Case study:
Rebuilding the Knowledge and Search team at SAP Concur
I began managing the Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) and Search team at SAP Concur at a time of turmoil. The team had undergone several re-organizations and was unstable. There was health to reestablish, confidence to restore, and work to be done. So, I got to it.
What: Build a healthy team, create a plan and roadmap to onboard partners to KCS, and queue-up the content teams to index and tag their content to be crawled by the new search tool (Coveo).
For: Support teams, partners, customers, and employees.
With: Global partner teams (multiple support teams, search, Ops, PM, content).
When: Calendar year 2019 (and beyond).
Challenges
I needed to act quickly and judiciously to right the ship, hiring, coaching, and ensuring we had the right people in the right roles. I prioritized building relationships, gaining the confidence of my team and partners, listening, learning, and creating foundational plans and priorities we could use as rudders.
Solutions
Over-communicating at this juncture was key. With not only my own team, but with the broader team, leadership, partners, and stakeholders. I had to reestablish confidence that my team would deliver. I built a cross-company editorial alliance. We rallied around our vision and plan. I got my team KCS certified. And in short order, every stakeholder who owned content or needed to get on our calendar for training, knew what was coming from us and when.
Impact
Results speak louder than words. I garnered respect and regained confidence of partners. We created a roadmap and began onboarding teams to KCS. We helped content teams understand how to tag their content for Coveo consumption.
We launched our internal search experience in May of 2019 and vastly improved the Support UX with Coveo integration in the KB. Our case deflection rate went from 2.6% to 17.1% in six months.
Learnings
I’m wired to strategize, but this was a small team with a lot to do, so tactics were also required. I had to balance and leverage the strengths (and challenges) of every individual team member and provide lots of coaching opportunities. I also flexed my be-fair-clear-and-honest muscle quite a bit while setting expectations around values and deliverables. I learned you can do a lot more than you think you can in a very short amount of time, but you have to do it with an open mind. I also learned a lot more than I ever thought I would about Salesforce. But that’s a story for another day.
