Organizations reap benefits from a knowledge-enhancing Web experience

One of those steps was the establishment of new rules for mortgages—now known as Qualified Mortgages—in order to be sold into the secondary market, which most are. The regulations for Qualified Mortgages took effect at the beginning of the year, including rules to calculate if the borrower has the financial wherewithal (including personal assets, income, etc.) to repay the mortgage, says Scott Stein, president of Xetus, a lending software company.

When beta testing the newest version of the company's Web-based mortgage platform, XetusOne, the incident reporting feature of Salesforce alerted the company's knowledge workers that application users were confused by the layout and language of the ability-to-repay rules, Stein says. So the staff conferred with the developers to make the language clearer and to redesign that section of the application workflow.

Now rather than having several checkboxes for different ability-to-repay qualification elements, there is a single dropdown box, which users have found much more intuitive, according to Stein. Inbound calls concerning confusion about using the platform have dropped about 80 percent, according to Stein.

"Having knowledge management workers is critical to meeting client needs in being able to use the product," Stein says.

As more companies and organizations increasingly rely on Web self-service, they will increasingly rely on knowledge management tools and personnel to make the Web experience as smooth as possible.