KCS & the AI Revolution: Building Powerful Knowledge

Welcome to the Service Management Show. From the team here at Ficode, I'm Gary Blower, IT service management practice lead, and this week we're going to be talking about Knowledge-Centered Support or Knowledge-Centered Service. I'll let my guest introduce himself.

Hi everyone, I'm Jack Graves, the founder and CEO of Capable. We're an Atlassian marketplace partner, and I'm here to talk about Knowledge-Centered Services.

So Jack and I first started chatting a couple of weeks ago at Connect in London, which you can see in a previous episode of the Service Management Show. We were discussing Jack's area of expertise around Atlassian Confluence and using it for knowledge and collaboration. I thought it was an interesting topic to feature on the next Service Management podcast.

If you're not familiar with Knowledge-Centered Support or Knowledge-Centered Service, it's a framework or methodology that's been around for about 15 to 20 years. It's not new, but it's had a resurgence recently due to the importance of knowledge for large language models and AI. There's a greater focus on Knowledge-Centered Support.

In layman's terms, Knowledge-Centered Support is about providing knowledge rather than just responses. If you're a support team receiving questions, don't just provide an answer; create a knowledge article and share it. This way, when the same question arises again, you already have the knowledge documented.

Jack, what would you say are the main benefits of using a knowledge base for self-service?

I think it speeds up resolution time, as support staff can refer to what others have already solved. We've all experienced solving an issue only to have it come up again, forcing us to re-understand the problem. Previously, documenting bugs and issues was an afterthought, but now, as we move towards AI agent models, building a knowledge base has become increasingly important.

I've worked with knowledge bases for a long time. When I took over a team at a bank that managed development and testing tools, I told them to write the knowledge article first when they received an inquiry or problem. Initially, there was pushback, as it seemed to take longer.

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To wrap things up, do you have any general tips for using a knowledge base, specifically in Confluence?

The first tip would be consistency. If you're creating how-to articles or guides, have templates to ensure uniformity across the knowledge base. You don't want different support agents writing in varying styles.

The second point is to organize your spaces logically. In Confluence, spaces are the logical containers for your pages. Don't mix draft content with external content in the same space, especially with Jira Service Desk.

Lastly, implement a review process for your content. You want to avoid someone publishing inappropriate material that could cause reputational damage. A rigid approval process is essential.