Proven KM Strategies
Five Best Practices That Ensure
Knowledge Management Success

Leading companies all over the world have significantly improved their customer service with well-executed knowledge management strategies. Knowledge management has transformed these companies, enabling them to harness the true value of information to improve overall service, cut costs and boost customer satisfaction and revenues. For other organizations, knowledge management initiatives have been plagued with costly setbacks and obstacles. What can be done to ensure the success of your knowledge management initiative?

While the specific goals and implementation requirements of knowledge management vary significantly for each organization, there are some best practices that have been proven to be common across industries and organization types.

Below are five of the most crucial best practices that can benefit your knowledge management initiative, both in the near- and long-term.

1. Envision, engage and encourage. The phrase "people, process and technology" has been used so often it has become cliché, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Having the right knowledge management technologies in place is critical to establishing a scalable, successful knowledge management initiative. But the tools and technologies are only a mechanism that supports the underlying processes and the people who contribute, review and use the content on a daily basis.

How will you capture, reuse, maintain and improve knowledge? Envisioning these processes—and how they will be enacted—is the core of a successful deployment. Similarly, these processes are only as effective and successful as the people employing them. Engaging contributors, users and customers in using and improving the systems implemented is clearly vital.

For internal audiences, this means that from the top of the organization on down, everyone understands and buys into the vision of knowledge management. Customer support isn’t simply about being on a case-closing treadmill; it’s about sharing and improving knowledge and getting better at delivering service. In addition, staff members’ involvement in knowledge management needs to be formalized as part of their job descriptions and performance evaluations.

For customers, this means that systems need significant testing and quality control before being rolled out. Phased implementation strategies are key to future success. Support portals need to deliver a great experience up front and provide high-quality, meaningful content right from the beginning. Further, customers need to be actively engaged, through discussion forums and interactive sessions, where critical feedback is gained.

For both audiences, champions of the project need to address the question, "What’s in it for me?" and they need to be able to articulate the value of the solution for everyone who’s expected to interact with the system.

In fact, the whole area of change leadership—getting people aligned with the initiative, getting them trained and coaching their progress—is probably where executives need to place most of their focus.

2. Usable content is king. Thinking of your current content repository of support incidents as the ultimate source of knowledge will invariably lead you in the wrong direction. While important as a source of customer context, these cases are a poor substitute for true solutions-oriented knowledge content. Instead of simply using a search engine to provide a window on content that may be flooded with back-and-forth exchanges and little solution value, it is far better to develop quality content during the course of solving current cases. It is vital that this content development be made part of the resolution workflow.

Indexing content that resides in other repositories can be a good way to quickly provide agents with access to useful content through search. However, in the long run, it is best to re-author the content that is related to the key service issues so that this content is more readily available through the multiple information retrieval options the knowledge management system provides.

When re-authoring content for inclusion in the knowledgebase, break the information up into logical units or solutions. Agents should be able to quickly gain access to useful solutions—content that is structured for access and reuse. It is vital that this content is concise, and that it provides a clear picture of the customer context. One of the most effective methods for developing meaningful content is to fully integrate support agents into the knowledge creation and maintenance process.

Empowering agents to contribute their expertise when demand requires it is particularly useful for filling in knowledge gaps, especially for those infrequent or low-value questions that you have deliberately chosen not to address in the initial implementation because they do not heavily affect customer satisfaction or costs.

3. Accelerate the review process. It is important to start with an understanding that knowledge content is fundamentally about answering questions. Further, this information is often very time-sensitive in nature. As history has shown, once an issue is detected, the bulk of inquiries into that subject arises within the first 30-45 days. That’s why it’s critical that organizations strive to accelerate their review processes as much as possible, while taking the steps required that ensure the quality and usefulness of information. Ultimately, organizations have to weigh the risk of having mistakes appear vs. the value of having content available quickly. This balance will be determined by your risk/reward policies, your industry standards and liability limits.

How do you get quality knowledge content out quickly? Following are the key points:

• Don’t review everything. Rather than having everything reviewed before publishing, it tends to be far more effective to provide authority to those qualified to publish directly, and then review samples of published content to ensure content meets your quality standards.
• Don’t do technical reviews outside of the customer context. A technical expert can review a solution and determine whether it sounds plausible or not, but it is very difficult to confirm whether it works or not without the specifics of the customer situation.

Often it simply isn’t practical to replicate every customer’s environment in a lab, recreate the issue and verify that a given fix works. It is far better to have technical reviews happen to content in the process of actually using it. Then users can flag or fix content that needs correction or improvement, which ensures accuracy while speeding content availability.

Quite simply, your front-line customer service agents may be your best litmus testers for problem-resolution content. Allow them the authority to flag or revise content as they engage with the user. Content that has been flagged can then be reviewed for accuracy and consistency.

4. Reward content creation that works well. Rather than requiring a specific number of content pieces per month or building incentives that encourage meaningless contributions, focus your authors and agents on delivering new content or content revisions that evolve from actual customer engagements. Setting up a reward system that is derived from content usability and supported by a system that tracks content usage and success rates will engender greater participation and higher satisfaction ratings from both content authors and content users.