Kaleo for IT

(Pronounced ka-lay-o)

Kaleo is helping organizations finally deliver on the promise of IT self-service with fast, bite-sized answers that people will actually use. 

Summary

As the PM for Kaleo Software I drove innovation by building an integration with ServiceNow, an IT Service platform, to extract knowledge from closed support tickets. Leveraging machine learning and natural language processing my team and I were able to design an elegant solution that created a self-service knowledge base powered by content from the help desk. The goal of this initiative was to drive down support costs and increase employee satisfaction with a unique approach to self-service.

Project phases

Research and Discovery

For this project I led the research to find product-market fit. To validate buyers and users existed I performed an opportunity assessment:

Step 1: Value proposition - Surveyed executives within our customer network and contacts made at various industry conferences to understand their needs and wants

Step 2: Target Market – Interviewed CIO’s to better understand roles within their various teams and identify decisions makers, influencers, detractors, and promoters

Step 3: Competitive Landscape – Gathered intelligence from industry research groups like Gartner and Forester to benchmark alternatives to our knowledge solution

Step 4: Differentiators – Formulated ideas to analyze and create content from closed support tickets

Step 5: Market Window – Identified ITSM platforms, like ServiceNow, were top of mind for every participant we surveyed and spoke with at industry conferences

Step 6: Requirements – Outlined the high-level solution workflow and created a hypothesis based PRD

Design and prototyping

Using tools like Balsamiq, InVision, and Sketch (with guidance from Google’s Material Design principles) I created a number of wireframes focusing on an Insights Dashboard for the Support Manager. Since this role was our primary influencer and sometimes the decision maker I wanted to make sure we offered data and analytics around content and usage to demonstrate the value of Kaleo for IT.

I identified 4 primary areas and related questions that were highly valuable to them:

1. Usage - Are people using the knowledge base?

2. Gaps - Of those using it, what are they searching for?

3. Quality - Of the content that has been created, are there any that need improvement?

4. Trending - What content are people most interested in?

Development

My team consisted of 6 developers who had varying skills and areas of expertise. We divided the work relying on the full-stack engineers to evaluate the integration and API’s available with ServiceNow to extract ticket data and leveraged the front-end engineers to begin building the Insights Dashboard.

Our biggest challenge was organizing and making sense of the large amount of unstructured data we could get from SerivceNow. Using open source APIs like IBM Watson and MonkeyLearn the team was able to overcome some of these challenges while I focused on the user experience.

We built a search integration with ServiceNow's portal to surface Kaleo stored knowledge along with any articles currently residing in their repository. Below is a screenshot of our proof of concept:

refine and test

With the help from my Customer Success Team I was able to demo and gather feedback from our existing customers who were interested in expanding Kaleo to their IT departments. Their feedback helped shape our offering and gave us valuable insights.

The most interesting thing I learned through this process was that we needed to take an incremental approach. Our initial idea was to have Kaleo be the first point of contact before an employee reached out to the Helpdesk. While this sounded great to us, we learned quickly that customers were a little more skeptical and wanted something to prove we could make an impact for them. We ended up developing a Health Check report to summarize our analysis of the ticket data they made available to us before implementing Kaleo. This became a very powerful sales tool for us.

launch

Leading up to our product debut I worked side by side with marketing and sales to create content to educate the market and produced collateral like product one-sheets, sales materials, and videos to demonstrate our offering.  Taking advantage of some of our early adopter customers we were able to obtain testimonials to prove the value of our solution.

We recently launched our product at a conference called Fusion in Las Vegas where I attended and met with other potential platform partners, prospects, and evaluated our message compared to competitors.