How Does a Dedicated KM Platform Impact You? : Q&A with Noureen Badwe, Senior Manager of Customer Success, Upland RightAnswers

Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

Marydee Ojala, Editor-in-Chief of KMWorld magazine recently interviewed Noureen Badwe, Senior Manager of Customer Success for Upland Right Answers.

[Edited for length and clarity]

Ojala: Today I'm talking with Noureen Badwe, Senior Manager of Customer Success for Upland RightAnswers. Noureen, please tell us a bit about what RightAnswers does.

Badwe: Right Answers is an enterprise knowledge management platform built for complex environments, the kind where the cost of getting the answer wrong is high. We create a trusted knowledge layer that connects information, structures it, and makes it usable in real time. 

Ojala: AI is obviously the elephant in the room. Organizations invest in AI and automation for support, but the outcomes vary often a lot. What role does knowledge play in determining whether those initiatives succeed or fail? 

Badwe:  AI doesn't solve knowledge problems, it exposes them. Organizations with structured, trusted knowledge tend to see AI initiatives succeed very quickly. The ones with fragmented or outdated knowledge often see the opposite. The difference isn't AI, it's the knowledge layer underneath it. One of the big shifts is organizations moving from thinking about knowledge as content to thinking about knowledge as a system. When knowledge becomes part of the operational workflow instead of a separate repository, that's when it starts to drive real impact. 

Ojala: When knowledge, is fragmented and ungoverned, who feels the impact first within the organization? 

Badwe: Very simply, the frontline feels it first, and they feel it very immediately. For everyone else, it’s a lagging indicator. Fragmented knowledge causes agents to spend an incredible amount of time playing detective. Customers wait longer; agents lose confidence in the information they're finding; escalations start to increase. Organizations often misdiagnose the problem as training or more staff, but the issue is that the knowledge exists, but it’s hard to locate. 

Ojala: What changes occur when frontline agents move from searching across systems to accessing that trusted AI-powered knowledge all in one place? 

Badwe: Agents stop hunting for answers and start being guided to them. Instead of constantly searching for the right answer, the right answer comes to them. When knowledge is centralized and trusted, the system can surface the most relevant answer almost immediately, especially with AI, often directly inside the workflow the agent is already using. Newer agents can ramp up much faster because the knowledge system itself is able to distribute expertise across the entire team and enterprise in a way that's truly scalable. 

Ojala: What does it mean for knowledge to be truly AI ready? 

Badwe: I think the the knowledge manager is probably the most important of all of these dynamics because they are controlling the content. AI-ready knowledge means that information is structured in a way that humans and machines can understand. That comes down to three things within the actual knowledge. The first being clarity, there's sort of clear problem and resolution within the article. The second being ownership. There's people in the organization who are responsible for the accuracy, governance, approvals, and regular review of that knowledge. And the third being structure, the information is organized consistently so systems can retrieve it reliably. 

Ojala: Where does governance and provisioning come into this? 

Badwe: I think it's critical to be able to have a systemic approach to how you govern your information, how you review it, who approves it, when do they approve it, and how it moves through the entire ecosystem. It’s part of being AI-ready. There’s elements of AI within that governance process that we're very keen on as well. Some things AI can review and others that we need a human to review. The entire iterative process is exceptionally important. 

Ojala:

How does the notion of federated or connected knowledge improve both the agent productivity and AI effectiveness? 

Badwe: It’s a modern reality that information and knowledge is everywhere and documentation, internal wikis, support tickets, and internal portals all contain valuable information. In an ideal world, we centralize that knowledge, but trying to move that into a single system isn't always practical. When we federate it, it really changes the model. And instead of centralizing every piece of content, we connect those sources. Then knowledge can be discovered regardless of where it lives and surfaced exactly where it needs to be surfaced to find that answer. 

Ojala: From a leadership perspective, what are the tangible business impacts they can expect to see when they're implementing a dedicated KM solution? 

Badwe: For leadership, I think the value of knowledge management shows up in scale. Support demand almost always grows faster than the support teams can. When knowledge is structured and accessible, organizations resolve issues more quickly without increasing headcount. You start to see improvements in first contact resolution, faster onboarding for new hires, more consistent and positive customer interactions. KM becomes less about documentation and more about operational leverage. KM is a driver for ROI and improved business processes. I think that's when knowledge management becomes a lot more punchy and exciting. And I think that's where AI is really changing the game as well. 

Ojala: How does the KM platform have an impact on how the customer interacts with support? 

Badwe: The real beneficiary of strong knowledge management is the end customer, and customers tend to want two things. They want speed and they want accuracy. When the knowledge layer is strong, both tend to improve. The customer can solve issues through self-service, AI systems can handle our simpler requests. And when a human gets involved, they already have the right information available. 

Ojala:  Noureen, did you have some wrap-up comments you wanted to make? 

Badwe: I think AI is sort of the layer over top of the core of what knowledge really is. We see it as a robust capability across the organization that's fueling everything else. 

Ojala: Thanks for your time today, Noureen. I appreciate it.