The role of knowledge management technologies in service business processes

Instant availability of up-to-date information is a vital pre-requisite in today's business for decision making and the execution of many job tasks. Especially, in service business, which is to a high degree human-based and knowledge-driven, service job experience and information about the customer as well as the installed equipment are critical success factors to deliver high quality services efficiently. Very often this information is stored in heterogeneous back-end systems and it needs to be aggregated and retrieved on demand. It needs to be provided to customer contact centers, which deal with the first customer contacts, as well as to field service engineers, who need to be well-prepared for the service job execution. In this paper, a case study is used to describe how knowledge management technologies can facilitate these service processes based on a process analysis- and knowledge requirement- driven approach.