Knowledge management. What is it, why does it matter & how can it be done better?

Strengthening our product to solve an increasingly relevant problem.

For a while, Hopstay’s platform has been primarily geared towards chatbots. But there’s one thing that chatbots need more than anything — knowledge.

In a post-pandemic world, organisations are accelerating their efforts to become 100% digital. Not 60%, 70% or 80% digital, but 100% digital.

This only heightens the importance of effective knowledge management. Knowledge that is easily accessible, searchable & shareable across all digital environments by all staff at all times.

So what is knowledge management? And how can companies & organisations be better at managing knowledge?

Knowledge management is an approach. It refers to the way in which an organisation manages what Gartner refer to as their ‘information assets’. More specifically, how they create, evaluate, verify, store, search & distribute organisation-specific information.

When you consider that employees spend on average 1.8 hours a day searching for information, you begin to appreciate how important all aspects of knowledge management are.

Yet, when we dip into the knowledge management software of our clients to get them chatbot-ready, we frequently encounter frustrations.

So where are organisations going wrong, and what can they do to improve their internal knowledge management?

Upgrade the tech

We’ve seen countless organisations relying on dated intranets, which makes it difficult for us to extract the right information. Some of our closer clients have given us a look into their knowledge management software, which in many cases has no search function & requires an in-depth mind-mapping of the knowledge base to even know where to begin searching for the right piece of information.

A couple of months ago I had a discussion with one of our clients & I asked him what frustrated him most about their current software. He replied, in capital letters, SEARCHABILITY — going on to say that their current system had none. Searching for information is a massive time sucker, so it’s not surprising that this is #1 on the list of desired features.

Upgrading to cloud services & SaaS platforms will offer you fast, reliable & secure features to manage knowledge, with impressive search, editing & distribution features all designed to save you both time & money.

We expect such offerings to increase as organisations are forced to accelerate their digital overhaul in the age of remote working.

Focus on accessibility

When a new person joins your team, how easy is it for them to find the right information? Is your knowledge management software intuitive or does it require heavy training & muscle memory?

Once a new employee learns the basic functions, they should be able to locate most information relatively easily. If they can, this reduces the time burden on experienced staff who may carry the responsibility of a 6-month onboarding process. Effective KM software can shorten that period dramatically, enabling new employees to self-serve, find what they want & get up to speed quickly.

It’s also important that it’s well-structured. Good knowledge management software should help employees build a structured understanding of the organisation & it’s moving parts, understanding the various organisational silos & which team members are experts on what.

Distribution

An often-forgotten aspect of knowledge management is distribution. Once a user has located a piece of knowledge or information, how easy is it for them to share it— for example, with a customer or another team member?

Good knowledge management software should cater for modern distribution channels. This means the ability to build templates (emails, phone scripts, messaging text) & ideally, the ability to integrate your knowledge management software with these distribution channels.

So, how good is your organisation at managing knowledge?

Advanced knowledge management software can save your organisation a tonne of cash. If you can save customer service agents as little as 30 minutes a day in search time, that will add up to thousands of minutes over the course of a year & potentially hundreds of thousands of $’s in cost savings.

As we increasingly shift to a remote working world, your employees need this more than ever.

We can’t wait to launch the world’s newest knowledge management software for you soon!

Feel free to contact us at hello@hopstay.co if you’re interested in what Hopstay is up to or would like to chat further. Thanks!