Did you know more than 70% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experiences alone? It's no wonder to find customers moving away from a brand after just one bad experience. One-third of consumers agree they would change brands after one bad customer experience. Clearly enough, Customer experience is becoming a fundamental competitive differentiator, making it essential for businesses to prioritize their customer services. 

Your customers likely use more than one channel to reach out to you. One of the key ways to achieve excellent customer experiences is by providing adequate services across multiple customer touchpoints with the help of knowledge management software. All these various channels for customer support, including email, social media, website, physical store, or your call center, provide an opportunity for your business to attract, delight, and retain customers. It depends on your CX strategy and how well it is oriented to achieve your brand objectives. 

While it is vital to provide your customers with as many channels as possible to engage with you, it is equally important to map your customers' journeys and measure their satisfaction across every touchpoint. Therefore, having a multichannel approach to CX is essential but not enough in itself. In an age of growing digitalization, brands can combat all their CX challenges and even thrive by adopting an omnichannel customer support strategy.

Before we delve into how omnichannel customer support boosts CX, it is crucial to understand what it exactly is.

What is Omnichannel customer support?

Like multichannel CX, omnichannel customer service includes several channels customers use to communicate with brands. The critical difference is the integration and relatedness between different channels that omnichannel customer support provides. When these multiple channels integrate, customers get seamless experiences across all touchpoints.  

Having multiple channels for your customers to communicate with you is not enough. Providing seamless customer experiences across all the channels is the key. Here is why omnichannel customer support is the best way to boost CX.

Seamless customer engagement

When customers interact with your brand on one channel, they expect the same services from you on another one. They do not like it when your customer support agent gives them information that is different from the one they see on your website. Customer engagement, therefore, depends on providing consistent information across all channels.  

An omnichannel customer service connects all the channels to make it easy for your customers to switch from one channel to another while completing a purchase. If a customer makes an initial purchase offline and does not want to revisit your store for further assistance, your agent should rise to provide appropriate support through digital channels and make it easy for the customer. In this case, having a robust knowledge management system in place could be of great assistance.

The customers need not think which channel is best suited to their needs. Instead, they should be convinced of the adequate support your brand will provide them, irrespective of the channel they use. Omnichannel customer support tracks customer journeys across multiple channels to provide the right engagement at the right time to your customers.

Integrated channel approach

As the discipline of Customer Experience continues to evolve with new technologies like AI-backed knowledge base software, brands must focus on providing exceptional CX that creates an impact in customers' minds. 

Unlike the multichannel approach, where different channels operate separately, omnichannel customer support integrates all the channels under one centralized location. All the channels coordinate with one another to improve customer experiences.

During a particular customer journey, a customer using a live chat knowledge base management system to solve a problem may shift to a voice call with an agent for better clarity. Since the information is retrieved from the channel last used by the customer, there is no need to repeat the problem. 

The agent, therefore, is aware of the challenge faced by the customer and resolves the issue quickly. This reduces the average handle time (AHT) an agent takes to resolve a customer query and improves the quality of customer support across all touchpoints. 

An integrated channel approach gathers customer data from different channels, which gives you insight into your customers' specific needs. This can help you customize experiences for your customers and increase customer retention.  

Assistance through the customer journey

To boost your CX, you should be ready to support your customers wherever they are. It is undoubtedly beneficial to increase engagement by giving your customers multiple options to communicate with you. However, the quality of support you provide them at each platform is more important. An omnichannel CX tracks customer journeys from beginning to end and ensures that customers receive assistance through every stage.  

There are certainly newer sets of challenges that CX poses for brands every day. However, as long as your customers feel valued, they will stay with your brand. The key, therefore, is to strengthen the foundation of your CX strategy, which should prioritize your customers' satisfaction & having next-gen knowledge management software can be of great help. An omnichannel customer experience removes friction across multiple platforms so customers can move seamlessly from one channel to another and receive quality support throughout their journey. 

Improved Brand trust

Exceptional customer service ranks number one in creating customer loyalty for brands. 

To retain your customers' trust, you need to value their time and care for their convenience at every step. An omnichannel strategy with the help of a knowledge management tool uses data integrations to unify customer information. You can leverage this customer data to create personalized experiences for your potential and existing customers. The unified customer data also increases your agent productivity, enabling them to resolve customer queries at the first go.    

Customers trust brands that are clear and consistent with their message across all channels. Being omnipresent across all channels can help you increase brand awareness among your customers, and consistent brand messaging can help you strengthen brand-customer relationships for improved CX. Omnichannel customer service focuses on improving customer satisfaction by tracking customer interaction at every touchpoint. 

When customer needs are taken care of at their desired channel, it elevates customer experiences and increases brand loyalty.  

Conclusion

An omnichannel customer service equips you to utilize opportunities that data holds, empowers your customers to communicate with you through their preferred channel, and creates a consistent and solid brand image across multiple channels. With the right knowledge management software that promotes omnichannel support, you can enhance the resilience of your CX strategy to embrace challenges and improve customer experiences across all touchpoints.  

Nonaka & Takeuchi developed the SECI model by introducing the Japanese concept of 'Ba', which roughly translates as 'place'. Ba can be thought of as a shared context or shared space in which knowledge is shared, created, and utilized.

Through this article I intend to help my readers understand how vital KM is as an enabler in helping you realizing and tap into honing your competences to magnify your personal brand.

Conference badges - how many of them do you have? If you’re a leader in sales, a marketer or even a business consultant, I am sure you have traveled often and have a collection over the years!

Many times we attend conferences to network and learn about new markets, industry upcoming advancements in technology and many more such events for keeping ourselves updated. Over the years we display our badges from these events as a sign of knowledge we have gained to our surrounding teams.

The larger question I reflect on in this article is how Knowledge Management can help us re-invent ourselves through ensuring we part-take in being a co-speaker rather than just another participant at a Masterclass in a conference.

Let's introduce you to the four quadrants of the SECI model to learn more.

• Socialization (Tacit to Tacit) – Socialization is about capturing knowledge by physical proximity; wherein direct interaction is a supported method to acquire knowledge. The tacit knowledge is transferred by common activity such as being together in the same environment.
• Externalization (Tacit to Explicit) – Externalization is the process of making tacit knowledge explicit, wherein knowledge is crystallized and is thus able to be shared by others, becoming the basis of new knowledge. This includes publishing or articulating knowledge. Concepts, images, and written documents, for example, can support this kind of interaction.
• Combination (Explicit to Explicit) – Combination involves organizing and integrating knowledge, whereby different types of explicit knowledge are merged. Here explicit knowledge is collected from inside or outside the organization and then combined, edited, or processed to form new knowledge.
• Internalization (Explicit to Tacit) – Internalization involves the receiving and application of knowledge by an individual, enclosed by learning-by-doing. On the other hand, explicit knowledge becomes part of an individual's knowledge and will be assets for an organization. Internalization is also a process of continuous individual and collective reflection, as well as the ability to see connections and recognize patterns, and the capacity to make sense between fields, ideas, and concepts.

I am sure you can now relate each of the four quadrants of the SECI model on how our tacit knowledge can help us better re-invent our personal brand in-time.

The obvious next question however is how does one role-model and hone such a change and how does one identify the right opportunities in-time.

While there are many models I would like you to read more in detail the Four stages of competence as I relate it to the Quadrant graphic above.

• Quadrant-I > Quadrant-II : As you participate in the Masterclass as an audience the first-time you know very little about the topics as most of the content is new to you. So, in such instances its ok to just keep an open mind and have a few grey areas to which you relate in which your skilled over the years. This is the base for moving from a stage of 'Unconscious Incompetence' to 'Conscious Incompetence'.
• Quadrant-II >> Quadrant-III : As you move away and reflect on the key takeaways you are slowly realizing what areas of the conference for which you need to develop your own subject-knowledge and possibly invest in reading more. You start moving from a stage of 'Conscious Incompetence' to 'Conscious Competence'.
• Quadrant-III > Quadrant-IV : You are beginning to discover yourself and with time by volunteering for expert field work, participating in key research projects & giving talks to smaller communities of practice. You begin to develop mastery of presenting on similar topics and relating content with right examples and resources.

To become a professional speaker requires the right opportunity and one can start with taking professional course as a Certified Learning Champion at work and engaging audiences based on professional opportunities-at-hand.

KM is a journey that starts the very first time we visit the firm’s intranet portal. Many colleagues have participated in contests, published white papers, or taken expert advice and tell us about checking out the KM portal. But the question is how many of us today know we have our very own customized KM page that shows us the last ten enquires we posted, the latest document we searched and related other information that can add value to our daily routing work.

There is a growing need to harness the true potential of KM and explore the different sections.

Some collaborative spaces are more individual in nature, others like War rooms, PDB are specific to group or projects. There is a growing need however for better awareness not just from the KM team to employees but more importantly managers who with proper governance can help resolve some of the challenges highlighted below.

KM as such is only a tool and must be understood effectively by an employee in applying it to improve his productivity. All the challenges have been shared by employees in accessing KM and I have used my experience and speaking to fellow employees to suggest an approach.

10 Top Challenges for Knowledge Managers to tackle

1. Information is available from multiple sources on Google. Today employees who adopt KM spend time finding the right documents but often face challenges with validation. 

This is more to do with a behavioural pattern for adoption. Today most of the information on Google is copyright and the employee would be willing to use a proven framework document uploaded on their KM portal, with the relevant guidelines on how to customize the framework available but what is lacking is who will validate the final document.

There is a need for creation of project champions in teams who can guide employees to use chat forums and publish their questions online to seek the right help to validate information.

2. Project wins need to be supported by the right resources. Today delivery managers are faced with the challenge of depending on resourcing teams to find a fitment as employee resumes are not updated.

During the tenure of an employee, he/she would have updated their resume at least once on a Resume Corner. The challenge is a resourcing team has their owned defined portal and process more importantly is based on the band of an employee. Today, many employees with cross functional skills are not updating their resume completely.

A "Managers corner" where constant reminders are sent should be present and a monthly dashboard sent to the BU Head to ensure employees frequently update their resumes highlighting any significant achievements. 

3. Many teams are doing similar projects as a part of the same domain and some of this work is being recognized but the success factors are not clearly captured completely while building a framework.

Key Wins are highlighted at a BU level and recognition is happening for talented performers who are motivated to build solution frameworks. Today organizations are looking at patenting these frameworks but there is a burning need for identifying trainers who can coach employees working on similar domain projects to identify the tenants of building a framework, more importantly executing it as per the project scope. Webinars are effective but not everyone prefers disclosing his identity in an open forum.

Communities of Practice should be explored more where Discussion Thread links are shared and content can be downloaded for analyses, questions posted, other sections of KM portal accessed such as an Expert Corner and RFP Corner. 

4. Consultants are mostly onsite and are facing a challenge with identifying themselves with the culture of the organization.

Most of the time employees use their time doing certifications, completing administrative work like bills submissions and if nothing just sitting at home.

There is a need for more effective capturing of time sheet data and aligning their time to contribute to knowledge sharing sessions like organizing sessions to new recruits , domain-based case study creations and more such that their tacit knowledge is of broader use and reference to the organization.

5. Not all employees know how to be smart workers using KM, mostly they cite accessibility, access rights permission denied and search not valid as reasons.

It is the responsibility of the manager to educate the employee on updating KM regularly. Most employees today have VPN access and are good workers, but the challenge is there is no proper governance established. If immediate managers see the benefits in the long rung motivating employees to share documents and review the same before uploading on KM can be a winner. Today most of the employee’s upload documents for compliance; they do not see the added benefit and recognition that comes if their document is referenced by another team member.

Contests must be expanded and recognize talent where documents mentioned in a Proposal by another fellow employee are recognized rather than the number of employees who have accessed it. 

6. Project Managers do not want their artifacts to be put on KM as most of the time this involves seeking customer permission. 

This is a challenge as the information must be reviewed and selectively edited by someone from the team. Most of the time project managers do not disclose the set of documents in the WSR document.

It should be made a practice where the WSR is reviewed and the number of documents uploaded tallied with the WSR, if any gaps are found valid reasons should be sort from the delivery teams.

7. An employee mostly reaches out to the KM team at the last moment and finds an answer. Today most organizationa have tools like Slack / Microsoft Teams other collaboration tools handy however these are stand-alone from the KM portal which has the ready templates, proposals of past projects, case studies and other information available. However, there are instances where there is a need for an international case reference, backdated reference documents and other such scenarios. It is important to do an online search, put a query or write to an expert all options worth exploring with KM portal. However, the problem is running against time will we get a response quickly?

The answer lies with the KM Team, as sometimes archived documents are not visible but that does not mean they are not present. It is important to ask your KM Champion and seek his recommendation on the best approach. 

8. Employee before leaving the project uploads all his documents on KM but in a hurried and haphazard manner such that it is useless. 

There must be a manager scorecard showcased at the QIC that merits the use of more frequent KM usage at a BU level. This does not have to be an extensive exercise and involve a lot of data collection and analysis.

Managers can make a choice and decide the type of documents that must be uploaded on a regular basis and drive compliance and quality rather than quantity.

9. When an Employee is on bench, he is spending hours giving interviews for new projects to be billable. Every employee is interested in his QPLC. Their efforts are always invested to tell their immediate managers of their billability and find suitable projects to be aligned to. There have been occurrences where an employee is not updated his manager or vice versa and this has led to billability not being achieved.

To resolve there has to be a BU level skill dashboard visible to all employees for open positions by band, competency and other parameters if an employee’s tenure in the project is nearing the project end term.

10. Customers are seeing better connect from senior management visits than survey feedback as the ownership is better managed.

Today review calls, escalation matrix is some of the ways customers are being given authority to get the right service from a partner. They are seeing value in ownership as many times senior management visits also are planned to resolve a problem in a timely manner. However, many times the customer is failing to acknowledge these initiatives and only remembers the issue at hand which impacts the CSAT.

It is important for clients to recognize that any problem is a time for due diligence and recognizing that a change is managed two ways. There must be a proper signoff and the customer aware that his feedback has been captured in the KM portal and would be used for future reviews to improve the service delivery.

To summarize I have aligned most of the suggestions around the three parameters below.

Employee Productivity

1. It is important employees do not always use KM for a last-minute information search but understand how to navigate KM depending on the kind of requirement.

2. Employees refer the BU dashboard regularly and plan well in advance for their next project. Update their resume with significant achievement that helps delivery managers identify their talent.

3. Managers drive employee to regularly access KM and the same is highlighted during QIC’s to ensure the organization is committed.

Employee Satisfaction

1. It is important employees see value from KM in their work being referenced rather than just the number of times it is accessed.

2. Many employees who do not prefer face to face interactions may be more comfortable using chat forums, WarRooms or even webinars where they type a question to the presenter. 

3. Onsite employees see value in taking knowledge sessions for new project team members, working on case study references, framework design and more for reusable artifacts.

Customer Satisfaction

1. Customers must be made more aware of the knowledge captured in KM portal. It is not just project artifacts but even review meeting minutes , senior management connect sessions and others are important. It is important senior management signoff happens and the feedback is captured on KM portal to ensure quality service delivery.

An effective Knowledge Manager

1. Should be visible to all employees in the BU through his actions rather than reactions. He must reach out informally as well and talk to fellow employees to relate information to them.

2. Learn two ways, spending more time with Project Champions helping employee know the merits of using the virtual KM world.

3. Know the customer’s pulse and drives information to delivery teams supporting them with data to make a winning impression or resolve conflicts. This cannot happen visiting the client place it has to be done informally using the relationship with the delivery or sales teams.

4. Represent the BU as their spokesperson, success stories are not always captured in case studies. An effective KM Manager should sell Knowledge to fellow employees.

5. Acknowledge helping employees in different time zones working on the same domain as many times timings may differ. Helping your BU employee service his customer better should be the motto of all Knowledge Managers, as their success is yours.

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages." - William Shakespeare

Ever wondered who the actors of a PLAY are when you are deploying a successful KM strategy? If you thought that it is only the Leaders who are the producers and who own the budget, then think again!

Today, there are the three categories we can put these ACTORS into:

1) Decision Makers : These are the stakeholders who are accountable and own the change at an enterprise , department, or team level. For example, the Leadership Team and their regional or geographic teams if KM is distributed model.

2) Influencers : These are key experts whose span of influence ensures the KM strategy is aligned to the culture of the firm. They are consulted with and at times responsible for coaching / mentoring the team implementing the change. For example, the HR collaborating with the Users who are early adopters of KM.

3) Implementers : These are the key to executing the change and are custodians of driving the outcomes and always ensuring that they advance those unclear on their KM needs to become believers. For example, the Champions working with the core KM team AND in-turn KM tram working with IT teams.

Past studies would tell you that Knowledge Management is an organizational need and yet it is inherent that most organizations discount how their KM strategy is aligned to the business strategy. One reason that comes to mind is how do we combine the culture + systemic design + user needs and equate it to designing KM systems around our business outcomes.

"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."
- Leonardo da Vinci

In the beginning of this article, we bucketed our actors into three categories. If you look at the above graphic, what does it call-out? We can further group the characteristics into the below. It tells you that before you build a KM system what becomes vital is to ensure you have agreed on a set-rule based policy of advancing KM within your organization; that encourages only certain behaviours that ensure knowledge is created - shared - used and harvested. It tells you that we also need to ensure we imbibe practices that encourage us to move from our Fixed Mindset to truly contributing to advancing information that is actionable and helpful to those in need of it, which is Knowledge.

Behaviours

• We ensure at an individual level we are clear on the user's unmet needs and ensure our KM team and Champions are working together to even challenge their own 'Fixed Mindset'. We need to provide them with the right budget approvals, empowerment to be decision makers in this journey as entrepreneurs and ensure they are rewarded for the softer aspects that lead to creation & sharing of intellectual capital.
• As leaders, we combine our own ‘Believer's Mindset’ and ensure through sharing of our own failures of adopting KM we encourage exploratory learning within our teams. We define how we want Knowledge Management to truly differentiate us.
• Ensure our teams have a 'Founders mindset' (social construct is not missing) to coach their teams and top-down we ensure workplace collaboration rather than advancing secret mission evangelists who are stand-alone heroes.

Practices

• It is important that workplace policies are aligned, and the HR manage knowledge gain-loss throughout the employee life cycle, including ensuring every event includes knowledge sharing to begin, which slowly encourages other leaders to come forward and avoid high-performance distance within their teams.
• Core KM team has a mix of diversity for ensuring there is no brokerage mindset within the champions and other influencers who are driving KM based on only how they are rewarded.

Knowledge

• Our systems need to be designed around epistemology of practice ensuring the IT team is not only considering the 'New Ways of Working' but ensuring that the right touchpoints are catered to codify the knowledge as it flows through the organization.
• Ensure ICT is at the core so we can ensure that everyone in the organization experience contributes to building an intuitive driven performance management system that advances how knowledge is truly an intangible asset that is a key differentiator.

In summary, we need to ensure we go beyond and ensure all our metrics are based around measuring employee engagement and employee effectiveness where the employee is not necessarily only the end-user consuming the knowledge.

So, let us all sign the petition to ensure we are clear on the critical KM touch points and partner with HR / and others based on the role they are playing for increasing adoption. 

Knowledge is an intangible organizational asset that needs to be managed like any other asset. It needs to be developed, consolidated, retained, shared, adapted, and applied so that workers can make effective decisions and take aligned actions, solving problems based on the experience of the past and new insights into the future. -  - Definition from ISO 30401 : 2018

One of my gurus in KM asked me it is unclear to many what is the difference between KM and KM systems. If we define this Problem Canvas, there can be many who relate it to a need to 'Connect' so there is access to the organizations most critical knowledge. Some say nee to 'Collaborate' where we ensure the knowledge flows from those who have it to those who need it the most.

So is there a need to build a KM system or can KM be driven through People Practices where we celebrate true moments that enables Knowledge Management. Let us just look at 3 examples as below to understand this thought more in principle.

It is important to have a KM strategy aligned to the organizational culture

Are you a leader who is a believer and who demands a sense of urgency from your team to merit knowledge sharing behaviours to ensure KM advances? A good example could be any pre-sales team which has a stand-alone KM system (one separated from the larger organization) which the leader continues to ensure his team makes more contextual to their group behaviours and ensures knowledge capture , reuse, and creation. Think aloud; have you experiences any such stand-alone systems in your organization that is your answer.

How to advance a user basis when tacit knowledge contribution is unclear

In many large organizations there are a few experts who have been given titles such as Technical Member of Staff to name one. These are practice leaders who are domain experts and who ensure that through their knowledge practice the CoE continues to ensure relevant industry practices are followed; aligned to solving some of the most complex business problems. There are also innovators who earn credits through the IP they create, and it is this that helps build or advance many domain systems and models that are differentiators in the market for their firm.

The relevant question we can ask is how many of these leaders have contributed to advancing the larger advanced knowledge systems such as GitHub which is truly a global standard for building world class software. So should we measure external knowledge practices and advance users in their careers as truly it's their personal brand that is helping advance the organization, think again you have the answer.

Users are asking for instant gratification moments

Knowledge must be 'well defined' to be 'well understood'. There is a need to have a KM policy , mission-vision statement, and a unified portal that we spoke about earlier that drives the culture. However, without a Central KM team who interacts and has Conversations with the Leaders, Teams, and the larger Community we would truly fail to recognize moments to ensure KM is 'well-acknowledged.'

So, I leave you with this thought. Get started on your Knowledge Management journey today and let’s ensure we are In Conversation with KM!