KM experts discuss streamlining collaboration tools during the remote work boom

During the COVID-19 crisis, more people have turned to self-support and remote collaboration platforms. The biggest inhibitors are communication barriers and information silos.

Many have access to a plethora of collaboration tools and platforms, but are dissatisfied with the current level of knowledge sharing and are struggling to find real-time solutions.

KMWorld held a webinar featuring Fred Walters, chief innovation officer, iTalent Digital; Sandy Rivas, senior program manager, Microsoft; Chris Coumbe, senior community manager - AEC, Practice and Americas, Autodesk, who discussed how iTalend Digital helped successfully streamline collaboration for a better user experience and heightened organizational success for Microsoft and Autodesk.

iTalent Digital is an innovative global woman- and minority-owned SaaS software company and digital transformation consultancy headquartered in San Jose, California, according to Walters.

The company offers enterprise collaboration, mass personalization and unified search, business insights and analytics, cloud integration and software development, change as a service, and digital transformation.

Knowledge is of no value unless it is consumed, Walters said. The solution is to surface knowledge where the customer chooses to be.

Bi-directional intelligent content syndication allows companies to use connections to open up new strategies.

Autodesk’s focus is to connect customers to the expertise they need. The company has created the largest and most helpful community of designers, engineers and makers in the world, according to Coumbe.

Autodesk wanted to expand and cohere its community by utilizing social media. However, the company wanted to avoid over-extending its existing resources, leverage exisiting content and expert base in the forums, provide access to this content from a variety of social platforms, and have conversations become part of the greater knowledge base, said Coumbe.

The company went from a 4 week pilot to broad adoption across Facebook Groups by getting answers to these key questions:

• Will Expert Elites engage?
• Will we reach a new audience?
• Will we get a shift from the Forum to using the new channel?
• Will this affect Customer Effort Score positively?
• Are we getting different kinds of conversation?

By creating a syndication workflow with the help of iTalent, a community manager decides what questions and conversations to syndicate between the forums and Facebook. Then there can also be automatic syndication of these answers and comments between both platforms.

According to Coumbe, the company was able to gain more than 450 active users.

Microsoft wants to ensure customers know the full value and opportunities of the products they are using, but also understand the purpose of the sibling products and how they complement each other/can also be of value…better together, according to Rivas.

By using iTalent Digital the company was able to populate content and resources where they expect the user to be with the Microsoft Power platform. And Microsoft was able to provide community resources to the customer, wherever they choose to be.

An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.