NetApp
Nomination Details
NetApp Support is heavily invested in helping our customers resolve any issues they face with NetApp products and services. In 2020, we embarked on our Knowledge-Centered Services Version 6 (KCSv6) journey by relaunching our Knowledge Base (KB) site on CXone Expert, with the aim of improving customer success with our products through the efficient creation, usage and sharing of organizational knowledge.
As part of our efforts to provide best-in-class user experience for our customers and employees, we did a second redesign of the site in May of 2023 and improved the Site Taxonomy and Hierarchy. We continue to add several new features to the NetApp KB site using CXone Expert APIs, DekiScript and customized scripts developed by the NetApp KCS teams to meet the growing and evolving demands of our customers, employees, and our Knowledge Management (KM) program –KCS.
The CXone Expert platform played a significant role in our KCSv6 implementation and pivoting us towards being an organization with improved operational efficiency and increased self-services success, while enabling organizational learning. Today with the help of CXone Expert platform, we have a mature and successful KCS program and we continue to be razor focussed on ensuring world-class digital support experience for our customers. We are elated that this focus has helped us earn several industry recognitions.
Awards and Recognitions
Knowledge Management and Site Awards
• CXone Expert KCS Award (2022) Innovation Award (2023) and Most
Admired Award (2022, 2023)
• Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital Excellence Award 2022
Digital Support Awards
• Association of Support Professionals (ASP) support site wins 6 years in a
row: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 2022, 2023
• Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA) Award 2023
• Notable: 2020 ASP Overall Best Support Site Award
• Stevie® Awards for multiple Customer Service categories and levels in
2019, 2020 and 2021, 2022, 2023
• Award details can be found at
https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/info/aboutsupport
Site Taxonomy and Hierarchy Changes
In 2023, the KB team revamped the entire site taxonomy. The site hierarchy was completely changed to a customer centric design, where Categories, Guides, and Knowledge Articles were organized based on customer usage patterns.
The out-of-the box category and guide pages had limited options for article widgets. For instance, the Recently Created and Recently Updated tabs, did not have any timestamp, making it difficult to understand the recency of the articles. We customized the category and guide pages using a script and CXone APIs to show the Recently created and Recently Updated KBs along with the timestamp from the CXone Database.
Another innovative change in the platform was done using Javascript, CSS, and HTML. We added custom tabs to our guides and pages which gave us the flexibility to add different content formats (Resolution guides, videos, etc) into the Guide page, providing users all the relevant content for a product area within the Guide. This feature is not available in the native UI, and has been a significantly used addition to the site.
New and improved Website Design
Guide Page with Time Stamp for Recently Created Articles
The taxonomy and hierarchy changes required the team to
• Redesign 90+ pages during the release activity
• Move 8k articles to new guides via script
• Add Value Added Content (VAC) for 30+ Product pages
• Add Resolution Guides, KBTv videos at Product level
• Customize tabs for Recently Added and Recently Created articles
Also, we were able to accomplish these vast changes to the site with
• 0 mins downtime during the entire activity
• 0 dependency on IT and CXone Expert team
• No additional cost or IT development during the entire project
• API issues identified during the release activity were immediately fixed.
Robust Auto-Archival (through in-house script)
To ensure that our knowledge base only has the most relevant content and to improve searchability and findability of documents, we have started archiving content that is obsolete or has low usage. We were able to bulk archive close to 3000 articles from various guides, while adding the required metadata to ensure the archived articles are clearly differentiated in the repository.
Script automated archival
We developed an in-house script that helps reduce the manual effort by automating the archival process. The script checks identified archived content stored in an external repository. Based on the page IDs of the articles, the script moves the articles into the appropriate Archival folders, changes confidence to Archived, and adds the word ARCHIVED to the Title of the KB.
Script helped solve tool limitation
The Expert tool allows only publishers to access archived pages, which was a blocker for us, as we require all pro members to be able to access archived content, and retrieve it, if they need to use it to solve a customer issue. The script helps us control the visibility of archived articles and allows all promembers access them, if required. This flexibility is important for our Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) program and practices.
Script to Update Title & URLs
The Expert tool allows all characters in the URL, which caused challenges for us as some special characters would result in a broken URL, especially in touchpoint implementations. We have more than 1000+ engineers creating content, and to enforce all of them to use the right characters in the title was a challenge.
To overcome the issues caused by the inadvertent inclusion of undesired special characters in the title, we developed a script to strip all the special characters and convert them to “ _” (underscore) which helped us solve the problem and improve our ranking on Google
Our Globalization Efforts
Additional language sites
To broaden our services to different geographies, we included two additional language sites to support our Japanese and Chinese customers in 2020. Our Japanese and Simplified Chinese KB sites provide our customers with fully automated machine translated content, which is powered by SDL Translation Management System.
Instant Translation for German
To extend our site’s global reach, and to identify potential requirement and usage of German language, we leveraged CXone Expert’s neural machine translation solution to provide on-page translations in German to our logged in users. This along with two additional language sites (Japanese and Chinese) helped provide two types of translation services for our customers. The translation quality of both types of translations are acceptable, and beneficial for customers. While we had to turn off instant translations, in view of some technical glitches, we hope to turn it on soon, and provide our German users the benefit of accessing content in their preferred language.
Enhancements to existing features
Tracking and auditing KBs created or updated by support engineers while resolving customer cases, auditing cases closed by support engineers on a regular basis, and addressing user feedback on KBs in the database are important activities that help evaluate and sustain the success and maturity of a KCS program. The NetApp KB team has created multiple dashboards (general and personalized) using CXone Expert APIs, DekiScript and custom Java script to track authoring activities, manage feedback, and address audit process gaps.
Feedback dashboard
The Feedback Dashboard allows the NetApp KB team and the Knowledge Domain Expert (KDE) teams to track, assign and close feedback within 24 to
48 hours of receiving them. In addition, it allows us to segregate feedback as technical, non-technical external, and Internal so that we can prioritize
and forward the feedback to the right SMEs to address. In 2023, we enhanced the dashboard by adding closure codes. Closure codes help us understand the quality of feedback submitted by our support team. It helps us identify if the feedback was valid or invalid and whether it contributed to the improvement of the database.
Key KCS Features
• KCS Article Structure--Templates that adhere to our content standards:
• Customized templates for both Experience-based or Solve Loop and Compliance-based or Evolve Loop content requirements.
• Conditional content containers to manage visibility for customers, partners, and internal users.
• Authoring and editing privileges based on KCS license of the author—KCS ReaderPlus, KCS Candidate, KCS Contributor, KCS Publisher. KCS ReaderPlus is a new KCS license, that allows us to differentiate between a new employee and trained employees.
• Use of draft manager to manage Evolve loop content by making them KCS enabled=no
• Flexibility to create content formats such as Interactive Workflows and Resolution guides. These workflows and guides are designed to provide our customers the convenience of finding articles related to one topic or a common theme within the same location.
• The Solve Loop: Capture Manager for appropriate authoring controls
• Ability to set or change visibility and confidence
• Ability to flag or fix content issues
• Ability to create new and update content in the workflow based on the KCS license of the user.
• The Evolve Loop and Content Health:
• Draft Manager provides an alternate authoring workflow for Evolve Loop articles like Resolution paths, Resolution guides and Interactive Workflows, by limiting the editing privileges for these articles to small group of Subject Matter Experts.
• Feedback feature allows customers to be part of the content creation process by providing them means to ask for content improvement.
• CXone Expert APIs allow customers accessing KBs from outside the KB site, for example from the support site, to provide feedback using the TouchPoint functionality.
• CXone Expert APIs allowed us to create multiple personalized and general dashboards that help identify content process gaps, track author activities, etc. Some of our most popular dashboards are coach's dashboard, archival dashboard, and WIP dashboard.
• CXone Expert reports to help us identify top-used content and broken links. Top-used content is further optimized for search engines.
• Process Integration: CXone Expert APIs allow TouchPoints to be integrated into the Case Management tool, thereby providing the following functionalities.
• Knowledge Base is integrated into the SmartSolve search allowing the engineer to find appropriate knowledge articles from within the tool without opening another tab to search the KB database. This has improved the efficiency and time taken to resolve cases
• Touchpoint integration allows engineers to create, update, or flag content while working on a customer case.
• KB articles created using WIP editor within SmartSolve can be added to the KB database with a click of a button ensuring a seamless experience for our engineers and improving employee satisfaction.
• KB articles can be searched and directly linked to a case from within SmartSolve, for later review and analysis to drive process improvements or product refinements as part of the Evolve Loop process.
• Performance Assessment: Integration of Content Standard Checklist (CSC) audit form into CXone Expert platform.
• To provide our coaches the convenience of doing CSC audits from within the CXone Expert platform, we integrated the CSC audit form from SmartSolve using an iFrame.
• The coaches can review the first version of the article when it was created during case closure.
• The coaches can review and add the audit scores within one platform, which saves time. Previously, they were required to audit in SmartSolve and view the article in CXone Expert platform.
Below is a screen shot of the CSC form integrated into the CXone Expert platform:
Note: Seamless integration and ease of use of all tools required for case management and closure has significantly improved the process adherence score of our technical support teams.
Results and Impact
Our KCS program has yielded exceptional results:
• Performance Assessment – over the last year
Process Adherence Review maintained at >85%
Article creation rate: improved by 64%
Article reuse rate: improved by 25% ü CSC: maintained over 90%
• Team Licenses
90% of support engineers are licensed publishers
99% of our L1 team are licensed ReaderPlus
100% coaches are licensed
96% support leadership are licensed
• Digital Support Success
~52 Industry Certified KCSv6 Practitioners
> 800 Knowledge Articles published per month, close to 36K articles by end of 2023
95% of our Knowledge Articles are shared externally—a 40% increase from pre CXone Expert days
Orphaned WIP articles in the system reduced by 90% (Dashboards provide engineers ability to review the status of articles they create and complete them on a timely basis)
>3.5M monthly page views to our digital support sites and > 700K monthly page views on the KB site.
Our language sites bring us >75,000 page views each month.
99% of support journeys include digital channels
>90:1 Contact Ratio across our 5-Channel Support Delivery model—more-than tripled since realigning to KCSv6 Best Practices. (Contact Ratio is the number of Digital Support Engagement (web sessions) seen for every Assisted Support Case that is opened) (Goal was 30:1)
<5% of all answers are assisted support cases
Our CSAT scores are at an all-time high of 4.5/5
Our Customer Effort Score is also at an all-time high with 95%
These exceptional results tie directly to our KCS program success for which we owe a big thanks to CXone Expert platform