The place I work for, Progress.com, has this great customer support workflow - when a customer calls in with a problem, you start helping them by searching for existing solutions based on errors and information (symptoms and facts).  If nothing is found, then this query becomes the start of a new knowledge-base document.  It's part of a methodology called KCS that is at the core of the 70K+ solutions we have covering all of our product lines.  It's not the knowledge-base of legendary powerhouses like IBM or Microsoft, but it is encompassing for an enterprise of our size.  One of the major drivers behind KCS in our organization is that we cannot close a customer issue without documenting it with a knowledge-base article.  The idea is that every customer's issue is either something we've already documented, or something new - something that we need to capture.   

 

Every now and again it's driven home to me just how powerful this is.  If I'm required to have a solution in order to close a case, I'm more likely to spend time crafting GOOD solutions, rather than quick one-offs, or none at all - the classic knowledge hole.  A customer I dealt with this past week had one real problem - but in the course of solving his issue, we managed to capture 7 really good solutions around things we tried and failed at.  Some how-to solutions on how to do new things that weren't covered in the existing knowledge-base, and some diagnostics solutions on how to triage issues.  All were things we tried and failed, and then one that ultimately succeeding in solving the customer's issue.  In the future, this tremendous amount of work *WILL* save someone time, or lead to better, more informed product development.

 

Though we have them, we generally avoid using the catch-all Solutions such as "Unable to reproduce", "customer resolved themselves", etc.  For truly, in most of these cases, you *CAN* capture information about what occurred, what facts are true about the configuration and the problem (OS, Product Version, configuration information, etc.).  Your solution might just end up with "The exact cause is unknown."  Some other customer might run into that same problem, and through the power of hyper-linking you can connect two disparate customers and events and maybe extrapolate proximal cause.  

 

The power of Knowledge Centered Support is hard to overstate - but the devil's in the details.  You have to have the processes to enforce KCS, and the discipline to perform audits of cases closed - to ensure that your support engineers are capturing all the information in a case - to ensure that your content is up to your standards guidelines - to perform translation where necessary.  It's not easy work, and many places would consider it a time sink, especially case audits, but it provides value to your customers: every issue resolved by an existing knowledge-base article is one less issue clogging up your backlog.  And the best customer support is when your customer googles their issue, is linked to your knowledge-base, and never has to call or email your support team.