The ultimate guide to knowledge management

In this guide you'll learn:

• What is knowledge management?

• Why is knowledge management important?

• Benefits of knowledge management for your organization

• Benefits of knowledge management for your customer service department

• Challenges of knowledge management

• Building a knowledge management strategy

• What is a knowledge management system?

• Features of a knowledge management system

• Why is a knowledge management system important for businesses?

• Challenges of knowledge management systems

• How to set up a knowledge management system

• Knowledge management systems for SMB and Enterprise businesses

• Choosing a knowledge management system

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What is Knowledge Management?

‘Knowledge management’ is how an organization collects and shares its expertise for the collective benefit of employees and customers, as well customer support representatives. To manage this practice companies rely on a knowledge management system, software that houses their knowledge and helps them share it to maximum advantage. The first half of this guide discusses the various benefits and challenges of knowledge management, while the second half focuses on the features you can expect to find in a good knowledge management system, and how to choose the right one for your business.

While sharing information is not a revolutionary idea, a modern solution for knowledge sharing within organizations can have revolutionary results. It’s all about taking the insights from the experts and putting them in the right hands so that it can do the most good. Your expertise is one of your most valuable assets — learning how to make it work for you is a good business practice with innumerable benefits, as we will explore in this guide. Knowledge can also be used to capture and analyze the behavior of your customers as they use this knowledge to solve problems successfully (or with difficulty).

Knowledge management is a continuous practice, like tending a garden. With regular upkeep, it can make companies more productive and efficient, resulting in real savings. Having access to the right answers at the right times helps all kinds of stakeholders make decisions and use a product or service successfully.

Types of knowledge

Some types of information can be easily written down, while others are learned by doing. When it comes to the task of sharing knowledge, you will quickly find that not all types of knowledge are alike. To break things down, let’s take the metaphor of in a restaurant and look at the various types of knowledge at play

1. Explicit knowledge (or extrinsic) knowledge is describable – The ingredients and their amounts required for each dish are known, and can be written down for others to follow in the form of a recipe.
   

2. Implicit knowledge (or intrinsic) knowledge is indescribable – The techniques required to prepare each dish are also known, but they cannot be understood fully from a simple recipe – as with learning a language, it is only with years of practice that one can internalize this kind of knowledge.
   

3. Tacit knowledge is unspoken – The etiquette expected of the guests in this restaurant: ‘We don’t do that kind of thing here.’ These unstated norms are understood by frequent guests but can be explained to new customers.

While there are some types of information that lend themselves to knowledge creation more naturally, the good news is that knowledge management can help with each of them. When traditional how-to articles don’t do the job, rich media content such as embedded video tutorials can help guide your users every step of the way.

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Why is Knowledge Management important?

“Sharing knowledge is power.”

Inbal Namir, Director of Knowledge Management & Remote Work Lead at Deloitte

Knowledge management is essentially a way of avoiding siloed expertise in a team, organization or company. As a company, your knowledge is one of the most important tools you have, but it’s not doing anyone any good when it’s locked away in the tool shed. However, with a tool-sharing system, anyone with the right credentials can access and use its contents to solve problems themselves.

And it’s not just employees who need access to product expertise – customers are seeking your knowledge every time they Google your product for an explainer. Knowledge management can help you meet all of these use cases by making sure the right stakeholders have access to the right information.

Knowledge management is important because it can:

1. Create better customer experiences and faster resolution times through self-service

2. Provide a consistent source of truth between support agents and customers

3. Facilitate with internal onboarding of teams, particularly under remote conditions

Without knowledge sharing, you’re operating at a fraction of your potential efficiency, as you will continuously face knowledge gaps and the need to answer basic questions all day. Employees will spend precious time and effort seeking out answers, while customers will face increased frustration as they are forced to call for help with issues they could easily resolve themselves.

Benefits of Knowledge Management for your organization

With so many affordable solutions, knowledge management is a practice with tangible benefits that tie directly into your business goals. Though often seen as a support tool, the business benefits of knowledge sharing are not limited to customer support. Instead of chasing a document or a teammate over slack, teams can immediately access relevant knowledge. Knowledge sharing allows organizations to work smarter, not harder.

Fortune 500 companies lose at least $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge.

Source: International Data Corp. (IDC)

Employee productivity

A knowledge management framework allows employees to perform a host of activities independently that would otherwise require constant hand-holding, therefore bringing down the productivity of your whole team.

By aligning on best practices or internal procedures and publishing them internally, you simply post a set of protocols once rather than to do it in a group training session for new hires every quarter. This allows employees to answer questions independently with a quick search.

One source of truth

When working towards a common goal, proper knowledge management provides a North Star around basic protocols. This can take the form of a reference guide, such as a brand book or a set of design principles around which future work is based. Unlike a physical brand book or PDF, it is easy to update globally at any time. Additionally, it serves as a content hub for sharing and tracking new work, especially as teams learn to collaborate remotely.

Optimized onboarding

Every job has a learning curve and training new hires takes time and company resources to implement, especially when staffing out a new team, office, or location. Onboarding time can be drastically reduced with the help of knowledge management. This ensures that new employees will be ready to add to your team’s overall productivity from day 1.

Legacy knowledge vault

Knowledge management allows your organization to prioritize expertise over experts. In practice, this means having a shared structure in place so that when a product specialist moves on, they leave a repository of knowledge, rather than a gaping vacuum of knowledge. Losing a product expert can cause a temporary disruption in workflows, but it shouldn’t be a drain on your organizational proficiency.

Remote work

Working from home has become a part of everyone's lives, regardless of industry or location. Knowledge management is a game-changer for remote work since it improves accessibility to information without having to ping a colleague to ask for answers or guidance. Employees can understand issues at a glance by finding conveniently categorized articles and tutorials. Best of all, you can set roles and permissions to ensure that only authorized individuals have access to certain sensitive content.

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Benefits of Knowledge Management for customer support

Whether you’re an SMB with a limited support team, an enterprise business scaling your support operation, or a start-up preparing for growth – knowledge management can help your customers find what they’re looking for quickly, while knowledge management systems help support agents – who are in turn supporting your customers.

Benefits to customer experience

• Self-service – Customers can usually solve a majority of product issues themselves, if you put a reliable source of information in their hands. You might have the best support agents in the world, but many customers still prefer to resolve their own issue quickly over waiting on the phone to speak with them. No waiting times to reach an agent translates to less customer frustration and reduced churn.
  

• Consistent solutions – A strong customer support department is able to provide solutions in a consistent manner across the board, no matter the agent or channel. To avoid hit & miss support quality, knowledge management means one source of truth on any issue.
  

• Faster resolution – From the customer’s perspective, the best support experience is often the one where they don’t have to speak to an agent at all. This can be counterintuitive for support departments that are constantly trying to dazzle their customers with delightful service, but the reality is for basic issues most customers simply want their issue resolved as quickly as possible so that they can get back to their lives.
  

• Updated information – Few things are more annoying than troubleshooting a product only to find that a suggested workaround that is clearly outdated. It multiplies the existing customer frustration and is easily avoidable with the right tools. Improve your CX by ensuring that only the most current and up-to-date information is available. When users search for answers there should only be one set of current information – and updating that information on your end should be a one-click process.

Benefits to the agent experience

• Immediate context – If knowledge is power in the right hands, then wouldn’t it be handy to know exactly which articles your customers had read just before they reached out for help? By checking at a glance which support articles a customer has been viewing, agents can dial-in on the issue of an incoming support call in seconds (compared to the costly minutes it might take that customer to explain their issue over the phone).
  

• AI-powered learning – One of the game-changing features that differentiate modern knowledge management from the static FAQs of the past is automated article-suggestion. By monitoring which articles a given customer has viewed, along with the articles most commonly linked with that issue, machine learning can build a correlation with certain areas of your content, resulting in a more efficient support department.
  

• ‘Hands-free’ support – Nothing makes an agent’s life easier than automatic article suggestions. Rather than thumbing through countless open tabs to call up the right how-to guide, a knowledge management system that can scan a ticket for keywords will then supply the agent with readymade answers to those problems with astonishing accuracy.
  

• Faster onboarding – Whether training a single rep, staffing out a new team, or onboarding an entire offsite BPO call center, the reliability provided by knowledge management takes a huge burden off your shoulders. Just as knowledge management deflects tickets and allows agents to focus on more complex issues, it also allows new hires to self-train on support policies and best practices. This allows employees to start work as soon as possible, leaving only the more nuanced forms of tacit knowledge to managers to train.

Benefits to managers and support leaders

• 24/7 support – Knowledge management reduces the load on support agents, thereby freeing them up to answer basic questions. Best of all, it’s customer service that’s available at any hour of the day – a value no other support channel can match.
  

• Generate customers – When you consider the fact that only 1 out of 10 customers who need support actually get in touch with you, it means that the other 9 are simply leaving your product or site and move on. Missing out on those conversations with 90% of your customers (or prospects) is not something most businesses can afford. By providing a portal for existing and new customers to get in touch with you, you’re taking proactive steps to plug that gap and keeping all that traffic in your product, resulting in a much larger sample size for your data.

• Meet SLAs – Of all the customer service metrics and KPIs that support leaders measure, your Service Level Agreement (or SLA) is your baseline promise to your customers, the time under which you promise to resolve their issue. With a team of agents using knowledge management to provide fast and reliable service, meeting that promise and retaining customers becomes much more manageable.
  

• Actionable insights – Managing a support team is all about understanding the big picture, and this is where knowledge management provides a golden opportunity – a megaphone for your voice-of-customer. By monitoring the traffic to different knowledge base articles in real time, managers can scan analytics reports to track spiking support issues at a glance, and then take the necessary steps to address them. You don’t have to do guesswork when you’re making data-driven decisions. Create a new article, update a confusing one, reassign support queues, or providing feedback to your product team – all connecting to customer data and feedback.
  

• Reduce knowledge loss – Call centers have a notoriously high rate of attrition, or employee turnover, meaning that as new agents come and go your team is bleeding knowledge all the time. Prevent loss of expertise to maintain those insights with a knowledge management system consisting of internal articles and how-to tutorials so that your product experts of today can remotely train your agents of tomorrow.

What is a knowledge management system?

A knowledge management system (or KMS) is the software that allows organizations to create, share and track their expertise across groups of internal and external users. A ‘knowledge base’ is a KMS that can be used across a range of industries.

While bearing some similarities to the static FAQ documents of the past, a cloud-based KMS is in fact a form of proactive customer service, anticipating users’ needs and supporting them with answers to their questions before they arise. A modern KMS is a dynamic platform that meets its users’ needs while measuring usage in real time.

Cloud-based knowledge management is in fact a form of proactive customer service that meets its users’ needs while measuring usage in real time.

Before exploring the business case for each, let’s dive into the various component types of KMS, bearing in mind that for most companies a knowledge-centric solution will likely incorporate some combination of the following ingredients.

Components of a knowledge management system

• KNOWLEDGE BASE
  

If you want to make your organizational knowledge easy to consume, a knowledge base is a kind of ‘agent-less help center’ for customers to help themselves, as well as an internal hub for employees and support agents.

• Internal – Align teams around shared company information. This includes product updates, as well as onboarding and training programs.
  

• External – Help customers easily find answers with intuitive content. Share your expertise through how-to articles, video tutorials and other rich media content to guide your customers through every step of their journey, both before and after they convert.
  

• Analytics and reporting – Get actionable insights and track your content’s performance to identify knowledge gaps or the need for product improvements
  

• SURVEYS AND FEEDBACK

Did you find this article helpful? How likely are you to recommend our service to a friend or colleague? These familiar questions measure customer service KPIs. But where does it all go? Into a quarterly report that no one ever reads? Not anymore.

A modern knowledge management system is based on machine learning – when support articles are rated as helpful, they are ‘up-voted’ within the system, teaching your knowledge base that this article is relevant to the issue at hand. This strengthens the relationship between that issue and this article. If several users rate that same article as unhelpful, it’s a good indicator that you might need to rethink what your customers are looking for and how best to help them.

• CASE STUDIES AND WEBINARS

In addition to articles and tutorials created by a knowledge base editor and/or team, your knowledge management system can also feature broad customer education content like classroom training, case studies, and webinars.

Knowledge management system examples

• Getty Images knowledge base – Getty Images is a distributor of multimedia content serving businesses in more than 100 countries. With a vast global operation, self-service is key to their customer support philosophy. Their KMS allowed them to easily migrate existing content, localize it in 13 languages, and reduce the number of support calls.

• Viber knowledge base – Viber is a messaging app whose support department receives 3,500 incoming tickets a day. To provide seamless self-service, they customized their own help center to be in line with their main website, and update it regularly with new content. It manages and translates articles in multiple languages without needing help from other departments, while internally onboarding agents with minimal effort.

• Yotpo Global knowledge base – Yotpo is an eCommerce marketing platform that needed a customer support software to serve its growing user base. Their agents use the knowledge base to answer tickets more efficiently by easily accessing relevant articles. They also use it to troubleshoot complicated flows and optimize internal processes.

Features of a knowledge management system

Not all knowledge management systems are created equal. Some have features that others lack, while others have clunky UI that make even the most basic tasks tedious and time-consuming. Some were created to solve customer issues, while for others customer support is an afterthought. We recommend taking the time to properly evaluate your needs before moving ahead. Consider looking for the following features and tools in your new KB:

• Rich text editor – Diversify your content with screenshots, videos, and rich text - like bold and italics for emphasis. Creating this content should be easy and intuitive, with drag and drop tools requiring zero support from a developer.
  

• Multilingual controls – To keep customer effort low and reach users in new markets where you might not yet have a physical help center, many knowledge management systems come with the ability to connect to language translation tools. By providing multi-lingual support, you are able to better serve your customers looking to learn or have problems. This allows you to keep your articles localized and up to date, while letting your users set default languages so that they can consume your knowledge natively.
  

• Feedback tools – As a stakeholder in a knowledge management effort, you will want to track the performance of your content. Allowing users to indicate with a binary YES/NO form whether they found a given article helpful allows you to analyze the success of your knowledge base. Better still is the ability to submit a ‘feature request’ article — these allow you to collect feedback about the features your users want. They can also help reduce the number of support tickets you receive, by informing customers that a given feature is currently unavailable and/or under development.
  

• Reporting and analytics – This is another key differentiator in measuring the quality and effectiveness of your knowledge sharing. The ability to not only collect and distribute your information and expertise but also track its usage is key to leveraging your knowledge and making it work for you. This is a must for teams that want to integrate their knowledge-sharing efforts with Google Analytics, or those who prefer a KMS that can offer internal reporting, either of which can then be shared out with marketing and product teams.
  

• Roles and permissions – Set ‘viewing’ or ‘editing’ credentials for writers on your knowledge base team to ensure that only the authorized individuals have the ability to publish content. Similarly, some areas of your knowledge base might be intended for paying customers and require password protection in order to view. Perhaps yours is an internal knowledge base, meant for employee eyes only. Either way, a KMS gives you the ability to restrict access to each article, section or category of articles.
  

• Custom branding – A modern KMS enables you to customize the look and feel of customer and agent-facing platforms. For example, your knowledge base and contact forms can each match your business’ branding, logos, and color scheme. This helps build trust with your users because they can recognize who they are dealing with.
  

• AI-powered support – Agents in customer support departments with an advanced KMS enjoy some cutting edge technological perks. Suppose a customer visits their knowledge base to troubleshoot an issue and finds a relevant article there. The article fails to sufficiently answer their questions so they contact customer support. Before the agent even replies they have already seen this touchpoint’ giving them a head start on the interaction. Better still, their KMS offers AI-powered article suggestions. Both of these advantages help them to resolve the issues faster.

Read More: A Buyer’s Guide to Customer Support Platforms in 2021

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Why is a knowledge management system important for businesses?

Knowledge management systems were pioneered and put to effective use by customer service departments, but businesses of any industry can take a page out of this playbook. Simply put, a KMS allows your teams to do their work more efficiently by capturing and then leveraging your most valuable asset – your expertise.

Knowledge workers spend 90% looking for or recreating information that already exists.

Source: IDC

How a knowledge management system helps your customers

Empowered self-service – Customers help themselves through a knowledge base to get answers to common questions, at whatever time they need it, on whichever device they choose to use. This allows them to fix problems on their own, without having to contact the support team. Just having a KMS can free up the time of your support team while increasing customer happiness and satisfaction.

Faster 24/7 care – Customers can easily access information that helps them achieve what they’re trying to do without too many steps. With a KMS in place, they'll be better equipped to use your products or services and have an improved overall experience.

How a knowledge management system helps your employees

Breaks down silos – Organizations work better when experts are talking to each other, and a good knowledge management system can help break down the divisions that naturally arise between teams. Mobilizing your teams’ knowledge can streamline operations by connecting teams that are isolated from each, either geographically or due to remote working conditions.

But remember that this cultural shift isn’t going to happen by itself. See how to get your organization on board below, under our section on cultural challenges.

Protects legacy knowledge – As your company grows and resources turn over, the knowledge of your experts is safe when you have a well-maintained bank of knowledge that cannot be broken into, stolen or lost. Losing a product expert used to be devastating – like losing a phone that hadn’t been backed up to the cloud – but this no longer represents a devastating loss of information if this expert has created an internal content portfolio to serve as guidance for future work to be done. For those processes that don’t translate as well to static documentation, companies can use instructional how-to videos to help employees. From a centralized location of product and company information, you not only break down barriers between current teams, but between past and future employees.

How a knowledge management system helps your business

Promote visibility – Talk to your future audience indirectly by sharing helpful content across public channels to attract potential customers in the research phase of their buyer journey. By providing free educational content and even having your help articles appear as snippets in a Google search, you earn trust and become an authority in your field while gaining free traffic.

Scale support – Knowledge is the basis of self-service, and good self-service helps a business scale its support. Putting your knowledge in customers’ hands is an easy win for improving support operation. The added value here is that by deflecting the bulk of your support requests, your product experts are freed up to focus on handling more challenging tasks. By engaging your employees in more meaningful work, you end up boosting job satisfaction as well.

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Challenges of knowledge management systems

There are two kinds of challenges that organizations face when attempting to implement knowledge management practice. To minimize these, choosing the right software can help avoid many of the technical challenges outlined below. Successful knowledge sharing at scale requires the appropriate tools to help your teams efficiently collect and share expertise and processes. This is why it’s crucial to make sure you find and invest in the right knowledge management system to support your needs in this process.

Technological challenges

• Content architecture – Structuring complex forms of knowledge and assigning different access levels to respective groups sounds complicated, and this is what discourages many companies from beginning the process. Thankfully a good KMS already does the heavy lifting, enabling you to build out personalization with roles and permissions, complete with a powerful search mechanism.
  

• Inefficient UX – One of the most common roadblocks for companies who use a poor knowledge management system is their employees are hamstrung by a bad user experience. In this scenario, knowledge management becomes an uphill battle where tasks not only build frustration but often never get done.
  

• Dev requirement – A major roadblock for support departments is hard-to-use products that require advanced development expertise. A KMS might have all the features you need, but if you have to bring in a developer to unlock them it defeats the point. Look for knowledge management software that is powerful, yet designed for non-technical users (i.e. your agents).

Cultural challenges

Even the perfect knowledge management system won’t help improve how your business functions without organization-wide embrace, beginning with C-level buy-in all the way down to user adoption. Each level of a company or organization needs to understand what is being asked of them and why, in order for knowledge management to work effectively.

• Senior endorsement – Often the idea of buying a knowledge management system is met with initial resistance on the part of senior management. You will need to convey the importance and the effectiveness of knowledge management before moving on to the next steps.
  

• Stubborn silos – The resistance to sharing knowledge is not always conscious. At an organizational level, many companies are broken up into silos, which means that practically each team manages its knowledge independently. What does this mean for employees on a day-to-day basis? A basic lack of transparency on where knowledge lives and how to access it.
  

• User adoption – At the employee level, a knowledge management initiative can be handicapped by a lack of incentives. This results in experts who are unmotivated to share knowledge. Worse still, some employees see their institutional knowledge as power, and are reluctant to give it up.

Although knowledge management systems have many tangible benefits, ultimately their success depends on a culture of knowledge sharing and access to the appropriate technologies. Success in this area is a complex interaction between the minds of your employees, and the technological systems you invest in, to curate and share their knowledge.

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How to set up a knowledge management system

Having identified the benefits and challenges of knowledge management, what are the steps required to set up a KMS and successfully implement your strategy? Let’s break them down here, starting with what it takes to initiate this technological and cultural transformation.

1. Identify a sponsor – In order to proceed with the purchase of a KMS within your organization, you’re going to need the approval of someone senior. Identify a decision-maker who can communicate the message of the importance of knowledge management. This person will be your champion in the cause, so it’s important that they appreciate the practical benefits here. You must be equipped to make that case tangible with evidence and relevant statistics for your organization.
   

2. Define governance – What is the operational model for your knowledge management? Do you have a knowledge owner? Could you borrow knowledge moderators from a different business unit to oversee your content creation?
   

3. Understand incentives – What motivates people to contribute their knowledge and insights? If knowledge-sharing is not prioritized at product-expert level, your knowledge management efforts will merely be seen as a nice-to-have and constantly get shelved in favor of more urgent tasks. In order to overcome the cultural challenges that can hamper this initiative, managers must either appoint a dedicated editor or schedule and incentivize the writing of knowledge articles as an item of equal priority for their experts.
   

4. Source your knowledge – Time to take a deep dive into your issues. Talk with your team about which issues tend to come up most often for them. If you’re running a customer support department, you might want to hold a customer journey mapping workshop to better understand where the gaps in your knowledge are from a customer point of view. Use an analytics platform to map out which terms people commonly search to get to your site.

5. Organize the information – Get some post-it notes and clear the conference room. a. Start by grouping similarly themed topics together into buckets. Don’t worry about naming the categories yet, and try to keep it to six buckets. b. Identify the most popular items, based on site traffic and team feedback. What are the most common questions people are asking? c. Set up internal links, or ‘backlinks’, between related articles in your knowledge base. Not only does it help your users, but Google loves this and it will be reflected in your site’s SEO ranking.
   

6. Analyze and optimize – Give users the ability to rate your knowledge base articles by upvoting or downvoting them based on whether they helped resolve their issue. Poorly written article? Misleading title? If an article received too many downvotes, a good KMS dashboard can not only tell you that — over time, it will flag articles that were read by customers who subsequently turned to an agent for help. If this is the case, such an article may need to be removed or improved.

Knowledge management systems for SMB and Enterprise businesses

Knowledge management workflows – writing knowledge articles, editing and sharing them, and then measuring and optimizing them – change considerably as companies scale. With that in mind, setting goals really depends on what the business wants to achieve. Some examples for KM goals include:

• Increase in revenue

• Reduce onboarding time

• Improve efficiency and enable faster time to market

• Improved insights for better decisions making

• Enhance business continuity and prevent knowledge loss

• Increase regulatory compliance

• Improve internal communication and collaboration

• Offer 24/7 customer support

• Reduce customer effort through self-service

• Provide consistent answers to common issues

• Meet SLAs by reducing resolution times

KM strategy should be aligned with the organizational strategy and its goals, correlating the two helps us to identify where to focus.

Knowledge management systems for SMBs

As SMBs grow they are repeatedly rethinking processes that worked yesterday in order to anticipate the needs of tomorrow. Here’s how a KMS can help them to meet the moment and move from strength to strength, no matter their size:

• Knowledge loss from departing employees – In larger companies, responsibilities are spread across multiple employees who all share the knowledge and tacit practices of the organization. However, in small to medium-sized companies, these same roles might be shouldered by a single individual. A knowledge management system serves as a ‘remote brain’ that minimizes knowledge turnover when this person leaves the team.
  

• Maintaining procedures – When internal processes change regularly (as they are bound to do in a startup or a growing SMB) having an internal up-to-date doc to refer back to at all times can be a North Star amidst the change. As your team’s workflows change, having a source of truth to refer back to will help keep new and veteran team members alike aligned around common goals and practices.
  

• Expanding markets – Smaller companies tend not to need multi-lingual support, but for those that are scaling or offering SaaS products globally, it becomes increasingly important to provide. Consumers understandably prefer to communicate in the language that is most natural for them when making new purchase decisions, so don’t let a language barrier be a barrier to your growth.
  

• Measuring performance – Many SMB’s make the mistake of not prioritizing their data in the early stages of their business, but analytics come into play as you grow in many different ways.
  

Enterprise knowledge management systems

Enterprise businesses that enjoy a high degree of market traction know they need to take proactive steps to nurture and support the sprawling teams they have built. To manage and maintain the vast knowledge they’ve accumulated over the years, large companies need to ensure their employees work smarter – not harder. Here’s how a KMS can help them maintain a competitive advantage by staying a step ahead of the competition:

• Manage workflow – As more players are involved in contributing to and updating your existing knowledge base articles, setting editing credentials for writers ensures your content creation will be a productive team activity and not a messy free-for-all.
  

• Organize content – Smaller knowledge management systems lack a hierarchical content structure and search function, creating poor navigation experiences. If knowledge is power in the right hands, then enterprise businesses use a KMS to completely transform their knowledge-sharing practice.
  

• Offer multilingual support – A basic KMS doesn't typically offer groups and permissions or advanced language support, but global companies will require robust multilingual support to track translation completion and support customers in their native languages.
  

• Robust reporting – Enterprise teams can integrate their KMS with Google Analytics, or better yet, use a system with internal insights that can also be fed to marketing and product teams.
  

Choosing a knowledge management system

The benefits of good knowledge management are many, and the cost of going without a modern knowledge management system is something no business can afford these days. If you’re in the process of switching from yours, or if you’re only just starting to explore which platform is right for you, here are a few things to consider.

• How do your customers prefer to receive support? (younger users tend to prefer self-service, whereas in the past customer service was more common over the phone)
  

• Does your company need a self-service solution such as a help center for customers?
  

• Are you currently using an internal knowledge hub for employees?
  

• Does remote work present a challenge to your team?
  

• How many employees does your onboarding processing require?
  

• Do your employees face knowledge gaps?
  

• Could your team be more efficient and collaborative?
  

• What kind of reporting and analytics do you need?
  

• What is your budget? Is it flexible?

To take the next step and assess whether your next support platform is the right fit for a customer-centric approach, check out our buyer’s guide to customer support platforms make sure you’ve considered all points and you get a solution that meets your needs.