All the team's knowledge in your pocket

In technical service, employees acquire a great deal of knowledge over years or even decades and thus become real experts. This is often knowledge gained from experience that is not written in any manual or instructions. If such an expert leaves the company, much of this knowledge is lost forever. The disappearance of these "knowledge treasures" is therefore one of the biggest challenges for customer service.

Service employees now naturally use messenger services such as WhatsApp to exchange information about service cases and their solutions. However, these lack the necessary functions for professional use: anonymization, translation, search for synonyms, ensuring information quality, reusability, data security, etc.

In particular, data protection regulations and internal company requirements are far from being met by all messenger services. As soon as customer data is communicated, service employees and their superiors are treading on thin ice.

It is also difficult to find solutions that have already been created in the chat history. For colleagues who were not in the chat group at the right time, this digital knowledge is no longer accessible. If the group is disbanded at some point, this information is lost forever.

Empolis Service Express® addresses all of these challenges with its innovative "Community & Team Knowledge" function. With the help of an app, service technicians can discuss how they solve customer problems on a daily basis. With Community and Team Knowledge, chats are created based on problems and the right experts are identified based on their skills. In this way, service employees not only solve every problem, but also tap into their colleagues' wealth of knowledge to make the organization and employees a little better every day.

The solutions developed by the team can be published directly or edited into professional knowledge articles, translated and saved in the knowledge portal with just a few clicks. All content and attachments, such as photos of the machine parts concerned, are automatically transferred, as is the metadata. This means that the solutions developed are directly linked to the underlying knowledge model.

The use case from INOTEC Sicherheitstechnik GmbH shows how Community & Team Knowledge proves itself in use.

Distributed expert knowledge at INOTEC Sicherheitstechnik

With over 350 employees, INOTEC Sicherheitstechnik GmbH (Innovative NOtlicht TEChnologie) is one of the leading companies in the field of emergency and safety lighting in buildings. At its headquarters in Ense, North Rhine-Westphalia, the company develops and manufactures around 500,000 luminaires and over 8,500 emergency lighting systems every year - Made in Germany.

With its service team, consisting of 29 service technicians and 13 in-house service employees, INOTEC offers optimum customer support: installation, inspections, device repairs, basic programming and instruction as well as advice on legal regulations and technical implementation. A free service hotline is also available.

INOTEC is also already experiencing a shortage of skilled workers. Due to the generational change, older service and development employees are leaving the company. This mainly affects service support for products that are no longer produced but are still in use. Here, only long-serving employees have the relevant repair knowledge.

Existing service knowledge was also decentralized and therefore not always available, e.g. in Confluence, network folders, JIRA or in handwritten notes. These were all self-sufficient silos that not all service employees had access to.

In addition, it was often unclear who in the team might have a solution ready to provide support for certain problems. More complex problem solutions in particular were usually discussed in one-to-one meetings, so that only the people involved knew what was going on. The inability to share knowledge quickly and easily meant that the developers themselves also had to be involved in solving problems, which meant that they were unable to focus on their core tasks.

INOTEC's goal was to centralize all the service information floating around the company. INOTEC was therefore looking for an efficient tool to share information promptly and make it available to everyone at any time and from any location. The tool also needed to document problem descriptions and solutions more quickly in order to make them available to the technicians.

Quick solutions with digitized expert knowledge

With Community & Team Knowledge, INOTEC can digitize expert knowledge at lightning speed, preserve it within the service team and thus counteract the shortage of specialists and employee turnover.

The success here is based on two fundamental mechanisms: INOTEC Customer Service has imported enormous amounts of data and knowledge into Empolis Service Express® to create the basic requirements. This includes, for example, service instructions, manuals and product information, as well as the connection of the aforementioned data silos such as Confluence, network folders or JIRA. All data is brought together in a so-called knowledge hub, where it can then be found and filtered. It is particularly important for service technicians to be able to access all of this knowledge using the app so that they can contact their colleagues quickly and efficiently on site and discuss service cases and their solutions.

The problem-solving chat is an important feature for INOTEC. This is used for all problems that cannot be solved with the information already available in the Knowledge Hub. If there is no suitable solution to a problem in the data sources, the app automatically suggests that the employee work with the right experts to develop a new solution. To identify the right experts, the system accesses the stored knowledge model. The specific expert knowledge of the respective employee is noted here. With just a few clicks, a team can be put together to solve problems together.

The problem definition and the corresponding metadata from the search history are automatically transferred to the chat. This means that the chat members already have all the important basic information. The experts can then discuss the problem within the chat - e.g. through suggestions, comments, images, documents and reactions - and find solutions together.

As soon as the problem is solved, it is marked as solved and is thus released for the knowledge transfer cycle. The resulting solution is immediately published in the form of a chat history and made available to everyone. Optionally, it can also be edited by the experts into a knowledge article, which is then published. All content and attachments, such as photos of affected luminaires or device parts, are automatically transferred. In this way, INOTEC digitizes expert knowledge at lightning speed, preserves it in the service team and overcomes personnel challenges such as generational change, skills shortages and staff turnover.

More about Community & Team Knowledge at: www.service.express/community-team-knowledge

Or in the presentation by Frank Scheferhoff, Head of Customer Service, INOTEC Sicherheitstechnik GmbH: