Knowledge Management Systems : A Comprehensive Guide
When tickets are pouring in and customer support agents are swamped, a robust knowledge management system can help support agents & customers find the correct solution for every query quickly and efficiently.
How?
Knowledge management systems provide customers with a self-serve option, and if it works correctly, it can deflect tickets by allowing customers to find answers to their query without ever contacting your customer support team. With this, your customer service team can focus on complex queries and leave simple queries to the knowledge management system.
But the question is, do customers want it? YES.
70% customers expect a self-support option and trends show this will soon become a norm. And it also improves customer experience in the process.
And it helps the company in the long run. Gartner predicts that 89% of companies will compete on customer experience alone. So, let’s deep dive into knowledge management systems, and see how they’re helpful and how you can implement one for yourself.
What is a Knowledge Management System?
Knowledge Management System (Knowledge management system) is a customer support software that supports the creation, storage, sharing, and application of knowledge assets within an organization.
This is the broad definition of a knowledge management system. The basic purpose of a knowledge management system is to help your employees use the existing knowledge your business has in an effective way. For example, if a customer contacts your customer support for a query, the support agent should spend more time talking to the customer rather than searching for information.
Knowledge management system provide a better way of organizing your company documents like:
- Frequently asked questions
- Product documentations
- Forums or communities
- How-to article or tutorials
- Case studies
- Webinars
The main focus of the knowledge management system is to reduce the time to information.
Types of Knowledge: Explicit and Tacit
Knowledge within organizations can be broadly categorized into two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is information that is easily articulated, codified, and transmitted. It encompasses facts, descriptions, and data that can be readily conveyed and understood by others.Examples of explicit knowledge are manuals, procedures, reports, and databases.
In contrast, tacit knowledge refers to personal, context-specific, and often unspoken knowledge that is difficult to transfer to others through writing or verbalization.Examples include skills, insights, intuition, and expertise.
Why do you need knowledge management systems?
A robust knowledge management system can improve customer experiences by reducing their efforts to find information to be successful by using your product. Happy customers are more likely to repurchase and advocate, thus creating a positive feedback loop.
With a knowledge management system, you’ll be able to provide self-service options for customers. This allows you to scale your customer service without having a proportional effect on customer support cost while improving customer satisfaction. Plus, 75% of customers want a self-serve option and over 67% of customers prefer self-serve over contacting customer support. Over 91% of customers would use an online knowledge base if it is useful and helpful.
Thus, investing in knowledge management systems is beneficial to businesses in all aspects. Let’s look at the other benefits too.
Knowledge management system provides decision-makers with access to accurate, up-to-date information and expertise, enabling them to make well-informed, data-driven decisions that drive business success. A Knowledge management system promotes collaboration and the exchange of knowledge among teams, departments, and locations, breaking down silos and fostering a culture of cooperation and collective intelligence. By capturing and sharing best practices, lessons learned, and expert insights, a Knowledge management system accelerates learning and skill development within the organization, empowering employees to reach their full potential.
Knowledge management system acts as a catalyst for innovation by facilitating the exploration and synthesis of new ideas, solutions, and opportunities, fueling creativity and driving competitive advantage.By streamlining access to information and expertise, a Knowledge management system enhances operational efficiency, reduces redundancy, and increases overall productivity, allowing organizations to do more with less.
How to build a robust knowledge management system?
In order to build a robust knowledge management system, you need to bring all the elements of knowledge management system together:
- Source all information in one place
- Organize information
- Implement AI self serve options
- Update the system
Let’s focus on how to create a customer facing knowledge management system for self support.
Source all information in one place
The first step in developing your knowledge management system is to collect all the relevant information your employees and your customers need in one place. Understand what are the frequently asked questions from the customers and possible areas where solutions can be.
3 ways to identify what your customers are having problems with:
1. Go through your customer support tickets to understand the types of questions customers have, their frequent queries and their solutions. These can form a base for your knowledge management system.
2. Talk to your customer facing teams : Have a word with customer support and sales team to ask about queries from customers. Ask them to list the questions and topics that arise frequently.
3. Deep dive into website analysis : Understand customer journeys. See what customers are searching for using search bar queries. Make a list of all such pages and queries.
4. Collect all your company documents : like FAQs, tutorials, product documentation at one place for easy searchability.
Once you have all this information, it’s time to start writing.
Organize information
Structuring and categorizing knowledge in a systematic manner for easy retrieval and use, often involving taxonomies, metadata, and classification systems. Structuring information into categories ensures information is accessible and organized.
Once you have all the FAQs, and documents, you can tag them properly to ensure they’re easily retrievable.
Implement AI self serve options
While you have a static format of FAQs, webinars, product demos and more, customers spend over 15-20 minutes to search the information they need. Implementing a conversational AI self-serve copilot like Alltius can help you in many ways:
- AI assistants can understand natural language queries from customers and pull relevant knowledge articles/answers from your knowledge base. This provides a more intuitive self-serve experience.
- With Alltius, you can go beyond just static FAQs by creating an interactive knowledge base with capabilities like guided troubleshooters, decision trees, and step-by-step solutions powered by AI.
- You can leverage AI to automatically extract insights, solutions, and reusable knowledge nuggets from sources like customer chat/email transcripts, call recordings, forums etc.
In order to implement self-serve AI, just follow four simple steps:
Step 1: Upload all information sources to Alltius assistant.
Create an account on Alltius and create a new assistant. Follow the steps to upload your company documents into the AI assistant.
Step 2: Check the effectiveness of the AI assistant in the playground.
After all the sources of information are uploaded, check the AI assistant with a few questions. If you have any issues with the AI assistant, you can contact our team to get them resolved.
Step 3: Deploy it on your website
Once you’re happy with the changes, deploy it on your website using the steps mentioned on your screen.
Step 4: Connect it with your native stack to provide customer information as required.
You can connect Alltius with all your software to maintain the continuity of your customer information using integrations.
Learn how to create your own conversational ai and how to build your own ai.
Update the system
Continuously improving Knowledge Management processes, technologies, and content to ensure relevance, accuracy, and effectiveness through regular review and optimization, adapting to changing organizational needs and industry dynamics.
Alltius can help you with this. Alltius continuously monitors your customer conversations, and if any new conversations come up, it can automatically convert it into an FAQ for easy search ability for customers.
Challenges in Knowledge Management Systems
While the benefits of Knowledge management systems are numerous and compelling, organizations may face several challenges during implementation and ongoing management:
Cultural Resistance: Overcoming resistance to change and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing can be a significant hurdle, as some employees may be reluctant to share their expertise or adopt new systems and processes.
Information Overload: With vast amounts of data and information available, organizations may struggle to identify and prioritize the most relevant and valuable knowledge assets, leading to information overload and inefficiencies.
Data Quality and Relevance: Ensuring the accuracy, completeness, and relevance of the knowledge assets within the Knowledge management system can be a challenge, as outdated or incorrect information can undermine the system's effectiveness and credibility.
Integration and Interoperability: Integrating the Knowledge management system with existing enterprise systems and applications can pose technical and operational challenges, requiring careful planning and coordination to ensure seamless data exchange and workflow continuity.
User Adoption and Engagement: Encouraging user adoption and sustained engagement with the Knowledge management system can be a hurdle, as employees may initially resist or struggle to adapt to new tools and processes, necessitating robust training and change management strategies.
Security and Compliance: Implementing robust security measures and ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations and intellectual property protection can be a complex undertaking, requiring specialized expertise and ongoing vigilance.
Measuring and Demonstrating ROI: Quantifying and demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) of a Knowledge management system can be challenging, as the benefits may be intangible or long-term, requiring creative approaches to measure and communicate the system's value to stakeholders.
Best Practices for Implementing Knowledge Management Systems
To overcome these challenges and unlock the full potential of a Knowledge Management System, organizations should adopt a strategic and holistic approach, incorporating best practices mentioned below.
Develop a comprehensive strategy that aligns the knowledge management system with organizational goals, defines clear objectives, and outlines processes for knowledge creation, capture, sharing, and application.
In order to have maximum benefit from the knowledge management system, you need to cultivate a culture that values and encourages knowledge sharing, collaboration, and continuous learning.
You must engage stakeholders and subject matter experts from various departments and levels throughout the organization. This ensures that the knowledge management system meets their needs, captures their expertise, and gains buy-in for successful adoption.
Invest in user-friendly, intuitive technologies and tools that are easy to navigate and integrate seamlessly with existing workflows, minimizing disruptions and enhancing user experience.
Conclusion
A knowledge management system, when done the right way, can provide benefits almost instantly. From reducing customer support costs, improving NPS to more, knowledge management systems are extremely useful for customer support teams.
By embracing best practices and leveraging the power of cutting-edge knowledge management tools and technologies, organizations can embark on a transformative journey towards becoming truly knowledge centric enterprises, driving innovation, enhancing competitiveness, and achieving sustainable growth in an ever-evolving business landscape.
In case you’re looking to implement AI self-serve along with your knowledge management system, try Alltius. With Alltius, companies saw reduction in support costs by $50k/month, 30% ticket deflection within one month and 90% improvement in first time resolution.
Price: Free trial available. Pricing depends as per use case and is 1/10th of other platforms.
Learn more about Alltius:
- Start a free trial
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