What is knowledge management? Definition, types, and benefits

Inefficient knowledge sharing is no small matter. It costs enterprises between $2.7 million and $265 million, according to thePanopto Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report.

Poor knowledge management is costly because it slows down workflows. Team members have to wait for answers or muddle through a problem they aren’t sure how to fix.

And on support teams, inadequate knowledge management hurts customer relationships. When agents struggle to find solutions, waiting customers become frustrated or annoyed—and may eventually churn.

Knowledge management not only impacts customer and agent satisfaction but also productivity and profit. So, it’s critical for companies to adopt a system for collecting and sharing institutional information. But before you can harness the power of knowledge management, you need to understand the basics.

In this guide to knowledge management, you’ll discover:

Types of knowledge management

You should be managing explicit, implicit, and tacit knowledge as it relates to customers, your team, and your internal operations. Each type of knowledge plays a role in helping your organization operate efficiently.

• Explicit knowledgeis information that’s easy to document, share, and scale (like data and repeatable processes).
• Implicit knowledgeis the ability to take explicit knowledge and apply it to a problem.
• Tacit knowledgeis information that’s difficult to express or put into words (such as personal experiences with your customers or things you know how to do intuitively).

通常情况下,你想要捕捉并分享explicit, implicit, and tacit knowledge from both your employees and your customers.

• Employees:Insights from employees, product experts, and external partners can lead to help center articles that address common customer inquiries. These insights are also helpful to agents as a reference point when they’re assisting customers.
• Customers:Through 1:1 customer conversations, surveys, case studies, social media engagement, and support requests, your support team has access to a wealth of knowledge that can help improve marketing, sales, customer support, product development, and more.

Benefits of knowledge management

Internally, companies use knowledge management to share expertise and important information across departments.

Establishing an organizational culture of knowledge sharing helps give all employees equal access to institutional knowledge that can help them do their jobs well. It also allows everyone to contribute to that knowledge in some way.

Knowledge management can be used to improve the customer experience, too.Self-service optionsempower customers to accomplish easy tasks—like changing a password or printing a return label—on their own. When done well, self-service increases customer satisfaction and boosts agent efficiency.

• 24/7 support for customers

  In general, customers prefer to help themselves when it comes to simpler issues, but they need access to the right information to find solutions independently.

  Knowledge management in the form of self-service resources—such as bots, FAQ pages, and help centers—provides information in an organized and straightforward way. Plus, customers have access to it 24/7, so they can get answers at any time without having to wait on an agent.

• Efficient internal operations

  Thanks to customer self-service, agents have more time to focus on complex problems and can keep their workloads more manageable.

  Agents can also use knowledge management systems to answer their own questions. All team members have access to the company’s collective knowledge base, so they can find the internal information they need without relying on a specific team member or department.

  Knowledge management is crucial in the onboarding and offboarding phases, too. New team members benefit from tools like internal wikis and help centers because they can access information from the get-go. Meanwhile, you minimize “brain drain” by gathering information from employees on their way out the door.

Knowledge management process

Creating an organizational culture around knowledge management starts with building a formal process for sharing information. Here are five key steps in the knowledge management process.

Knowledge management system examples

While you could manually organize your support team’s knowledge management system, the process would take time and probably be full of errors. Instead, we recommend leaning on tools that allow you to quickly and accurately gather and store information.

Your knowledge management platform and tools should provide customers and employees with the information they need in a scalable, efficient way.

Help centers

A help center, also known as a亚博官方app, gives customers and support agents access to frequently asked questions, product details, company policies, and more.

Help centers can be internal, external, or both. They generally operate much like a wiki or search engine, so employees or customers can easily find the answers they need. As your business evolves, team members can draft new articles on the fly, flag outdated content, and share article recommendations with customers via support tickets.

A big benefit of help centers is the ability to reach large numbers of employees and/or customers at once. This makes knowledge sharing much more sustainable, as you don’t have to rely on small-group training or 1:1 mentoring.

Community forums

Community forums are online spaces where customers can interact with other users and offer their insights and support.

As frequent users of your product, customers are sometimes better suited to address questions and troubleshoot issues than your support agents. Online communities allow customers to pose and answer questions—taking some of the burdens off of your support team. Companies can assign moderators to jump in as needed and make sure conversations are appropriate and accurate.

Community forums can build a sense of camaraderie around your product or service, too. They may even provide your company with valuable insights about your customers (such as how they’re using your product or what challenges they’re facing).

Chatbots

Chatbotsare gaining traction as a tool for both customers and agents to address frequently asked questions.

Bots are particularly helpful when it comes to sharing basic information and relevant links. They can recommend the rightknowledge base articles, answer straightforward questions, and help customers complete certain tasks.

Again, this eases the burden on your customer service team. Agents can focus on more complex issues while the bot handles the simple ones, and customers aren’t left waiting a moment longer than necessary.

Knowledge management best practices

Here are a fewbest practicesfor each type of knowledge management program.

When developing a help center:

• Use simple language.Clear, concise writing makes your content easy to consume and understand, whether it’s shared internally or externally.
• Include keywords in the title and text.This will help ensure your knowledge base is searchable, so people can quickly find the information they’re looking for.
• Connect your help center to your chatbot.Make sure your chatbot can point people to relevant articles from the help center. That way, visitors have more than one way to find the right resource.

When building an online community or forum:

• Set clear guidelines.Community rules can help keep the trolls at bay and steer conversations in a positive direction. Rules can include anything from limiting profanity to dictating the number of times someone can post (to minimize spam).
• Recruit moderators and/or community managers.You need someone to enforce your rules and ensure user responses are correct. Usually, you’ll want this to be somebody in your company. However,customer advocatescan make great community managers when your team isn’t available.
• Feature top posts.You should highlight posts that are important and/or are receiving a lot of engagement within your community. Pin those posts to the top of the page so they don’t get lost in the shuffle, and more users will see them.

When implementing a chatbot:

• 是前期。Companies should avoid frustration by being transparent when they’re using chatbots. A good chatbot will identify itself as a bot and give customers the ability to opt out and speak to a human agent instead.
• Keep the tone conversational.Just because customers are conversing with a robot, it doesn’t mean it should sound like one. Program your bot to communicate in a natural and friendly way—as a human agent would.
• Make it easy to escalate issues to an agent.If your bot can’t answer a question or solve a problem, that’s okay. But it should be seamless for your customers to connect with an agent if needed. The bot should pass along any information the customer has already provided, such as their name and issue type, so they don’t have to repeat themselves.

Knowledge management strategies

There are two mainknowledge management strategies: collecting and recording information (codification) and connecting people (personalization). Most companies should use a blend of these strategies.

Codification

Codification is the process of formally documenting knowledge. This can come in the form of interviews with subject matter experts, white papers, guides, or recording a client’s preferences in your CRM. The information gathered can be stored indocument management systemsand distributed through groupware or intranets. This process turns the information that lives in your experts’ heads into documents that the rest of your company can access.

Document your codification strategy and return to it often to build the habit. The true power of codification comes once you’ve created a robust, repeatable process for identifying knowledge sources, collecting that information, housing it somewhere that’s easy to access, and disseminating it.

Codification works especially well for explicit knowledge in industries that have a systematic approach to solving problems, like engineering.

Personalization

In the context of knowledge management, personalization means creating opportunities for employees to transfer their knowledge directly to other people through networking, conversations, and presentations.

For personalization to happen, employees and customers need channels for sharing information. Some examples of these channels include:

• Internal webinars presented by subject matter experts
• Communities of practice, or groups of people who regularly gather to discuss specific concepts within the company

Knowledge management use cases

Here are a few common use cases of knowledge management:

Knowledge management tools

Use the followingknowledge management toolsto consolidate company information and distribute it efficiently to your employees and customers.

亚博官方app

A knowledge base contains information about a company’s product or service and internal processes. Businesses can set up external bases to help customers troubleshoot product issues on their own and internal bases to help employees find details about the organization’s policies and structure.

Customer relationship management systems

A CRM system is the best way to track prospect and customer data. This can be as basic as contact information and purchase history. It can also be as complex as documenting the conversations a customer has with your company at each touchpoint.

Learning management systems

A learning management system is a tool companies use to train new employees and help existing employees learn new skills. You can centralize information like company history, sales scripts, and handbooks here.

How to build and implement an effective knowledge management framework

Your company probably isn’t starting from scratch. Lots of information already exists within your organization. To wrangle it all, you’ll need the right team in place and a clear vision of what you expect a successful knowledge management system will help you accomplish.

See how other companies implement knowledge management

Don’t waste time reinventing the wheel. Instead, learn from other businesses that have been where you are now.

If you’re ready to take the next step, check out our favoriteexamples of knowledge management.