Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS), also known as Knowledge-Centered Service, is a customer service methodology designed to manage and share knowledge more effectively.
It focuses on capturing, organizing, and reusing knowledge to solve customer problems quickly and efficiently.
Customers expect quick, accurate answers. To keep up, support teams need a better way to capture and share what they already know. This is where Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) comes into play. KCS changes the traditional approach to customer service by giving support teams a centralized, continuously updated knowledge base to work from.
By adopting the KCS process, businesses can significantly reduce response times and improve the accuracy of their solutions.
Support teams can turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to refine and expand their knowledge base, ultimately delivering better, faster results. With KCS, support teams become more efficient, customers get answers quickly, and overall satisfaction improves.
In this blog, we’ll explore KCS, how it works, and how implementing it can transform your customer service experience.
Key takeaways
- Knowledge-centered support helps teams capture, organize, reuse, and improve support knowledge as part of daily customer service work.
- The KCS process works best when agents document real customer issues while the answer is still fresh.
- A shared knowledge base helps agents give more consistent answers and helps customers find useful self-service content.
- Regular review cadences keep articles accurate as products, services, and customer questions change.
- Camtasia Snagit and Camtasia Editor can help support teams add screenshots, short videos, and walkthroughs to make knowledge-base articles easier to follow.
What is Knowledge Centered Support (KCS)?
Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) is a support methodology that captures, organizes, reuses, and improves knowledge from real customer interactions. The KCS methodology was developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation to help support teams streamline their knowledge management processes.
By continuously improving the knowledge base with every interaction, support teams ensure that they provide consistent, high-quality answers to common customer inquiries.
This approach helps organizations respond to customer issues more rapidly and create a self-service model where customers can find solutions on their own without needing to contact support. The result is improved customer satisfaction, faster problem-solving, and a more scalable support system.
How does the KCS process work?
The KCS process is a set of steps that helps support teams build and use knowledge while they work.
At its core, KCS follows a simple pattern: capture knowledge, organize it, reuse it, and improve it over time. Each step helps improve the knowledge base with every customer interaction, making support faster and more efficient.
Step 1: Capture knowledge as you work
KCS begins by documenting real customer issues as agents solve them. When building a knowledge base from the ground up, there is no better place to start than by creating knowledge-base articles about the very interactions you’re helping customers in real time.
This ensures that the content created is relevant to those seeking help. The best place to start is to take each common support interaction in a single day and create a knowledge-base article to answer that question. This will help build up your knowledge base quickly.
Step 2: Organize knowledge for easy use
Organized categories and sections make KCS articles easier for customers and agents to find. While it’s good to have a lot of knowledge-base articles, it’s even better to organize them so that customers can easily and intuitively navigate to them.
Spending time sorting similar articles into categories and sections can go a long way toward helping customers find what they need without opening a service request.
Step 3: Reuse knowledge to stay consistent
Shared articles help agents give consistent answers and reduce repeat writing. As a customer, getting different answers from different support agents on the same question can be very disheartening. When your support team works from a shared knowledge source and can send links to articles, they give customers consistent, accurate answers.
Not only can support agents reuse answers while helping customers, but customers themselves can also find answers to their own questions without needing to contact support.
Step 4: Keep improving knowledge
KCS articles need regular updates as products, services, and customer questions change. It’s important to keep the information updated as the knowledge base grows. Regularly reviewing and improving the articles ensures that they stay accurate and useful.
Support teams should update the knowledge base as products or services change to keep everything current and helpful.
What are the benefits of knowledge-centered support?
KCS offers many benefits to both customers and support teams. Businesses can improve their customer service and satisfaction by using a knowledge-centered approach.
Enhance customer experiences with KCS
KCS improves the customer experience by helping customers find accurate answers faster. When a knowledge base is updated regularly, customers can find solutions quickly without contacting support.
Self-service options, like finding articles in the knowledge base, give customers more control and reduce the need for service requests.
Improve customer satisfaction
Consistent, reliable answers are the main driver of customer satisfaction in KCS. When customers receive fast, accurate information, they are more likely to have a positive experience.
Support teams can use KCS to find patterns in recurring issues and fix them in the knowledge base, making future interactions smoother and more efficient.
How does KCS help support teams?
KCS doesn’t just help customers—it also makes life easier for support teams. Support teams can solve problems faster and work more efficiently by using a shared knowledge base.
Faster problem solving with KCS
A shared knowledge base lets agents solve known issues without starting from scratch. With KCS, support teams can access a centralized knowledge base that grows with every customer interaction.
This means agents can quickly find the answers they need without having to start from scratch. Instead of spending time searching for solutions, they can focus on resolving issues. As the knowledge base expands, problem-solving becomes faster and easier, benefiting both the team and the customer.
Continuous improvement through knowledge sharing
KCS improves over time because agents refine articles based on real interactions. One of the key principles of KCS is continuous improvement. Support agents constantly refine and expand the knowledge base based on real-time customer interactions.
This ensures that the knowledge base stays current and useful for everyone. By updating content, teams ensure that they always have the most accurate information, making their jobs easier and more effective.
How do you implement knowledge-centered support?
Implementing KCS in your organization requires a few key steps to ensure its success. Here’s how to get started:
Step 1: Teach support staff KCS principles
Teams need KCS training and leadership buy-in before the workflow can stick. By adopting the KCS core principles you can start your organization on a path of collaboration and continuous learning.
It is important to educate your support teams on the benefits of KCS to ensure buy-in from them and leadership.
Step 2: Build a knowledge base from customer support interactions
New KCS content should come from real customer support interactions. Create a robust knowledge base by having agents create content and publish knowledge-base articles based on their customer support interactions. Teams should capture the answer once during or immediately after the customer interaction, then reuse that source in the knowledge base and future replies.
Camtasia Snagit can help easily capture screenshots or video tutorials that can be included in knowledge base articles to improve clarity and understanding. Utilizing the Camtasia Snagit step tool to help guide users along a specific set of steps in a knowledge base article can be very valuable when paired with written steps.
Step 3: Review and update the knowledge base regularly
Regular article reviews keep the knowledge base accurate and useful. Be sure to encourage support teams to regularly review and update their knowledge base to ensure it remains accurate and relevant.
Having a review cadence for each article can help make sure all articles get continuous improvements. Not all articles need to be reviewed at the same cadence. It’s okay to use different cadences for different articles, depending on how often each article’s relevance and accuracy change.
Another way to keep the knowledge base fresh is to use a program like Camtasia Editor to create updated video tutorials or demonstrations that show how to resolve customer-facing issues.
How do Camtasia Snagit and Camtasia Editor enhance knowledge-centered support?
KCS can be even more effective when paired with the right tools. Camtasia Snagit and Camtasia Editor help support teams create clear, visual content that makes knowledge-base articles more engaging and easier to understand.
Capturing clear visuals with Camtasia Snagit
Camtasia Snagit helps agents add screenshots and short videos that make support steps easier to follow. A picture can often explain a process better than text alone. Camtasia Snagit makes it easy for support teams to capture screenshots and record short videos to document solutions.
Those captures are a practical way to document the exact steps an agent just used to solve a customer issue. These visuals can be added to knowledge-base articles to help customers and agents follow step-by-step instructions. The step tool feature is helpful, as it visually guides users through a process, making complex solutions easier to understand.
Creating tutorials with Camtasia Editor
Camtasia Editor helps support teams create more detailed walkthroughs for complex issues. For more detailed explanations, Camtasia Editor is an excellent tool for creating video tutorials.
Support teams can record in-depth walkthroughs to show how to resolve more complicated customer issues. These videos can then be embedded directly into knowledge-base articles, providing customers with helpful visual aids that complement the written instructions.
A Camtasia Editor walkthrough can support a knowledge-base article and give agents a consistent reference for more complex issues. With Camtasia Editor, even the most complex solutions become accessible and easy to follow.
How does TechSmith use KCS?
TechSmith uses KCS practices to create, reuse, and review knowledge-base articles based on support trends. TechSmith has been adopting many of the steps in the KCS methodology to build out a very comprehensive knowledge base.
We have multiple support team members creating knowledge-base articles based on recent ticket trends. These articles are then reused by the entire support team to quickly solve issues which results in higher customer satisfaction.
We have also established a process where support team members review current knowledge-base articles each time we release a new version of our software to ensure they remain up-to-date and accurate.
We can measure the success of our knowledge base by using a self-service ratio. The self-service ratio is the total number of knowledge base views on our support site divided by the total number of new tickets created in that same time frame.
TechSmith’s self-service score is roughly 3.6 times higher than the industry average.
Camtasia’s self-service score is roughly 3.6 times higher than the industry average.
What challenges can affect KCS implementation?
The main KCS challenges are getting agents to contribute and keeping articles accurate as the knowledge base grows. One key challenge organizations face as they implement Knowledge-Centered Support is ensuring their support teams actively contribute to and use the knowledge base.
A great way to overcome this challenge is to provide training on the KCS principles and have your support teams use tools such as Camtasia Snagit and Camtasia Editor to make creating content easier as they document and share knowledge.
Another challenge is maintaining the accuracy and relevance of the knowledge base as it grows.
It’s important to establish regular reviews and updates of knowledge base articles. Using a tool such as Camtasia Editor to update video tutorials will also ensure the articles reflect current processes.
If you are using Zendesk Guide as your knowledge center they also have an article verification feature that lets you set reminders to verify your articles are still up-to-date. It has the flexibility to create different verification cadences, which can be applied to different articles.
This is great because different articles need to be updated or verified at different frequencies based on the content in the article.
Conclusion
The practical takeaway is simple: capture knowledge from real interactions, reuse it, and review it regularly. Adopting Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) can help your support teams solve problems faster, improve customer satisfaction, and build a continuously evolving knowledge base.
By capturing and reusing knowledge, KCS helps support teams answer customer questions consistently while empowering customers to solve problems through self-service. Incorporating tools like Camtasia Snagit and Camtasia Editor into your KCS process makes creating and updating helpful content even easier.
These tools allow support teams to document solutions clearly and visually, making the knowledge base more effective for both customers and agents. Try Camtasia free and start building your next support walkthrough from a real customer question.
Frequently asked questions
What does KCS mean in customer support?
KCS stands for Knowledge-Centered Support, also known as Knowledge-Centered Service. It is a customer service methodology for capturing, organizing, reusing, and improving support knowledge. The goal is to help teams answer customer questions faster while keeping those answers consistent and useful over time.
How should a team start using knowledge-centered support?
Start by turning common support interactions into knowledge-base articles. Capture the answer during or soon after the customer interaction, while the steps are still clear. Add screenshots, short videos, or longer walkthroughs when visuals make the answer easier to follow.
How often should KCS articles be reviewed?
KCS articles should be reviewed regularly so the knowledge base stays accurate and relevant. Not every article needs the same review cadence. Articles about frequently changing products, services, or processes may need more frequent review than stable reference content.
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