steps the customer would take to experience this issue? Note if there is more than one possible path. STEPS TO RESOLVE 1. 2. 3. What are the specific steps that the customer should take to resolve the issue? KEYWORDS Are there any related keywords that were not included in the descriptions above? If so, list them here to enable better searching by the search engine. |
A challenge with the Knowledge Base is creating enough Knowledge Objects that you have coverage of your product and "critical mass" to address the majority of issues that customers of the Knowledge Base have. There is no customer experience more frustrating than finding that the so-called Knowledge Base has no knowledge in it. Once way of getting to critical mass is as follows:
- Clear aside an afternoon and create Knowledge Objects based on your existing knowledge of the product and the most common support issues. This is your starting base of Knowledge Objects. If you can come up with 25 Knowledge Objects in this session, you're off to a good start.
- Incent your Customer Care team to create Knowledge Objects going forward. One company I know of bases the compensation of their Customer Care representatives on the number of Knowledge Objects they create and update.
- Identify someone with good writing skills to clean up the Knowledge Objects and manage them and make them suitable for public consumption.
