Establishing a Service Support Knowledge Base System: A Case Study

IT service providers are continuously seeking new tools and methods to improve the performance of customer support and to reduce the support and maintenance costs. Self-service tools, such as knowledge base systems, provide customers and users solutions to their problems 24h/7d. However, many IT service providers do not have experience on how to implement a knowledge base system for service support. This challenge has led us to examine the research problem: How to establish a service support knowledge base system. The main contribution of this study is 1) to present how a large IT service provider company in Finland implemented a knowledge base, and 2) to identify what types of requirements are related to a service support knowledge base system. Data for this study were collected using case study and action research methods.