Program data

The design, creation, and implementation of a corporate knowledge base to facilitate the speed-to-market for the customer. The view of this project is at the operational level both from the organizational perspective and customer experience. The agile flow of information involves a reliable operational technology analysis and end-user analysis for the implementation of the general operational framework.

Project initial deployment: 2000.

Request for global implementation and improvements: 2019 – 2020.

The number of people impacted: approx. 5’000 people per total, approx. 200 power-users, 7 business units.

Context

Problem: before 2010, the business only had a basic download section for customers.

This solution was inadequate to meet the client’s needs, besides the fact that the user experience was confusing.

Solution

A new project started in 2010 to provide a better customer journey.

Using SAAS provider ServiceNow, a knowledge base was set up inside the customer support portal, where logged customers can download updated software, consult specialist articles and product release notes.

The Knowledge Base (KB) was split up in two sections: a “Fix” section and a “News” section.

The Fix section contains all the software patches that the customer can download. The “News” section contains all the news, alerts, documents, and other essential information such as security reports.

Each publication within KB has the following main operational attributes:

• unique KB number
• publication & validity date
• active flag; light workflow (draft/review/published/retired)
• company visibility (public/restricted/internal)
• navigation with product line>software product>software version>exact version
• attachments.

Other attributes include business data such as status holder, point of contact, other references and sources.

Authoring roles simplified with the creation of 2 groups: “downloadable software” or “support news”.

The software patches to download stored on the ServiceNow cloud servers, therefore actively assisting any customer from any place. This feature was very useful for onsite consultants.

Project Implementation

The project took only a couple of month to be in production.

The first reactions were very positive because each customer had access to the “Support Portal” via his web browser. The customer can easily download software files and search or read articles.

Long-term viability

This project was a success: a rapid implementation, accurate and error-free, with a minimal budget. The Knowledge Base answered all customer needs with an easy-to-use format.

Phase two of this project is in progress and has the objective of re-designing the dashboard and to add more search options. As the business is growing and products are becoming more complex and diverse, the re-designing will facilitate the navigation through the separation of the software by the major family product.