RIGHTNOW GUIDE: KNOWLEDGE BASE AND SEARCH BEST PRACTICES Version 1.1 2010 RightNow Technologies. All rights reserved. RightNow and RightNow logo are trademarks of RightNow Technologies Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. www.rightnow.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS ESTIMATED TIME TO COMPLETE... 1 TARGET AUDIENCE... 1 UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM... 1 ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM THROUGH BEST PRACTICES... 1 1) Best Practice: Your Top 20 most frequent customer searches return great results... 1 2) Best Practice: Regularly monitor your customers' frequent searches... 2 THE RIGHTNOW PROCESS FOR KNOWLEDGE BASE TUNE-UPS... 2 DEFINTION OF TERMS... 6 REFERENCES... 12 ABOUT THE AUTHORS... 12 ABOUT RIGHTNOW TECHNOLOGIES... 13 DISCLAIMER... 13 COPYRIGHT... 13 www.rightnow.com
ESTIMATED TIME TO COMPLETE Assuming you have a reasonable working knowledge of RightNow CX, but no specific expertise with the RightNow Knowledge Base, this Tune-Up should take around 2 hours of focused time to complete. Time may vary depending on the depth of changes that you wish to make to your configuration. TARGET AUDIENCE This document is intended to be used in parallel with the Knowledge Base/Search Tune-Up Checklist, and should be read by anyone who wants to improve the experience customers have when searching for knowledge. UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM Ensuring that your Knowledge Base is properly optimized to help customers find what they need has benefits for both your self-service success rate as well as your customer experience. Knowledge Bases are RightNow s bread and butter. We have worked first hand through thousands of customer implementations; through this extensive experience we have seen a number of patterns arise and we d like to share these with you in the form best practices. Please note that for the remainder of the paper the abbreviation KB will be used to refer to Knowledge Base. ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM THROUGH BEST PRACTICES When thinking about KBs from a business perspective there are only two basic Best Practices. 1) Best Practice: Your Top 20 most frequent customer searches return great results Directive: Each popular search term should return an Answer for the customer's specific need within the top 1-3 results. RNT Guidance: Follow the KB Tune-Up process outlined in this document. Figure 1: A set of great search results 1
2) Best Practice: Regularly monitor your customers' frequent searches Directive: Configure the Keyword Search report be automatically emailed to you once a week. RNT Guidance: Keep an eye on this report to watch for any changes to your Top 20 searches. If new Phrase Stems appears in this list, repeat the KB Tune-Up process for this new customer need. Instructions on setting the Keyword Search report to automatically email itself to you weekly. 1) Use the Agent Desktop and navigate to: REPORTS EXPLORER >> Public Reports\Service\Site Reports\Keyword Search\Keyword Search\ 2) Create a copy of the Keyword Search report and save it somewhere you can remember. 3) Right click on your new copy and choose Edit Report Definition. 4) When in edit mode, under the Home tab, choose Scheduling. 5) Choose Add Schedule, and then change the format to HTML Email (Images/Charts sent in email). 6) Name the schedule, fill in your email address, and set the Reoccurrence to weekly. 7) Save your report. THE RIGHTNOW PROCESS FOR KNOWLEDGE BASE TUNE-UPS Before going further, you may wish to review the Glossary at the end of this document. All bolded KB terms in this document have a corresponding definition listed in the Glossary. RightNow recommends the use of a basic process for troubleshooting and improving client KBs that use the actual words customers have entered into the search box as the basis for efforts to improve their experiences. This process begins by opening the Keyword Search Report located at: REPORTS EXPLORER >>Public Reports\Service\ Site Reports\Keyword Search\Keyword Search\ This report will show you the most frequent Phrase Stems that customers Search Strings can be reduced down to. Clicking on a row in the Answers column will drill down into the report and show you the actual Search Strings that each customer has entered into the search box. 2
Figure 2: A screenshot of a Keyword Search report. Figure 3: Clicking on the REGISTR phrase stem will show you the actual Search Strings that a customer has entered. You will then take the most popular Search String for the most popular Phrase Stem and visit your Customer Portal pages to perform this search. 3
Figure 4: The Search String Registration has been entered on the Customer Portal pages At this point, put yourself in the shoes of your customers in order to evaluate the Search Results shown and take action as needed to ensure that these results are of very high quality. Remember, this term Registration is the #1 thing that customers on this site are trying to find information on. You should invest appropriate effort to give these customers the best chance of self-service success. The flow chart below illustrates how the Tune-Up process proceeds from here. Please review this chart in detail. 4
FIGURE 5: The RightNow process for Knowledge Base Tune-Up You can see that if a top customer Search String returns great results, no further action is need for this search. You can simply proceed to the next most popular Phrase Stem and then proceed. Once you have worked your way though the Top 20 most popular searches, you can be confident that your KB is up to the minimum standard required for a successful web experience. Please note that to maintain this standard you will need to regularly monitor and take action on your Top 20 searches, as these change over time. To go beyond a minimum level of performance, there are several options available to you: 1) Use the Tune-Up process for ALL of your customer searches (not just your top 20). 2) Utilize the free KB Optimization 1 document available on the Customer Community to learn about to use of more advanced KB optimization techniques that are used by our Professional Services organization. 3) Leverage RightNow s paid Professional Services offerings for full service optimization. In addition to a full service KB Optimization 1 offering there is also a comprehensive full service KB Optimization 2 offering for larger customers with multiple interfaces and/or languages. If you are interested in these offerings, please contact your Account Representative. 5
DEFINTION OF TERMS Aliases - An alias is used when customers actual search terms don t match up with the official words you use in your KB. We recommend the use of an Alias instead of a Keyword when it is a term that broadly applies to your KB. This includes things like: Synonyms: Different customers will often use different words to describe the same thing. For instance three customers might refer to the thing they drive as an Automobile or Car or a Vehicle. Abbreviations: RNT and RightNow International variations in spelling: Such as Color and Colour. Certain Misspellings: Customers frequently misspell a word a particular way, such as RightNow, Right Now, and Write Now. If you have a word or phrase that is ambiguous (the same word means different things), do not use an Alias. An example of this might be a product called RightNow Live and a concept called Go Live Date. You should NOT use an alias here because Live can t be mapped to a single concept. Aliases are used during all searches and therefore require an extra level of cloud processing. If you have too many aliases it may impact both the speed and accuracy of your customers searches, so thoughtfully consider each addition to make sure it is useful for a large portion of your users. AND Search Setting your RightNow search engine to use AND type scoring will require that ALL terms entered into the search box be found in an Answer in order for it to be returned. While it may seem tempting to use this type of scoring to ensure only top quality results are returned, we almost always recommend clients use dynamic Search Result Limiting instead. Answer Content The actual information contained in the text of an Answer. This content is automatically indexed for searching, and any words which appear here do not need to have Keywords added for them. 6
Answer Editor The RightNow Answer console. This allows you add new Answers to your Knowledge Base or edit Answers you have already created. Figure 6: A screenshot of the RightNow Answer editor Answer Stop Words A Stop Word is used to prevent a certain term from being used in the scoring of all search results. By default this includes terms such as: I, a, the, but, be, by, can, will. It is common to add a new Stop Word if you Knowledge Base contains a word which is not useful to differentiate between Answers (such as your Company Name). Figure 7: The Answer Stopwords editor. Note that no Suggested Additions are shown this is normal and means that no Stopwords have yet been automatically detected. 7
Answers Last Access Time This is standard RightNow report available to you which shows you the Score (sometimes referred to as the Solved Count) for all of your Answers, and the time each Answers was last viewed by a customer. This score is incremented by usage. Field Bias This refers to the weights which are assigned to each of the Answer attributes that are searched through when looking for an Answer match. We do not normally recommend you change these values. These fields include: Product Category Keywords Box Subject(Summary) Question Answer Body File Attachments Two exceptions to this rule include: 1) Turning down (or off) the Keyword weight (see below), and 2) Turning down (or off) both the Product and Category weight. Keyword IMPORTANT: Keywords are used a bit differently in RightNow that you might expect, and you might instead think of them like Bonus Keywords. When authoring a new Answer, DO NOT assign any keywords! Remember that all words that appear in the Answer Content will automatically be used to return matches for this Answer. You only need to add an Individual Answer keyword if you wish to artificially boost the weighting of an individual word that customers are frequently searching for. For synonyms or customer misspellings, we recommend you instead use an Alias. In the long term, using an Alias will greatly improve your ability to maintain the KB. Keyword Search Report This is a standard RightNow report available to you, and is used to monitor what search terms customers are actually entering into the search box. The actual characters entered are broken down into Phrase Stems and then ranked by the frequency that customers have searched for this term(s). Careful monitoring of this report is critical to help you to uncover customer trends and needs, and take action by adjusting your search results or authoring new Answers to promote self-service. KB An abbreviation for Knowledge Base. KB Optimization 1 A more advanced methodology for KB tuning that goes beyond a Tune-Up. This methodology is available freely on the Customer Community[1] and also as a 2 day paid professional services offering. 8
KB Optimization 2 A paid Professional Services offering to ensure the highest level of KB performance tailored to a specific business use case. This engagement generally takes around 3 weeks of effort over the duration of a month and concludes with an on-site delivery of findings and implementation. OR Search Setting your RightNow search engine to use OR type scoring will return Answer matches for ANY terms entered into the search box. These results are then ranked according to how many times the word or phrase appear in the Answer in addition to the other Field Bias weights. OR Search is the preferred searching method when the document repository is relatively small (compared to Google or Bing), which is the case for all RightNow installations and even most complete corporate document repositories. Compare this against internet or library searching where the document repository is effectively infinite, where an AND search would be better suited. Most of our clients are using OR searching, and many of these clients augment this with Search Result Limiting. Phrase Stem: This refers to the basic word piece that is used for search indexing. Words such as Register, Registering, Registration, and Registered are broken down into the Phrase Stem of REGISTR and then treated as the same word. Phrase Stem is one of the columns shown on the Keyword Search report. Quantum Thermodynamics: This doesn t actually have anything to do with Knowledge Base or Search. We just wanted to make sure you were still awake! We know, we know - it was a dirty rotten trick but given that you carefully read this document, you should probably take our web survey (http://tiny.cc/tune-up-survey) to tell us if this tune-up was useful to you or not. Search Result Limiting Not to be confused with Search Thresholding, this feature uses a dynamic Artificial Intelligence algorithm when scoring customer searches. This feature combines the best of both words from OR searching and AND searching. While the actual algorithm is more sophisticated, you can think of this feature like doing an OR search first (which will return all possible results), and then performing and AND search to see if there is a group of top scoring high quality results which jump to the top and can be separated from the rest. Search Engine The RightNow technical solution that keeps track of which Answers contain what information ranks these Answers for relevancy and then returns Search Results. 9
Search Priority Words These used to be known as Topic Words in versions before May 10. This feature is used to manually show an Answer at the top of all Search Results when a certain Search Term is entered. Using a Topic Word is helpful when you are confident that you know exactly which Answer a customer wants to read when they search for a particular term. We do not you recommend you widely use Search Priority Words, and instead use them sparingly for special situations like when you have an Umbrella Answer. Figure 8: The Search Priority Words editor Search Results The actual Answers that are ranked and returned when a customer search has been performed. Search String Used to refer to the actual words a customer types into the search box. Customers Search Terms are shown in the Keyword Search report. 10
Figure 9: A customer has entered phone. This is stored in the Keyword Search Report as a Search String. Search Thresholding We do not recommend any clients use this feature. This feature has been replaced by the improved Search Result Limiting. Summary Line This field in the Answer Editor represents the title for the Answer that is shown in the search results. A good summary line should be a like a newspaper headline - accurate, punchy, attention grabbing, and limited to 5-7 words. Figure 10: Search Results are shown with the Summary Lines highlighted Solved Count This is an automatically calculated value which is intended to reflect how useful each Answer is. This number is sometimes referred to as the Score for the Answer. 11
Topic Word The old name for Search Priority Words that appears in Feb 10 and before. Umbrella Answer This is technically an Answer like any other Answer, but is called an Umbrella Answer because it serves as introduction or overview to a series of child Answers which describe the information in more detail. Umbrella Answers are commonly used for a Product when the customer enters a generic product query as a Search Term, you can then use a Search Priority Word to point them to your Umbrella Answer on this product rather than showing them a bunch of overly detailed individual Answers. An alternate to using an Umbrella Answer is to require that customers select a Product or Category before presenting them with popular Answers or a search box. See our Web Experience Design tune-up for more information on designing your support home page to support this style of interaction[2]. REFERENCES 1] RightNow Knowledge Base 1 Optimization document, Doug Warner, http://communities.rightnow.com/files/14e9681120/knowledgebaseoptimizationsteps_m ay_2010.pdf 2] RightNow Tune-Up page, http://community.rightnow.com/customer/support/tuneup.php 3] Designing Search User Interfaces, M. Hearst, 2009, (Freely available online) http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/ ABOUT THE AUTHORS Ben Werner, Product Manager for Best Practices, has conducted extensive user research regarding self-service, usability, and customer centric design methods. He also holds a Master s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Minnesota and is a board certified Associate User Experience Professional. Doug Warner, Director of Product Management for Knowledge Foundation, has more than a decade of experience leading all aspects of the design and development of RightNow s Knowledge Base, currently holds 8 patents in the area and is an author on 8 peer-reviewed academic publications on knowledge management. Ben and Doug are not related. No really, we swear. 12
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