A Technology Lifeline
To tackle a problem that was leading to internal frenzy and customer discontent, 3M decided to create a technology "lifeline" for its call center staff by investing in both customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management (KM) software. The integrated system would manage most points of customer contact, linking six formerly individual, noninterconnected call centers.

The first step in building the system, recalls Steve Conway, an IT specialist at 3M, was to create a task force to explore the available technology options. "We formed a team of 14 people, representing a cross section of 3M business units," says Conway. The panel, which included customer service managers, call center agents, IT analysts and documentation developers, quickly settled on Remedy Corp.'s Remedy Action Request System to handle call management tasks. The decision was straightforward because the software is designed to easily integrate with a knowledge management product and doesn't require additional programming to create database logic, workflow business rules and form layouts.

Finding a knowledge management tool, however, proved to be a more formidable task. After considering more than a dozen products, the panel chose a product now known as Primus eCRM from Primus Knowledge Solutions. Not only was the software compatible with 3M's existing hardware and software infrastructure, it also provided a flexible workflow that supports individual approaches to problem solving. Perhaps most important, the software allowed immediate sharing of newly created solutions—eliminating the need for a separate, offline knowledge engineering process.

The System at Work
Compared to the way 3M used to handle customer inquiries, the new system is a model of efficiency and simplicity, says Guanzini. When a phone call comes in, the customer service representative checks the Remedy system to view information about the customer and basic data about 3M products the individual or company uses. He or she then types in the details of the customer's problem. If the representative can't answer the question with the information at hand, pressing an onscreen button transfers all of the data that has been entered into the Remedy database into Primus eCRM's eServer software where it can be used as search criteria. The agent can then launch a search for a solution that answers the customer's question.

The eServer software gives 3M's customer service representatives intuitive access to critical information. Rather than relying on simple keywords, the agents can use natural language statements to describe a problem. The system lets them define a problem statement as a goal, fact, symptom, change, cause or fix (for example, a symptom might be "The X adhesive isn't sticking the X tile to the X surface" while a fix statement could be "What is the best adhesive to use for sticking an X tile to an X surface?"). This flexibility allows them to take into account multiple factors when searching the knowledge base for solutions. The system then presents agents with a weighted list of solutions. "It's not a tree-based, hierarchical system," explains Shelly Waits, a 3M customer service supervisor. "This is a relational system that's designed to bubble-up the most appropriate answers for the particular description that's fed into the system." Every piece of information generated by eServer is available to 3M's entire support staff.