Utilization of knowledge management for service business processes improvement

In today's business instant availability of up-to-date information is a vital prerequisite for decision making and the execution of many job tasks. Especially in service business, service job experience and information about the customer as well as the installed site equipment are key factors to deliver services efficiently and with high quality. In many cases supporting information is stored in different back-end systems and it needs to be retrieved, aggregated and presented on demand. These requirements play a crucial role for contact centers, which have the first contacts with customers, as well as for the field service engineers, who have the closest contacts with the customers during executions of service jobs at the customers' sites. In this paper, a typical service process is presented and a case study is used to show how knowledge management technologies can provide improvement possibilities for a service business company.