ABSTRACT ORGANIC KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR WEB-BASED CUSTOMER SERVICE.pdfVIP

1 ORGANIC KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR WEB-BASED CUSTOMER SERVICE Stephen D. Durbin, Doug Warner, J. Neal Richter, and Zuzana Gedeon RightNow Technologies ABSTRACT This chapter introduces practical issues of information navigation and organizational knowledge management involved in delivering customer service via the Internet. An adaptive, organic approach is presented that addresses these issues. This approach relies on both a system architecture that embodies effective knowledge processes, and a knowledge base that is supplemented with meta-information acquired automatically through various data mining and artificial intelligence techniques. An application implementing this approach, RightNow eService Center, and the algorithms supporting it are described. Case studies of the use of eService Center by commercial, governmental and other types of organizations are presented and discussed. It is suggested that the organic approach is effective in a variety of information-providing settings beyond conventional customer service. INTRODUCTION The phrase organizational data mining in the title of this book suggests the importance of tapping all sources of information within an organization. The bare term “data mining” is most often applied to the extraction of patterns and relationships from databases or other structured data stores, enabling the productive use of information otherwise buried in overwhelming quantities of raw data. More recently, methods have been developed to extract information from relatively unstructured text documents, or at least to render that information more available via techniques of information retrieval, categorization, and extraction. But in spite of such progress, one major source of organizational knowledge often remains inadequately managed. It is widely recognized that much of the knowledge of any organization resides in its people. A major difficulty in tapping this key resource is that much of this kno