Since my earlier days at American Express (AMEX), every company I have worked for has tried to create the uber-customer or knowledge database. AMEX, probably did the best job, though. Considering it was pre-internet when I was there. They recorded the transactions of all their card holders and then used that data to develop co-marketing programs with their merchants and then tailed offers to their members.
At Apple, it was difficult because most transactions went through a third party (Best Buy, Frys and the like). At Borders, only the WaldenBooks side of the house had a membership program to capture useful buyer information.
American Online wasn’t bad at building a knowledge database of sorts because they were a membership / subscription program, so it was easy to know what area of the proprietary services users were surfing in — Even though they had the data they were more into direct mail carpet bombing and sending out as many CDs as possible.
At Intuit, we have a knowledge database, which someday will incorporate most of our user created content. Today, our FAQs written by employees, etc. are separate from those written by the hundreds of thousands of communtiy users. It is worthy trying to create a customer facing, user friendly knowledge database that centralizes all this ifnormation and that can help deflect inbound telephone costs or customers concern about controlling their own destiny, by finding and figuring out the problem on the their own.
So, we spend a lot of energy on creating a clean (good data) and useful (you can find the answer you are looking for) Knowledge Database. Why not let users do this? Maybe you have to reward them, maybe you don’t. If you are facing a similar challenge, a decent short term solution, however, which we are doing on the Quicken Community website is just to ‘grab search strings’ and display the results on a web page. But… if I stop being skeptical, I do see some strong individuals driving for the master database concept. They key is to get your key evangilists — lead users — involved in the project. They are the one who have experienced the pains and gains of financial management. Through some sort of Community Darwinism, these users will float to the top.
Absorb knowledge + Share Knowledge + (have someone else) Absorbe that same knowledge
or Learn, Teach and Learn
It is amazing how a corporate philosophy, such as creating a learning culture, applies to the community and of course, to building a Knowledge Database. Imagine what happens when you put lots of users together in a community. Certain thought leaders take the lead. Our job is to make their information available. To also let these thought leaders just emerge from the crowd. They might be a few steps ahead of the rest of the community or the contributors to the knowledge base, but others will follow. That’s why it is also good to recognize these individuals expertise and knowledge — in a particular industry, etc. — and enable them to teach others. After all, they were once the students, whether they read the answer in the book, got it through trial and error learning on the job, or just asked someone else.
I am sharing this because we have learned that it is not really useful to just have a bunch of static FAQs. Especially when dealing with small businesses — where companies are in different industries, users figure out new workarounds, new versions of products are introduced, etc.
Another point is that ratings/usefulness needs to be a living piece of data that evolves and changes over time as more and more users interact with your product. (But similar to the number of people posting on communities, only a small % of folks are really rating posts)
Make sure that the ‘Helpfulness” questions you are asking will provide useful info to your users (of course you). So, you might want to ask more than ‘was this just helpful.’ How about ‘what industry are you in?’ ‘Did you try send another users to read this FAQ, etc.’
Then you can add your ‘helpful’ info to your search results. Where users can search on items that customer voted to be most useful.
In Steven Johnson’s excellent book Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, we are invited to learn about about the complex engineering feats and research management of building ant colonies. All this is done with any sort of dictatorship — except for the MaMa Ant once in a while. And as the colony is being built ants are dying off and new ones are replacing them. This is analogous to the community and to the contributors of the knowledgebase
The behavior of one ant is based on the behavior of all the other ants, which is based on random events. And No one will be participating for ever. And when they leave (hopefully not due to death), others will replace them and follow the written and sometimes unwritten laws.
Johnson points out that if you are building a system frm the ground level — like a KB system or a community, there are learnings at the global/macro level, but also at the local level. I will touch upon them below and take a little bit of creative license in explaining them:
1. More is different: You need to have critical mass in order to study the colony, but more important to make sure you are getting proper representation — which will highlight the most common issues…..I guess this is similar to making sure you have both a statically significant sample and that the more data you have, the easier it will be for themes to float to the top.
2. Ignorance is useful: Build a simple system — sometimes we try and over-engineer our databases — design for dummies — or the lowest common denominator, your lease experienced user.
3. Encourage Random Encounters: Let the users connect the dots between the type of product they are using and how they are using it. We learn so much from our community about how they use our products — A great example is Workarounds. So many of them are discovered and shared out of the blue
4. Look for Patterns in the signs: You will see some common themes float to the top.
5. Pay Attention to Your Neighbors: “Local information can lead to global wisdom’ — We learn so much by looking beyond our own borders — our own websites — and seeing what other small business owners are saying on the web.
Your Knowledge Database should be thought of as self-organizing and living organisms. Don’t try and control it…(how many times have you heard that about communities? The difference here is that I am also saying it about Knowledge Databases)
Start simple and don’t try to centralize all your existing data. Let your users be like ants and work on it together, whether it is intentional or unintentional. All you are doing is providing the infrastructure for them to play and stay a while. I might be alone here — and be perceived as someone who is against extensive planning and design. Lets just say that while I believe in some design of the KB, the power will be to let it evolve on its own. How many of you are struggling to build your own super customer database or knowledge database, eh?
(For a good enterview with Steven Johnson)
When I first arrived at Intuit, everyone was talking about Process Excellence, which was Intuit’s phrase for Six Sigma. There was a lot of GE influence in the company and it seemed as if that the time that you had to walk the talk and be at least a Green Belt to get promoted. One of my first projects was to work with a Black Belt, a team leader who was responsible for measuring, analyzing, improving and controlling key processes that influence customer satisfaction and/or productivity growth. Together, we tried to figure out what prospects really looked for and what they wanted to accomplish when they visited our main ecommerce site, QuickBooks.com, which I was managing at the time. We used a 
This past week, we relaunched the 
I will never forget my first day at Intuit. After sitting in a three hour training meeting (which we call ‘onboarding’) about the company’s benefits, leadership practices and products, my manager brought me to a meeting with Scott Cook. We shared with him some ‘data on how the site was doing and how we planned to change the site.’ His initial response was ‘what are the website’s users saying.’ Instead of just looking at the numbers, he wanted verbatims. He wanted VOC – he wanted to know the ‘voice(s) of the customer.’ I have to admit that this was very different from what I had experienced at some of my other companies, where management just wanted to ‘see the numbers.’ Since then, I have noticed that our product managers relay on what customers are actually saying and what types of words they are using.’ 
