As a knowledge manager, I often struggle to convey the importance of my role to those outside of the KM community. For most, you can be a content writer or a technical writer, but if you explain that you manage all this knowledge and make it accessible to everyone in the organization, they draw blank.

So here is a simple definition to explain what it is and its purpose in the organization. Hope it helps when next time you have to explain how critical is your role for your organization.

Our role is to ensure that valuable information is not only captured but also made accessible to everyone within the company with the right metadata and tagging to ensure that the right knowledge is delivered when looking for specific topics. This means that we are responsible for creating systems and processes that allow for seamless knowledge sharing and collaboration.

By collecting and organizing data, we can ensure that everyone has access to the knowledge they need to make informed decisions and drive innovation.

But that's not all - knowledge management also involves collaboration and the creation of new ideas. By working together, we can generate fresh insights and push the boundaries of what's possible for the growth of employees and the organization as a whole.

In today's fast-paced business world, having access to the right information at the right time can mean the difference between success and failure. That's why knowledge management is critical to any organization's success.

So the next time someone asks you what you do as a knowledge manager, don't be afraid to share this exciting and important role with them. After all, knowledge is power, and we are the gatekeepers of that power! So KM is much more than storing and sharing knowledge and it's all about managing possibilities to help your employees grow, learn, share and innovate and deliver the best outcomes to clients and customers.
 

Given how competitive contemporary markets are, your organization cannot afford to overlook the importance of gathering insights directly from customers. Knowledge management plays a crucial role in facilitating the collection and utilization of customer feedback. As a specialist in the field, you are central to your company’s efforts to harness the power of insights in ways that drive innovation and boost customer engagement.

While knowledge management is widely recognized for its ability to enhance internal operations and knowledge sharing, its potential as a tool to broaden the scope of customer feedback is often overlooked. By leveraging knowledge management systems and practices, you can empower your company to actively engage with a wider audience and expand the channels through which they receive feedback.

Achieving and Utilizing Seamless Customer Journeys

As a knowledge management professional, you understand that one of the most important uses of consumer insights is creating meaningful customer journeys. Nevertheless, it’s also vital to recognize that a great experience can provide important insights. By effectively utilizing knowledge management practices, you can create a more mutually beneficial consumer journey that helps you tap into authentic feedback from a broader audience.

Some effective approaches to this include:

Tailor your strategy

Design a feedback collection strategy that aligns with your knowledge management goals. Identify the most important touchpoints related to these goals where customers interact with your organization throughout their journey. Wherever possible, incorporate feedback mechanisms into these areas, like satisfaction surveys, feedback forms, and user comments to capture their experiences. By collecting more targeted feedback, you can refine your knowledge management processes to improve consumer journeys.

Foster active collaboration

Gaining truly authentic customer journey insights should involve making consumers active participants in the process. Invite a broader range of consumers to get involved in product testing. Even having customers film their reactions when unboxing a product can be impactful. In essence, you’re getting immediate and unfiltered feedback that you wouldn’t necessarily gain from surveys. By nurturing these knowledge-sharing collaborations, you create a valuable feedback loop that enhances the customer experience and improves the range and efficacy of your organization's knowledge assets.

Leaning into Web Accessibility

Part of the knowledge management specialist’s role is ensuring the information-gathering process is as effective as possible. This is also crucial for making certain you can gain data from the broadest audience. Among the most powerful ways to enable this is to boost the accessibility of your business’ online resources.

Some impactful ways of utilizing web accessibility for gaining knowledge include:

Designing for accessibility

It’s not enough to simply tack superficial accessibility traits on top of your existing website. You need to direct your company’s web designers to create your online knowledge platforms with inclusivity at their core. Begin with steps that meet the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) web accessibility compliance guidelines. Optimize navigation for use with keyboards as well as a mouse. Provide alternative text for images and captions for videos. Make sure these efforts extend to the methods customers can provide feedback online.

Providing accessibility training

While your role as a knowledge management specialist means you drive company-wide efforts, you’re also reliant on other professionals to implement your initiatives. It is, therefore, vital to ensure that all relevant staff receive comprehensive web accessibility training. This helps to ensure workers have a practical understanding of the basic principles of online inclusivity and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). As a result, you can be certain that everyone involved with creating knowledge assets and influencing consumer engagement prioritizes reaching the widest possible audience.

Leveraging Knowledge Management Tech

The rise of the digital landscape has been great for knowledge management specialists. You have the opportunity to leverage technological tools that expand your ability to gather feedback from a broader audience. It’s worth taking the time to understand what platforms specifically geared toward and powered by knowledge management you can adopt into your strategies.

Some of the tools you can use to reach broader audiences include:

Interactive feedback widgets

Feedback widgets have become more practical knowledge management tools over the last decade or so. These specialized tools allow users to provide feedback on individual website components or content sections, so they can rate the helpfulness of the asset and suggest improvements. By incorporating these widgets effectively, you encourage users to actively engage with your knowledge resources and provide specific feedback. As this tends to be a more user-friendly and convenient approach to feedback, you may find it garners a broader range of respondents.

Sentiment analysis and text mining tools

Sometimes the issue is not that you haven’t received a broad range of feedback, but that you don’t have tools to fully analyze the widest possible insights from the data you’ve gained. Sentiment analysis and text mining tools employ natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to extract meaningful insights from qualitative feedback assets, such as customer comments or even support tickets and assess them efficiently. Indeed, the text mining elements can categorize feedback based on topics, keywords, or themes, allowing you to gain deeper insights from large volumes of customer responses.

Conclusion

Knowledge management is a powerful tool for businesses to gather and utilize customer feedback effectively, driving innovation and improving decision-making. By tailoring feedback collection strategies and fostering active collaboration with customers, your company can gain a wider range of relevant insights. It’s also vital to prioritize web accessibility and leveraging knowledge management technology to connect meaningfully with diverse audiences. This creates a positive cycle of engagement and improvement, enabling your business to refine its knowledge management processes, enhance customer journeys, and gain valuable insights for the continuous enhancement of products and services.

As you develop your knowledge management strategies, it’s worth also thinking beyond direct insights from customers. Establish channels and tools to maximize the potential of customer service staff. By fostering an environment where employees are encouraged to provide suggestions and insights based on their interactions with consumers, you can tap into additional sources of knowledge, further broadening your feedback channels.

As a project manager, you’re in charge of a lot of people and a lot of data. You’ve got to ensure that everyone on your team can gather the information they need as quickly as possible. It can be a complex task that used to be easier when everyone was in the office. The employees could walk over to an associate to ask questions and get a quick response. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic, many project teams are now working remotely from home, so the idea of sharing information has become more of a challenge than it was in the past.

The solution is to implement knowledge management techniques and make a database of information your team can use and contribute to from wherever they’re currently operating. Let’s look at how knowledge management can improve your remote team.

Knowledge Management And Remote Work

Knowledge management allows anyone in your team to collect, organize, and share any information they need about anything, from HR policies to product roadmaps to holiday calendars, with very little fuss. This information can be stored anywhere, from a server at corporate to the cloud. Basically, it’s where anyone can get to it quickly.

When you think about it, a knowledge management information database is perfect for a remote project team because they can still work to their full potential without sitting in the physical office. On top of that, when the information they need is at their fingertips, your employees can get what they need without stopping their current tasks to seek out the information. Studies show that it can take 25 minutes to get back on task after a distraction, which can be devastating when you’re on a tight deadline. After all, it’s easy enough to get distracted by noise and family when working from home as it is.

Many remote employees, especially those who work as part of a project management team, may try to work varied schedules, which could be early in the morning or sometimes at night. Online knowledge management allows team members to access the information they require whenever needed, which provides maximum flexibility. Employees can often be more creative when they work on their own schedule. So, this tech can allow them to reach their full potential for the good of the team.

Why Knowledge Management Is Ideal for Remote Teams

A good knowledge management system is excellent for any company, including those in brick-and-mortar stores. However, these types of databases are ideal for remote teams because it helps to meditate on some of the challenges of this type of work environment.

In addition to the lack of face-to-face contact with co-workers, working remotely has other surprising health risks, including those that have to do with mental well-being. A common side effect of working from home is an increased risk of burnout, which can occur when employees are unable to properly manage stress at work.

One potential cause of workplace stress is if an employee needs information that they cannot find. If this occurs continuously, and the employee is not able to receive the help they need from managers or co-workers, burnout symptoms can ensue. You can avoid this potential issue by building a knowledge management database that is easily accessible to employees and promoting its use.

The other great benefit is that knowledge management creates an even playing field where everyone on the team has the same access, and they don’t feel left out. Sometimes, team members may believe that asking for information they should already have can look like incompetence. The ability to drop in and easily find the necessary information can prevent that scenario.

Getting Started With Knowledge Management

Now that you’ve started a database, it’s time to get the employees in on the act so they can provide their own valuable information. Ask your associates to document key experiences and compile materials that will help other project team members and add them to the database. Since this task is so essential, instead of just making a request, make it a part of the employee’s job description so they understand the importance of what they’re doing.

With the knowledge management database created, the project manager should remind their teams of its existence when an employee asks for a particular piece of information. If they don’t use the database often, it can be easily forgotten and defeat the purpose.

Since the ability to find data quickly is so important, it’s wise to ensure that each member has a strong Wi-Fi connection and access to quality internet. If possible, consider using 5G Ultra Wideband or something similar. A strong connection will allow employees to web-conference and easily use tools like Office 365 to compile their information so they can share it with the team. As a remote team, fast internet, with no lost connections is key for delivering quality work and saving their sanity.

In summary, it’s ideal for every project management team to have a knowledge database that can be accessed immediately, especially if they work remotely. Consider the perks and tips provided here and give your team the power to manage their work seamlessly from the comfort of their homes.

Most Knowledge Management professionals end up in Knowledge Management by accident, rather than a deliberate career choice, just like i did (Nokia 9210 a KM Origin Story)

So below are my top 5 tips to developing a career in KM for customer service. If you get these right, you will go a long way towards a successful career in KM. 

Customer Focus - The Customer and Customer facing staff are the most crucial stakeholders in Knowledge Management for Customer Service. You need to empathise with both and see the world through their eyes. If you can do so, spend time taking calls or dealing with chats from Customers directly to understand what works well and where the challenges are from a Knowledge Management perspective. If you cannot do that, sit with agents and observe the calls. What do agents do? How do they find content? Is it easy to understand? What do they do when they are stuck? I learn far more from sitting with call centre agents than anyone else. Helping frontline staff and delivering value to them should be your primary focus. 

External Networking - Join various industry events. Use LinkedIn's pwer to connect with similar professionals, and don't be afraid to ask questions, share problems, and offer solutions. If unsure, connect with me, and I will be happy to point you in the right direction. Be aware that there are a lot of different fields of Knowledge Management out there, from KM in Law to consulting firms, to libraries, to organisational knowledge, and of course, Customer Service. Most share common traits and best practices, but be sure you find the proper forums for your context. 

Curiosity – Be curious and be happy to try new things and ways of working across all KM strategy components. Pilot new ideas and see what works and what doesn't. Too many KM professionals get protective over the way they work, especially when it comes to content. Try not to be overprotective with your content and embrace constructive feedback to improve it, especially from the customer and frontline staff. A good Knowledge worker should support and encourage this.

Specific Skills – Learning some core Knowledge Management skills could be advantageous. For example, Copy Writing, Process Design, SEO or Information Architecture / Taxonomy skills, but to be honest, in the longer term, I am not 100% sure they will still be as valid, as AI starts to take over a lot of these tasks.

Technical Skills –  Although not essential, it is worth taking the time to understand how your existing Knowledge estate works from a technical perspective. For example:-

• What systems exist? 
• How are they connected? 
• What are the interdependencies? 
• What is the role of IT for KM in your organisation? 
• What are all the features of the KM products you are using, and are you using them effectively? 

Most KM Vendors will have external events where you can meet and talk to other KM professionals that use the same technology. Again, sharing knowledge and best practice.

What advice would you give to someone starting a career in Knowledge Management for Customer Service? 

In any organizational setting, new knowledge is generated every single day. What was a fact a few years ago is now considered outdated or irrelevant. The decay of knowledge not only affects us as individuals but affects organizations as a whole. Technologies change constantly leading to the decay of knowledge. It is crucial for organizations to have processes in place to capture, harvest, repurpose, and achieve knowledge to keep them relevant to the market, constantly innovate, to stay relevant and competitive.

Organizations generally go through a rigorous process for hiring the right skills and experience. Also, the workforce is trained in specific skills and tools to align with their role and the organization’s goals. But the fact of the matter is that employees leave and take along with them crucial knowledge and experience.  Also, people retire, taking their wealth of experience and insights which is then lost to the organization where an employee gained it all. Organizations are left struggling to fill the skill gaps outgoing employees leave in their wake.

Failure to capture the experience of employees who leave, and past mistakes that proved disastrous and left behind a trail of lessons learned, prove disastrous for the growth of organizations.  These learnings are knowledge that needs to be captured, constantly revisited and revised, and disseminated seamlessly for the growth and progression of organizations in the highly competitive market space.

According to Arnold Kransdorff, when this knowledge is left undocumented, it leaves organizations “plagued with an inability to learn from past experience, which leads to reinvented wheels, unlearned lessons, a pattern of repeated mistakes, productivity shortfalls, and a lack of continuous performance improvement.”

Knowledge decay hampers innovation. Innovation directly implies the services and service delivery which directly impacts the organization’s profitability.

Moreover, when institutional knowledge is lost because of the exit of an employee, and if the organizations fail to capture knowledge and disseminate it, it definitely puts the business in a perilous position. The missing download of insights and knowledge from the outgoing member, makes the joining of the new employee inefficient, affecting his productivity, efficiency, and morale which directly impacts the organization’s business goals.  

To remain informed and relevant in the market, organizations must adopt knowledge management systems for capturing knowledge, preventing the loss of expertise as well as constantly reviewing and updating the knowledge base. Also, KM will only work if it works for the people and they find it closely aligned with their work and goals. Take the monotony out and bring in creative ways of knowledge sharing. Introduce virtual cafes, and icebreaker sessions, bring in the flavor of design thinking, story-telling, and mentoring sessions and you will see employees adapting to the culture of knowledge sharing with ease.

Make collaboration, knowledge sharing, and rewarding the knowledge-sharing efforts, a part of your organizational culture, you can definitely prevent the decay of institutional knowledge, keep your employees armed with the best tool and practices to foster innovation, and stay a mile ahead of your competitors.