Picture this, you are working and receive an “urgent” ticket, detailing a customer having a license issue that is preventing their software from being used at all, affecting all users in their organization. Obviously you would want to resolve this customer issue immediately.
This is a true story observed by our founder Mukunda Johnson while he worked at a company that supported a portfolio of nearly one hundred products.
You can imagine that documentation may not be perfect if you maintain such a broad portfolio. While resolving this urgent ticket, information was lacking on the article that described the prerequisite steps, namely outdated contact information regarding who to verify urgent license extensions with.
To make matters worse, the company was fully remote and used asynchronous communication extensively. Basically, that means it would be difficult to find someone to get answers from immediately.
The issue was eventually resolved, but not as fast as it should have been. The next step after resolution would be to correct the documentation. The company had a documentation curation process like so:
- Raise a ticket with the knowledge curation team.
- Describe the changes that you would like to see in the documentation.
- Wait for the ticket to be processed.
- Review any feedback or questions from the knowledge curation team.
- The final draft goes in for final review.
- The updated documentation is published.
What we see here is a process that is designed for customer-facing documentation. Unfortunately, the company used this process for both internal and customer-facing articles. The upsides to this process is that you end up with clean and curated documentation. The downside is the cost, latency, and possible loss of information due to context passing.
Cost: The company’s knowledge curators were paid more by the hour than the agents. Assigning them work is always expensive.
Latency: To get the information visible to your teammates, the ticket has to undergo the entire publishing process first.
Loss of Information: In the best case, the knowledge curator understands your request exactly. That is commonly not the case, and instead, some detail is lost as they have not experienced the reasoning behind the request directly. It is especially tedious to describe everything to a knowledge curator, and even then, more detail can clutter the important detail.
Now, imagine if the process was this:
- Leave a note
Wow! So, for any internal documentation, the agent can provide corrections directly without involving another team, instantly sharing the information with other agents that view the same material.
That is the magic of annotation. There is no change of the original content, hence nothing can be lost. More information is attached and presented directly to guide the next user. Instant, great results without the cost.
Now, this isn’t to say that cleanly curated content is a bad thing. Dropnote also has methods to track which notes are popular. With that data, you can guide your knowledge curation team, using the traffic insights to triage work time towards where it will scale the most.
Everyone wins here, and we’d hope that value is easy to see. Book a demo with us today to see how easy it is to get started.