What are Knowledge Management Best Practices?

Knowledge management (KM) is about making information easily available and digestible to individuals across the organization. It enables teams to learn from past experiences, share expertise across departments, and make informed decisions based on collective wisdom from past and present employees. Knowledge management best practices are KM practices that are proven to deliver quick business value while elevating the experiences of all stakeholders.

Per Gartner, there are 7 best practices to improve knowledge management in the enterprise that will ultimately improve user experiences. In fact, Gartner says that many digital transformation projects have failed because organizations have focused on installing the pipes (digital touchpoints) but not what flows through those touchpoints (knowledge — answers, advice, content) and the relevant best practices.

Learn about the 7 knowledge management best practices from Gartner, and the way businesses can achieve them, from eGain.

Recommendation: Design thinking doesn’t focus on solving a problem — it focuses on achieving a goal. It requires an outside-in approach where user experiences are designed by empathizing with the user’s situation. This approach improves user experience and therefore, customer experience.

How to execute the best practice

Businesses need to consume innovation quickly. They need to be agile in implementation — Focus on adoption, make quick changes based on feedback, and ensure advocacy.

This begins with thorough user research, including interviews, surveys, and observations of how employees and customers interact with existing knowledge resources. Businesses should:

• Monitor user adoption rates and make adjustments based on user feedback
• Build advocacy programs to promote knowledge sharing
• Establish clear metrics for measuring success

The eGain Innovation in 30 Days program for knowledge management allows teams to pilot the eGain AI Knowledge Hub in their environment. Our team helps enterprises identify use cases, design solutions, and put the eGain AI Knowledge Hub into production at no-commitment, and no-risk.

Recommendation: Organizations deploy multiple knowledge bases and create islands of knowledge. According to Gartner, enterprises that undertake enterprise-wide knowledge consolidation projects can lower knowledge management application maintenance costs by 15% to 40%.

It will improve the speed of knowledge being authored and released to multiple channels, shorten the time of the training of machine learning or the natural language processing engine, and increase the accuracy rate of the content.

For organizations that may find it difficult to consolidate all knowledge to a single knowledge management system, Gartner recommends system federation—establish a single, “logical” content hub where all relevant content is available over the appropriate API(s) among a rationalized number of systems.

How to execute the best practice

An AI Knowledge Hub allows organizations to “plug in” various knowledge sources. The system federates content to deliver contextual and relevant company knowledge across channels and touchpoints. eGain has been advocating a knowledge hub approach for a long time, with a tiered approach to knowledge management.

Depending on the content stored in various knowledge bases, the Knowledge Hub can be employed to operationalize a consolidation strategy that works best for that organization.

Organizations can promptly migrate essential content to the knowledge hub, gradually move less frequently accessed content over time, and implement a federation strategy for the remaining material that is required infrequently.

Recommendation: Enhance enterprise search by leveraging semantic analytics and natural language processing capabilities.

Digital commerce, web self-service, content presentation sites, and mobile apps depend on the drill-down capability of search to make information retrievable from large repositories.

Gartner advises application leaders to create maps outlining the information that needs to be searched, along with the search objectives of both customers and employees when planning for these projects.

How to execute the best practice

Search should be able to guide the user to relevant, accurate information based on their query. This can involve a variety of data sources, machine learning, and natural language processing to optimize user experiences.

eGain’s AI powered search uses a set of powerful technologies to understand the user’s intent — Personalization, Intent inference, search learning, NLU, metadata, indexes — and return accurate search. Each layer of technology can be tuned to adapt to specific needs of the customer and data

Recommendation: In industries such as financial services and healthcare where customer issues can be quite complex, especially as simpler customer queries get handled by self-service, knowledge guidance can greatly simplify processes for both employees and customers.

How to execute the best practice

An AI reasoning capability should be configurable to support different types of customer experiences. The guidance engine takes users through a set of steps to diagnose a problem, guide them to a solution, and ensure compliance.

eGain Guided Help uses patented Artificial Intelligence reasoning and Case-Based Reasoning™ (CBR), to match the context of customer requests with solutions in your knowledge base. The system prompts customers with additional questions and provides contextual answers until an appropriate solution is found.

Recommendation: Businesses should consider the use of conversational AI capabilities such as virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot to provide customers with “shortcuts” to the right information. This reduces the need to navigate complex websites or mobile apps and contact customer service over expensive live channels. Good virtual assistants (or virtual customer assistants, as Gartner calls them) rely on knowledge repositories as the foundation and natural language processing (NLP) technologies.

How to execute the best practice

The VCA’s knowledge needs to be broad and deep to be able to answer questions intelligently. The bots also need to be connected with other channels for a unified, connected customer experience.

eGain’s virtual customer assistants are more than simple conversational interfaces. Their capabilities include:

• Solving real-world problems
• Connecting with other channels including live agents, enabling handoffs from bot to live agents and vice versa
• Availability as Virtual Agent Assistants — customer service agents in contact centers

Recommendation: Personalization is now a strategic imperative. Personalized, relevant, and contextual information can save lots of time for customers. Businesses can provide targeted, relevant content across all channels of interaction.

Organizations must understand their customers’ preferences and tailor their communications accordingly.

How to execute the best practice

Once your content is consolidated in a central Knowledge Hub, it can then be used in context across devices, touchpoints, and locations. Contextualized content can be presented based on user profile and current need and delivered to personalized portals.

Recommendation: Select knowledge solutions, customer and partner community solutions with search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities. In addition, an active community environment will help. Active knowledge sharing communities generate a large depth and breadth of knowledge

How to execute the best practice

When selecting knowledge management solutions, organizations should prioritize platforms that offer robust search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities. This ensures that valuable knowledge assets are easily discoverable both internally and externally.

A well-optimized knowledge base helps users find relevant information quickly and efficiently, reducing frustration and improving overall productivity. This can be done through relevant URL naming conventions, high-quality content, and following SEO best practices.

Beyond basic SEO functionality, organizations should focus on building and nurturing active community environments around their knowledge bases. This can be done by:

• Implementing tools that facilitate easy community contribution and collaboration
• Facilitating knowledge-sharing meetings and community discussions with members across different departments
• Create incentive programs to recognize and reward valuable community contributions
• Regularly moderate and curate community content to maintain quality standards

eGain helps enterprises improve customer experiences and deliver trusted, consumable answers with the AI Knowledge Hub. We have also outlined additional knowledge management best practices in our Knowledge Management for Dummies eBook!

Below are a few best practices that have been proven successful with our customers.

1. Establish Objectives and Success Criteria

Outlining clear goals and objectives for your project helps define what success looks like and the road to get there.

2. Defining the Scope of the Knowledge Base

When planning out a knowledge management project, it can be beneficial to start creating knowledge for specific products or departments first. This will allow teams to identify common gaps and refine processes before expanding the project to the greater organization.

3. Update and Maintain Knowledge

Ensuring long-term usage of the knowledge base requires ongoing updates to the content and implementation of feedback from users. A few ways this can be done include:

4. Conduct Routine Updates:

• Create new knowledge assets with the introduction of new products, services, and processes.
• Routinely evaluate knowledge assets to ensure they are still accurate and up to date.
• Assess feedback from users and update knowledge accordingly or create new content if needed.

5. Create personalized interfaces

One way to ensure that the knowledge base is used by employees of all skill levels, not just junior or new employees, is to create personalized interfaces. Interfaces can be customized based on skill level, role, or department.

Personalized interfaces provide relevant, helpful information in an accessible way.

6. Selecting and Managing Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

Subject matter experts and experienced customer service agents are great resources when building content for a knowledge base. It’s important to work with people with technical and non-technical backgrounds as they can offer unique perspectives on a topic.

Creating incentives for sharing knowledge and communicating how SMEs roles could change after sharing expertise will help cultivate a healthy knowledge-sharing culture.

Organizations implementing effective KM best practices experience both operational and financial benefits that significantly impact their overall performance and success.

Operational Efficiency

A strong knowledge management strategy can dramatically reduce time spent searching for information.

Employees can address challenges more effectively when they can quickly access the information they need. This is especially helpful in customer service operations, where support and service team members need to answer a large volume of customers’ questions.

Organizations can maintain higher levels of performance across all departments with standardized processes and better compliance tracking.

Cost Savings

A knowledge management strategy can lead to a decrease in operational redundancy and knowledge loss, which ultimately leads to cost savings.

One example is lowered training costs through the help of a knowledge management system. New employees can quickly access company processes, resources, and FAQs through a central hub during their first few months of onboarding.

Competitive Advantage

When an organization successfully captures, organizes, and leverages its shared knowledge, a foundation is created for informed decision-making.

• With a strong knowledge base, businesses can experience a variety of benefits:
• Teams can respond more quickly to market changes by accessing relevant historical data and insights
• Innovation cycles accelerate as employees build upon existing knowledge assets rather than starting from scratch
• Customer service improves through consistent access to best practices and solutions

Furthermore, organizations with an effective knowledge management system can adapt more readily to industry changes. Teams can develop a clear understanding of their capabilities, identify knowledge gaps, and quickly distribute new information throughout the organization.

Proven best practices combined with a mature technology can get incredible improvements in CX and employee experience for the business. Look at these:

• A leading telco improved FCR by 37% and NPS by 30 points, while speeding up agent time-to-competency by 50% across 10,000 agents and even 600 retail stores.
• A large HCM provider and BPO company saw an immediate 70% adoption of its eGain knowledge system when it had targeted to reach 40% adoption.
• Leading North American telco reduced average handle time (AHT) by 17% and incoming calls by 19% with omnichannel knowledge.
• Payroll and human capital management software provider’s employees saw improvements all around — 60% in confidence in answer, 35% in finding the right answer, 62% in consistency of answers, and 67% in time to answer with eGain Knowledge.

By facilitating knowledge-sharing culture, companies can enhance their operational efficiency, improve employee collaboration, and deliver superior customer experiences.

Our Innovation in 30 days program is a no-charge, no-commitment production pilot of the eGain AI Knowledge Hub with expert guidance for success. Over a focused 4-week period, your organization can test and evaluate the solution with support from our expert team at no cost and with no obligation. Many of our enterprise clients have tried our AI Knowledge Hub risk-free. Learn more about it here.

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