What is KCS?

Knowledge-Centered Service operationalizes knowledge management concepts into your existing workflows, holistically improving customer experience, employee engagement, and organizational learning. The latest version, KCS v6, is based on the collective experience of Consortium for Service Innovation Members and developed over 30+ years.

KCS takes teamwork to a new level. The organization must shift to a perspective that sees knowledge as an asset owned and maintained by the team, not by an individual or a small group of dedicated content creators. The focus of the team is to capture and improve the collective knowledge – not only to solve individual customer issues, but also to improve organizational learning.

Consortium Members who have implemented KCS in both their internal and external support organizations report dramatic improvements in incident resolution and training times, in customer satisfaction, and in analyst job satisfaction. As a result, they are realizing substantial savings in operating costs at the same time they are seeing improvements in service levels.

Are the following questions relevant to you?
If you have ever had any of the below questions, then KCS methodology is for you!
  • How to keep the knowledge base up to date?
    Content managers constantly ask themselves the question - “What should I write an article about?” Why customers do not find the content, even if it's in the knowledge base?
  • How to hire and train new employees within a short period of time?
    It’s not a surprise that attrition in IT (and specifically in support orgs) is quite high. It takes time and effort to keep enough headcount and continue delivering high-quality service. Looking for a way to minimize these efforts?
  • How to optimize support costs?
    Looking for the right metrics to measure the effectiveness of the knowledge base? Budgets are not unlimited. It’s always the question of the right balance between the number of headcounts, and its cost.

The postulates of KCS
Leverage existing organizational knowledge to fuel continuous improvement across your business.
  • 1
    Who creates the content?
    Knowledge base content is created not by dedicated content managers, but by all support agents.
  • 2
    What to create?
    Content is created on the basis of all incoming tickets where customers have already encountered a problem for the first time.
  • 3
    How do they create?
    The only draft article is created with minimum time spent. A support agent just captures the symptoms of the problem in the customer’s own words, and the resolution is written in the ticket.
  • 4
    Where to link?
    Each ticket is to have an article linked to it. It can be either an existing one (draft or public article) or a newly created article.
  • 5
    When to publish?
    As soon as a certain number of tickets are linked to a draft article (for example, 5), the content is considered as really demanded, and the draft is to be published. Only in this case, agents spend efforts for article reviewing and “polishing” before the publication.
  • 6
    How to keep up-to-date?
    While linking existing articles, agents also check the relevance of the content, and, if necessary, modify it.
  • 7
    How to assess?
    New performance assessment and quality metrics focused on knowledgebase content health are being introduced at the individual and team levels. Employees are judged on their contribution to the knowledge base as well as on the effectiveness of that knowledge.
Benefits of KCS

People choose KCS because they see the need to scale and expand their customer and technical support capabilities, but don't have endless staffing or budgetary resources. The use of KCS provides both quantitative and qualitative benefits.


Initial results of KCS adoption


  1. It is clear what content to create! Tickets generate the content, and demand ensures that the right content is published.
  2. Content is always up-to-date! Publishing only demanded content increases the relevance of articles, and waives unnecessary “garbage” that can clog the search.
  3. Resources optimization! All agents create drafts, spending a minimum amount of time. Additional time is spent only on in-demand article publishing.

Initial results of KCS adoption


Solve Cases and Incidents Faster

  • 50 - 60% improved time to resolution
  • 30 - 50% increase in first contact resolution

Optimize Use of Resources

  • 70% improved time to proficiency
  • 20 - 35% improved employee retention
  • 20 - 40% improvement in employee satisfaction

Enable Web Success

  • Improve customer success and use of self-service
  • Up to 50% case deflection

Build Organizational Learning

  • Provide actionable information to product development about customer issues
  • 10% issue reduction due to root cause removal

People choose to adopt KCS because they need to scale and extend their organization's capabilities in a world of limited staffing and budget resources.




ROI Calculator
Feel free to make a copy of calculator and put your numbers there