In today's fierce global competition excellent customer support is a decisive competitive edge.

The key to excellent customer support is knowledge. In-depth product knowledge solves a customer's problem the first time. Configuring a new system correctly assures a problem free start-up and a satisfied customer.

Today's fast product cycles and complex products make customer support operations critically dependent upon up-to-date accurate knowledge.

KSD has developed an architecture to capture and deploy critical knowledge throughout a company's customer support operations. This design is based on existing computer software and networking standards. A knowledge base provides a repository for the critical support operations knowledge. Standard interfaces provide access to databases or other data repositories. A web based front end provides access to the knowledge using standard browsers and other web technologies.

The knowledge base is the key component of the system. Knowledge for customer support applications can often be captured using decision trees. Decision trees can represent the complex series of actions and choices to configure a new product, or a set of steps for positively isolating a fault. Using a pre-built library of software objects any number of decision trees may be constructed. Commands can be embedded in the decision trees to automate routine time consuming activities, for example, a lookup and comparison of specific sets of data from different databases, or sending sequence specialized commands to reset a network switch.

As knowledge is built into the knowledge base it becomes available to all customer service representatives. A key feature of this knowledge base is that it is easily maintained by support operations personnel. A graphical development environment allows decision trees and commands to be quickly assembled and made active. This centralized knowledge management ensures all support representatives use the latest knowledge available.

Another advantage of capturing support knowledge is that initial versions of a knowledge base may be assembled during the development of a new product. This allows detailed design knowledge to be captured and made available to the customer support organization immediately upon roll out of a new product.

Decision trees are not the only form of knowledge representation available. Depending upon the knowledge to be captured, rules, neural nets or other knowledge representations can be added in a modular fashion.

The knowledge base contains the business knowledge. Other business data necessary for operations is often stored in databases or legacy systems. This architecture is designed to concurrently access many sources of data. Off the shelf bridges are available for most commercial databases (Oracle, Sybase, RDB, etc…) as well as ODBC compliant databases. In addition to database connectivity, generic bridge software is available to connect to legacy systems that have their own application interface.

The goal of this flexible connectivity is to provide seamless data access across multiple data sources. This architecture shields the users from having to know details about data access. Customer service representatives can concentrate on the customer eliminating the time and distraction of accessing different sources of data. During a customer support session data from multiple sources can be correlated to help make complex decisions. Of course this connectivity works both ways allowing data to be distributed to multiple databases or applications.

A web browser is typically used as the user interface to this system, however it is possible to link to existing non-browser interfaces by customizing a generic bridge.

There are several advantages to the web interface. It is based on open standards and thus is easily upgraded. It is based on Internet technology and is scalable to thousands of users. It can be extended to the public domain allowing customers to get help that would have previously required a call to customer support.

• Valuable business knowledge is captured and distributed to all customer service representatives increasing the efficiency of support operations.
• Updated knowledge is instantly available to all users.
• A graphical knowledge base interface simplifies maintenance and updates allowing operations personnel to maintain and update business knowledge.
• Standards based interfaces provide wide ranging connectivity.
• User interface based on Internet standards simplifies upgrades and scalability.
• Knowledge can be extended onto the World Wide Web reducing service call volume.