knowledge management systems growth
I subscribe to Support World (a support rag) just to stay in touch with what the formal support community is up to. Mostly the mag is a bunch of ads for help desk software, but occasionally there's something interesting in there. Today it was some stats about knowledge management systems, or customer self service if you prefer. Apparently a Gartner study found that in 2001 only 1% of service desk contacts were via the web and in 2003 only 2%. Email contact grew from 6% to 17% over that same time period. Most interesting to me however, is that Gartner predicts 65% growth in the knowledge management systems area by 2010 to 58% of all interactions (up from 35% in 2005).
Great news for HelpSpot!
During development I almost dropped the knowledge management features in order to get HelpSpot out faster, but I'm really glad I didn't. It makes so much sense to have your request tracking and self service in the same product and well integrated.
I will note that Gartner's report is hardly ground breaking and is mostly obvious, but it's always nice to have the endorsement of the "pro's" :-)