The transition wasn’t quite as painless, however, for the Level 2 and Level 3 agents. Indeed, their roles changed significantly. "Rather than simply submitting HTML pages to Tactics Online, they were now asked to analyze the problems in a very procedural way and create diagnostic ’trees,’" says Breit. "That’s a more analytical way to think through a problem. Most of these guys had thought in terms of ’what is the fastest way to solve a problem’ rather than ’what is the most efficient way to solve a problem.’"

With hundreds of people submitting solutions, Marconi tended to get a lot of wheel reinvention. "There can be five or six ways to solve the [same] problem, but there’s one way that’s most efficient," Breit says. To unearth and disseminate the most efficient solutions, agents were required to flowchart each of their solutions for the first three months following KnowledgeBase’s launch. "It’s amazing how many [agents] were unconscious of their own methodologies," says Breit. "It was somewhat painful, but they eventually felt they benefited because they understood how they solve problems."

As a result, agents now create technical solutions for customers in the most efficient?and logical?way possible instead of simply offering a "quick and dirty" solution. Think of the difference between simply being told what keys to strike on your PC and being taught how your software works and the logic behind executing a certain sequence of keystrokes. Once you actually understand how the product works, you can use the software more effectively and resolve more problems yourself.

Agents also had to change the way they present the solutions to customers. "We wanted to provide a collaboration tool for employees and a library source for our customers," says Demiral. "Engineers wanted to provide a lot of detailed information yet we needed a degree of simplicity for customers. Most of the time, the immediate focus is on what a great collaboration tool this is and how it overcomes geographical distance among agents. Then I have to remind [agents] that this is a tool that we want customers to use and that they’ll have to organize, write and present the content with customers in mind."

Making It Work

Demiral spent a lot of time working with the Level 3 agents to make their solutions less complex and streamline the review process. "We had to go through two iterations of how to organize and present the content," Demiral says. "Customers tend to think in terms of the product and then the problem. But engineers often think about the problem first and then the product."