KCS 4.1 Search Early Search Often: Knowledge Centered Support
Practice 3: Reuse
Practice 3 Reuse, consists of 4 techniques. The first technique is; Search Early Search Often.
Search Early, Search Often
Searching the knowledge base must become an integral part of the problem solving process and we should search early and we should search often. The best practice for information capture is to search the knowledge base in real time while engaging in conversation with the customer.
The words and phrases we use to search are potential content for new articles if one doesn’t already exist. Once we have captured a description of the issue and some information about the environment (such as hardware or software involved) we then have enough context about the problem to perform a search.
By searching early and getting explicit information about the customers situation, we ensure that we understand the problem as the customer sees it and we minimize the risk of investing time in a problem analysis and research on a problem that has already been solved. The “early searches” in the problem solving process should be done using the customer’s context.
Searching often is important because as we are working on the problem and learning more about the situation we need to re-initiate new searches using this new information to discover what our support organization collectively knows about this or a similar situations.
Searching Is Not A One-Time Event
Searching is not a one-time event but rather something is done throughout the problem solving process. Now there are many advantages of searching often for example
- As new information is collected, searches can be done to see if a knowledge article about this issue or similar issues already exists
- The articles found in a search even if they don’t directly address the issue at hand can provide helpful perspectives from similar issues, this can help direct the conversation and help us identify clarifying questions
- It can reduce the risk of creating duplicate articles, and
- It is particularly important to search the knowledge base one more time before we save a new article just to be sure that one doesn’t already exist
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As shown in KCS Version 5.3 Knowledge-Centered Support Practices Guide (2012) S2 [12.1-3]. KCS v5.3 was written and edited by KCS v5.3 was written and edited by Melissa George, David Kay, Greg Oxton, Rick Joslin, Jennifer MacIntosh, and Kelly Murray.
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