March 2024 Meetups
March 7: Ask Product Anything
Summary:
Our Product Team wants to hear from you! We are going to take time to hear your questions and have Tim Hill, CXone Mpower Expert Product Manager, and his team answer them. We will gather questions via a form prior to meetup and then present the answers based on the topics that come up from the questions.
Highlights:
- The product team is working on delivering a generative search product using large language models before the end of 2024. It will initially be released in limited availability to around 10 customers for testing.
- Upcoming features planned for the first half of 2024 include addressing 3rd party cookie deprecation, enhancements to the custom dictionary and instant translation reporting, import/export filtering, search recommendations moved to the dashboard, and infrastructure/reporting improvements.
- The "Schedule Publish" feature will be generally available in May 2024 after a limited availability period.
- There are no current plans to extend advanced features like pinned pages, draft sharing, or revision access to "community members" (authenticated but non-seated users)
- For generative AI, the team recommends determining goals/problems it could solve, experimenting with public models like ChatGPT, learning the terminology, and researching "retrieval augmented generation" methods.
- The team is researching enhanced AI capabilities for the content editor, but details are not ready to share yet.
- Kernels is an API endpoint to serve expert content for use in custom generative AI applications while respecting permissions.
- Enhancements are planned for feedback reporting capabilities like storing feedback securely and reporting on scores differently.
- The team takes reliability and performance issues seriously, deploying solutions to address bots/attacks and infrastructure challenges impacting uptime.
Tim Hill acknowledged there have been some performance and reliability issues recently. He provided some context around the industry seeing a 94% increase in DDoS attacks across organizations year-to-date in 2024. He attributed some of the issues to "bad actors" using bots and public content to train large language models.
For CXone Mpower Expert, specifically, Tim said the uptime in 2024 so far is 99.97%, with 882 minutes of total downtime across two incidents. One incident was caused by one of these "bad actor bots" and another was due to an infrastructure upgrade.
He outlined three areas they have focused on over the last 6 months:
1. Unusual public data harvesting by bots ignoring robots.txt rules. They deployed an enhanced bot management solution and changed how they monitor/manage traffic flows to address this.
2. Malicious behavior seemingly designed to destabilize customer experiences by bypassing traditional security measures like firewalls. They deployed advanced detection and mitigation strategies around their infrastructure.
3. An infrastructure upgrade to their database platform caused an unexpected brief search outage due to a rare edge case. They added test cases and monitoring to prevent recurrence.
Tim Hill emphasized they take reliability and performance very seriously, do root cause analysis on every incident, and have made process/monitoring changes based on those analyses. He thanked customers for their patience
March 14: CXone Mpower Expert Journey: Insights on Knowledge Base Implementation Success
Summary:
Our panelists will share how their implementation process was from their previous knowledge base to CXone Mpower Expert: beginning to end, what worked and what didn't work. The panel features representatives from diverse industries, each sharing their unique experiences, challenges, and success stories in implementing CXone Mpower Expert for a better Customer Experience through their Knowledge Base.
Join the discussion on March 14th at 8am PT/11am ET, to hear how other customers use Expert for their organizations' teams.
Panelists:
Kalyn Howard, Knowledge Specialist, Westerra Credit Union
Rod West, Knowledge Manager, Aria Systems
Clint Rodenfels and Hannah Vincent, Knowledge Team, ResMed
Highlights:
Here are some key highlights from the discussion:
- The panelists were Kalyn Howard from Westerra Credit Union, Clint Rodenfels from ResMed, and Rod West from Aria Systems. They shared their experiences with implementing CXone Mpower Expert as a knowledge base solution.
- Kalyn's organization transitioned from having procedures spread across multiple Word docs in SharePoint to a centralized knowledge base. They spent 5.5 months on the initial migration and launch, with an emphasis on change management through videos, trainings, and continuous communication.
- Clint inherited the knowledge base system at ResMed that was already in place. Their main use case is for internal customer service support. A key challenge was understanding the product and its intended uses when coming in partway through the implementation.
- Rod went through multiple iterations of content mapping before their July 2022 migration from MT4. A lesson learned was investing more in communication and training around the new knowledge base.
- Looking ahead, Kalyn plans to integrate with Salesforce. Rod wants to expand use of the knowledge base across more internal departments. Clint aims to leverage reporting capabilities more and looks at potential Salesforce/CRM integrations.
- Common themes included the importance of thorough training, clear communication plans, securing executive buy-in, and exploring integrations to surface knowledge where users need it.
March 21: Empowering Learning: Transformative Strategies for Personalized Learning
Summary:
Dive into the realm of personalized learning, where tailored experiences redefine engagement. Join us as we address retraining challenges for content creators through a shift-left approach, providing valuable insights for L&D professionals and trainers. Do not miss out on this opportunity to revolutionize your training strategies with Libby Healy from Waters.
Highlights:
- Libby shared her approach to redesigning the training program for Waters' knowledge base, moving away from traditional lengthy classroom sessions to a micro-learning model with short, focused training modules.
- The new training model has three levels: macro (>15 mins, multiple topics), micro (5-15 mins, single topic), and nano (<5 mins, narrow focus). This allows reusing content across different learning tracks tailored for new authors, tenured authors, managers, etc.
- Libby emphasized the importance of making training personalized, engaging, and easily accessible through a "training marketplace" in their knowledge base.
- She discussed tying training efforts to company goals like their "shift left" strategy of deflecting customer support to lower-cost channels through effective knowledge sharing.
- Libby highlighted the future role of generative AI in blurring the lines between knowledge and training content, aiming to incorporate training materials into their knowledge base for AI-generated responses.
- The discussion also covered best practices around coaching programs, including finding enthusiastic, knowledge-sharing coaches aligned with company culture, maintaining proximity between coaches and learners, and handling changes in roles.
- Other attendees like Mike Terry shared their own knowledge management journeys, integrations with CRM systems like Salesforce, and the use of variables and content reuse for efficient knowledge updates.
March 28: Crafting Customer Success: Unlocking the Full Potential of Your Site
Summary:
Join us for an insightful webinar featuring product manager Tim Hill as he delves into the realm of customer-centric success and unveils the latest addition to our toolkit: new out-of-the-box template for your Expert sites. In this session, Tim will share key strategies for unlocking your Expert sites’ full potential. Discover the significance of information architecture and guided content framework in enhancing your site. Join Carol from Netsmart for a Q&A interview, showcasing an exemplary site. Gain practical insights to elevate your site's performance and provide an outstanding user experience.
Highlights:
- Tim Hill introduced the webinar series aimed at providing tips and insights to help customers unlock the full potential of their sites.
- He reviewed the concept of information architecture and how it brings together business context, content, and users in a coherent way.
- Examples of companies with good information architecture included Apple, Amazon, and Google - praised for their simplicity and consistent formatting.
- An example of poor information architecture was Waste Management's website, described as difficult to find information on.
- Tim explained CXone's guided content framework as their approach to good information architecture - providing an intelligent site structure, powering strong search, influencing SEO, and facilitating generative search.
- Customers using guided content framework see 11% higher converted users, 9% less abandoned users, and 10% less unsatisfied users compared to those not using it.
- Carol Hattrup shared Netsmart's journey of transitioning from a disorganized "Wild West wiki" with over 10,000 structural errors to adopting CXone's guided content framework.
- Their previous site had categories nested inside articles, guides inside topics, etc. leading to very deep breadcrumb trails that made content hard to find.
- Adopting guided content framework provided a sense of order, consistency, and simplified design that improved findability of content.
- Carol explained how they structured their top-level categories to match their product families and subcategories for specific products.
- Change management was very difficult - they had to convince contributors to change their way of working through training, positivity, and expressing gratitude.
- Using tags rather than topics allowed them to group content by subject without having to create a dedicated topic for every feature.
- They saw metrics improve after the transition, like higher click-through rates, more page views, and more returning user sessions.
- There was an insightful discussion around using learning paths effectively, driving users to paths, integrating with an LMS for tracking, and having a consistent user experience across tools.
Overall it provided great insights into the benefits of guided content framework and tips for implementing it successfully through strategy and change management. Find the PowerPoint presentation attached in the Expert Community Group.