SPIE ICS absorbs 540,000 support requests a year with 140 agents on one knowledge platform

A knowledge base for every client, and nobody clearly in charge

SPIE ICS runs IT service desks under contract for other companies, and each of those companies supplied the knowledge base.

• The tooling came with the contract. SPIE's clients each provided the knowledge base their service desk had to use, so the toolset was decided outside SPIE.
• An audit found everything. Sticky notes, OneNote, SharePoint, Confluence, and the knowledge modules inside GLPI, EasyVista and ServiceNow, each with its own login and its own structure.
• Technicians switched context every few minutes. A new caller every five to ten minutes could mean a different client, and a different place to look.
• And the same answer was written many times over. Standard desktop questions do not change from one client to the next, but the procedure did, and nobody could retire the stale copies.

We measured how long it took to reach the right knowledge in the old tools. It was a minute to a minute and a half. With Elium it is 15 to 20 seconds.

One base, owned by SPIE

SPIE hired a dedicated knowledge manager before it chose the tool, and shortlisted only knowledge management software vendors.

• Specialists only, by design. The requirement went out to knowledge management vendors alone, not to suites with a knowledge module attached, so the depth would match the job.
• One platform across every client contract. Shared knowledge is written once and served to whichever desk needs it, instead of being duplicated per client and ageing separately. What is specific to one client sits in a space of its own.
• Two templates, and only two. One for incidents and requests, with steps, prerequisites and escalation. One for the reference material behind the work. Other contracts ran six or seven.
• Everything has an owner and an expiry. Review dates route to the person accountable, so a procedure that has stopped being true surfaces before somebody acts on it.
• Agents raise problems where they find them. Annotations and comments let whoever hits a wrong step flag it in place, and the procedure's owner decides on the change.

Two of our own clients now use Elium with us. We manage the knowledge hand in hand, keeping it alive and creating new material together. Those perimeters work well.

From one service desk to the rest of SPIE

Turnover is part of the job on a service desk: the roles are often a first step, and people move on. Nobody at SPIE expects that to change. What has changed is that when someone leaves, what they knew stays in the base, ready for whoever arrives next.

What began on the central service desk has spread to the regional teams, and SPIE is now pointing Hub IA, its own AI platform, at Elium content, where the knowledge is verified and kept current.

We often hear: we'll add AI, put everything in SharePoint and be done with it. To put AI in place in a way that actually works, the data has to be clean, verified and maintained over time. You cannot do that properly in SharePoint. The source of truth has to come from a knowledge management tool.

SPIE ICS started with twenty knowledge bases it did not own. It now runs its own knowledge management approach, for its agents, for its AI, and for every client that wants to join it.