Companies put new hires through a rigorous training process. However, the time and resource costs are substantial. Companies invest an average of $1,308 annually in the training of one employee. Therefore, it is crucial to concentrate on programmes that ease tension and make the onboarding process economical. 

Onboarding, however, usually takes more time than necessary. According to statistics, 58% of businesses acknowledge that the onboarding process they use is largely paper-based and convoluted. Here, choosing a knowledge management system would enable better distribution, storage, and preservation of all intellectual capital within an organization.

In the end, it ensures improved communication and knowledge transfer within the organization and better training procedures. You can gain access to a knowledge base that is secure and provides self-service with tools like knowledge management system.

Employee Onboarding: Why Should You Pay Attention to It?

It is essential for every business across all industries to hire staff and equip them with an accurate knowledge management system. According to statistics, businesses that concentrate on improving their onboarding procedure observe an increase in employee productivity of 70% and employee retention of 82%.

With the right initiatives, employees are more devoted to their employer in the workplace. When companies make early onboarding process improvements, they see higher employee satisfaction levels and better work quality.

You should realize that proper onboarding calls for more than just hiring new employees and providing them with job-specific training. Instead, brand-new workers need to learn more about the company. They ought to use the information they learn to perform better.

How are knowledge management (KM) and employee onboarding related?

A proper KM system coordinates the onboarding of new employees to offer advantages like:

• Standardized orientation for employees
• Worker role understanding is good
• Higher rates of employee retention
• Increased employee productivity
• Heightened interest from customers

Practices in a KM system make the employee onboarding process more functionally seamless. The impact on employee onboarding is as follows:

• Fast-paced training for new hires using a comprehensive knowledge base
• New hires can meet deadlines on time with the right information at hand.
• Assurance of superior work
• Proper task assignment and collaboration for faster task completion

The main ways that KM would affect employee onboarding are listed below:

1. For new hires, easy access to current company knowledge base 

The sources of information about their companies are unknown to new employees. It makes sense that they are having trouble finding the information quickly. Employees had to search through several sections in traditional onboarding processes to find a single piece of information. That takes a lot of time, though, which leaves new hires with less time to concentrate on other crucial elements.

As a result, it's crucial to introduce new hires to your KM platform at an early stage of the onboarding procedure and to ensure that they are aware of the information that is stored there and how to find it. Implementing a KM system will empower the employees to locate the information they need quickly whenever it is needed (without having to look for a subject matter expert or spend time searching through different files and folders).

Building a knowledge base can serve as a single location for all information so that new hires can quickly conduct data searches as needed. It provides a safe platform for sharing files and documents where you can keep all downloads and files and give your staff easy access to them.

2. Benefits from Self-Service

When brands include a knowledge management system in their onboarding programme, new hires can experience an independent working environment. They can look up information about the business, including tacit, implicit, and explicit knowledge, with ease. 

Clean code customization

The information and codes on this platform are all clearly laid out and readable. For better categorization, filters are available. It makes systematic searching simpler for both new and seasoned employees.

Strong search engine 

This platform's centralized knowledge base comes with a top-notch search engine. The fast deep indexed details allow employees to quickly search for any information in the system and obtain it in a matter of seconds. Users can also easily find files without knowing their names thanks to the software.

3. Quick Onboarding

Companies must quickly induct new hires into the duties of the organization. They can begin the actual work more quickly in this way. As a result, in traditional onboarding programmes, existing employees spent a considerable amount of time educating new hires on company policies, customer information, arrangements, employee training tools, and partner names.

It has two negative effects on businesses. Older employees spend a large portion of their workdays training rather than performing their duties, whereas new hires take a long time to learn. Employees can easily access company processes, policies, cycles, and frameworks with the help of a well-structured knowledge base.

As a result, new hires can progress through their training programme more quickly, and senior employees can concentrate on increasing productivity. Implementing a knowledge management platform ensures better time management by lowering the overall stress of existing employees supporting new hires. Find out more about how a central knowledge base reduces the time needed for employee training.

Higher Productivity

Employees who are familiar with their roles are more likely to carry out their tasks successfully, and the onboarding process teaches new hires the best practices for doing so. If they have the necessary knowledge base. 

According to statistics, an effective onboarding procedure increases new hires' chances of staying with a company by 82%.

More effective teamwork

Early on, it's impossible for new hires to seamlessly integrate into teams and existing organizations. They typically have a way to communicate with coworkers and other professionals who are training them thanks to the onboarding programme.

Users can benefit from services like Knowledge Collaborations thanks to knowledge management system programmes. Here, everyone on the team and the creators of the content can communicate, exchange ideas, and pass messages cooperatively for complete social team participation.

Conclusion

If customers receive timely resolutions, the customer experience (CX) can be improved. Customers' questions are likely to be handled more effectively by trained staff. Better and more knowledgeable agents encourage brand loyalty. Additionally, the customer forms an impression of the business in their mind and develops a sense of trust for it. 

Employee onboarding benefits both customers and agents with the help of a knowledge management system.

Think about how your customer service representative would deal with a client. They are trying their best, but the knowledge management software you now use makes it impossible for them to find the information they need. 

Was the customer support representative to blame? possibly not. They might have merely been the victims of a slow and ineffective knowledge management software.

Companies started keeping policies, product details, and marketing materials in internal wikis, intranets, and occasionally even Excel spreadsheets years ago. They continued to use their outdated system as it grew more and more obese as the volume of information increased.

Long instruction manuals and recommendations on how to use products are no longer common in business. Customers today dislike any sign of information overload and lack the time and energy to read through lengthy written explanations.

To do this, firms must have competent, contemporary knowledge base repositories to construct structurally solid knowledge base systems.

By allowing the generation, organization and management of information from a single platform, knowledge base builder tools enable a business's knowledge to become an asset.

Choosing a KM Software Checklist

To make sure you have the appropriate knowledge management  software, follow these steps:

Analyze the Situation in Your Business

It is not sufficient to know the knowledge base definition. You must now concentrate on what you want. Before selecting a knowledge base software, you must first understand where you are in order to decide where you want to go.

Analyze your company's current status. Here, a detailed examination with elaborate graphs and charts is not necessary. To find out where and how knowledge is stored, simply do a knowledge audit.

Features you want for your knowledge base should be listed

You undoubtedly want a ton of functionality from your knowledge management software. Just a few items to consider are as follows:

• Supports multiple languages
• Easy language creation
• XHTML code that can be restored from the trash box
• Personalized services
• For at least a year, updates are free.
• Cash-back promise

View Knowledge Base Demos from Various Vendors

It's crucial to choose a few companies and evaluate their knowledge management systems. Demonstration, or demo, allows you to see what the internal knowledge base software is capable of.

However, a lot of sales demos concentrate more on the tool's features than on how to utilize it and its benefits.

Consider requesting three demos of knowledge bases. You can then experiment with the various choices. You gain a sense of what is available and may concentrate more on your requirements after reviewing three vendors.

Know what you want for the structure and design

You aren't truly informed about all of the available knowledge management software options by the knowledge base description. You must therefore be aware of the design and structure you desire.

The knowledge base format looks like this. Most begin with high levels and resemble a standard website home page.

Users can search for items, browse categories, and more based on what they see.

Additionally, your internal knowledge base software needs to be discoverable. If users run into an issue, they must figure out a fix or it won't work.

Sifting through popular articles and highlighting them is one of the main areas of concentration. You should be permitted to enhance search functionality as well.

How do I choose the best software for a knowledge repository?

There are numerous options for knowledge repositories on the market. To reap the anticipated benefits for your company, choosing the appropriate knowledge base repository tool is crucial.

Listed below are some recommendations for the top knowledge management  software.

1. Complete the fundamentals first

You must have the answers to a few fundamental questions that will help you better understand your requirements before choosing the appropriate instrument.

How many users would it have? What purpose will it serve? What qualities do you want from a knowledge management software? What is the cost that you intend to incur?

You may lay the foundation for your search for the greatest knowledge repository tool by using these simple questions. You would be better prepared to properly comprehend your existing and desired state if you obtained answers to all the fundamental questions.

2. Verify the benefit it provides

Checking the tool's value is one of the most important stages you can take on this trip. It concerns the entire package, not just the cost. Consider the whole bundle when shortlisting a few knowledge repository applications rather than just focusing on price.

For instance, two similar-priced tools might both provide you with a better value for your company than the other.

3. Consider the Flexibility Level

Most companies that use knowledge management software need some flexibility to tailor the solution to specific needs. Therefore, it is crucial to determine the tool's level of adaptability for your use case. The quantity of actions a tool can carry out, the ease with which it may be scaled, and the degree of customisation are all examples of flexibility.

If your team presently consists of five individuals, for example, you would need a solution that would enable you to increase users as you add more personnel in the future.

4. Assess the usability

Any knowledge repository tool's success in an organization is typically determined by how simple it is to use. Obtaining the necessary staff buy-in will be difficult if the knowledge management solution is overly complicated and difficult to manage.

Before choosing a tool for your company, it is advised that you evaluate how user-friendly each of the solutions on your shortlist is. Obtaining product demos and using the tool is one technique to contrast the usability of the tools that made the short list.

Final Thoughts

You may choose the best knowledge management software for your company with the aid of these suggestions. The most important thing is to have realistic expectations and a proper understanding before choosing a gadget depending on your needs.

Your first option should be a knowledge management program because it is a user-friendly solution that enables you to produce materials for a better client experience. It provides the ideal ratio of flexibility to overall value you can produce for your company.

What is the secret to customer loyalty? The answer straight from ~50,000 consumers, per a massive survey conducted by Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner), was: Make it easy to get service.

In order to find the recipe for “ease,” Forrester Consulting asked 5,000 consumers (on our behalf) about their biggest hurdles to getting customer service. The answers (by far) were lack of knowledgeability among contact center agents and inconsistency of answers across touchpoints, followed by the inability of websites to deliver answers. With a common “knowledge and intelligence” theme running across the pain points, the panacea is clearly unified omnichannel knowledge management, infused with AI.

Done right, a modern knowledge management system (KMS) can transform contact centers. Here are sample metrics and real- world examples from our Global 1000 clientele.

First-Contact Resolution (FCR)

FCR is an important contact center metric that significantly reduces customer effort. While FAQs, search, and topic-tree browsing help with simple queries, more sophisticated technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help resolve issues of medium-to-high complexity at the very first contact through conversational guidance. When a premier telco client made  it mandatory for agents to use this technology to solve customer problems, FCR improved by 37% and NPS by 30 points across 10,000 agents and 600 retail  stores.

Average Handle Time (AHT)

As you know, AHT without FCR increases customer frustration even more. Happily, a modern KMS can transform both these seemingly conflicting metrics. A premier banking client reduced AHT by 67% while improving FCR by 36% by leveraging eGain AI to guide  customers to answers. In fact, advisors in its contact center used the technology to guide customers through processes such as account opening and other banking transactions while complying with industry regulations!

Annual Training Hours (ATH)

How do you reduce training needs without compromising service quality? Again, KM delivers the answer. A global banking client soared to #1 in customer service NPS and reduced training time by 50%, even as it expanded to 11 countries with mostly novice agents in its workforce! With the same technology, a telco reduced induction training time by 43% and time-to-competency by half. Note that reducing the need for training also cuts shrinkage, which is the amount of time lost due to agents’ breaks at work, sick time, training time, holidays, etc.

Call / Email / Chat deflection

One of the popular metrics for measuring digital self-service effectiveness is the number of deflections from agent-assisted channels. Using contextual self-service, with robust KM as its backbone, a media and legal services giant deflected 70% of requests for email and chat customer service.

Product returns and exchanges

No-charge product returns or exchanges has become standard policy in many branded manufacturing firms, retailers, and telecoms due to customer expectations and competitive pressures. Called No Fault Found (NFF), many of these returns and exchanges are unwarranted where the products were not defective but the contact center could not solve the customers’ problems. NFF costs organizations tens millions of dollars each year, but here’s the good news: KM and AI can address this issue head on—one of our large telco clients has reduced unwarranted handset exchanges by 38% while improving FCR by 19% and call quality by 23% in its contact center.

Dispatch avoidance rate

Depending on the industry, each truck roll or engineer callout for issue resolution can cost from a couple of hundred to a few thousand dollars. With omnichannel AI knowledge deployed in the contact center and on the website, a water utilities client saved ~$5M per year by reducing unnecessary engineer callouts, while improving FCR by 30%!

Final word

Some technologies improve customer service on the margins, some enable incremental improvement, but only a handful truly transform it. Modern knowledge management, infused with AI, clearly falls into the last category. Gain the edge today with knowledge!

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Today the Questioning Mindset can be a barrier to advancing one's career and this impacts also in many what Knowledge Management must be offer. It can be attributed mostly to the 'users' unclear needs exploration that can be a challenge to overall adoption.

If we only limit KM to advancing a user's needs based on the remit of the organizational objectives, then possibly we are not addressing his/her 'Fears' and many-a-times 'Aspirations'. If a user for example is a Business Consultant and wants to grow into a Practice Leader in 10 years, then we need to ensure we also help him Grow feels values for his/her Contributions towards KM.

Let me introduce the 7-step framework which is a Pain-Gain Journey map that helps you understand how to advance the 'user' to becoming a believer in Knowledge Management.

1) Know: Today many leaders are focusing on enabling new-joiners to learn around the benefits of KM practices and the ready tools through the on-boarding. They are ideally introduced to a buddy who is a Champion either from their project team or at the department level and it is this person who is responsible for ensuring that the tenets of the leadership talk during the induction are translated to practices that help the person recognize KM as a part of the culture of the firm.

Larger issue that remains un-addressed is the user has his own learning-apps, personal-devices that he uses and work-apps that are not linked to the World of Organizational KM.

2) Search: Let us assume the 'user' moves ahead and has accepted the stand-alone KM system with its features and is compelled to use the system due to collaborative rule-based nature of his internal work-practices. Then in such cases we see that the user is sub-consciously accustomed to visiting KM portal when he/she is lost. They explore the expert corner; they view the self-help group channel for frequent km trainings and in-time slowly KM is becoming a part of their daily routine.

Larger issue is we are still not addressing the user's aspirational need for a personalized system that helps him get noticed at work. Most would say Gamification is the key. However, throughout my career I have seen simple things like a simple reward & recognition page for the quarterly winners being published on the intranet where a simple Like button & Comment section did the trick. It helps peers appreciate the person for the mentor they are, the team member they have always been and most importantly as a humane leader who practices the firm's values, while congratulating the person.

3) Qualify: Most of the time a CKO is chartered with measuring metrics and the focus is on ensuring the team is responsible for talking about KM in a standardized manner, so it is adopted by all. However, this leaves out the aspect of 'Fear' as today there is a rich tacit knowledge that is not so easy to codify and hence the KM team tries to address this larger issue with standard templates and contests for collecting what is available.

The larger issue at hand however is how can we ensure the expert community is initiative-taking and sees benefit in co-authoring / co-developing or co-innovating articles / IP or other differentiators that would help the user advance. Can KM ensure the user moves away from always depending on this team lead to advancing a conversation with a pool of SMEs available on a Community of Practice forum, which is credible as a source?

4) Apply: Usually as a part of a KM audit we are given a mandate to check the categories of knowledge that is most effective. Right at the top we see whitepapers, webinar content , practice asset SOPs and more such artifacts/tools as enablers. These are a clear sign that the organizational KM framework is developing,

The larger issue at hand is such artifacts also exist on client systems and there is a growing need for both clients & the organizations KM system to be unified to ensure minimal effort, better quality of output and higher usage by the community.

If we look back then we have managed to map KM by understanding the user's persona through his Fears, Aspirations and partially Skillsets. However, to advance a user and ensure he/she sees KM as a true enabler we need to also address their 'Interests' partially.

5) Realize: If you have read the Knowledge Management Toolkit by Amrut Tiwani the book talks about how a system must advance the user to know-why and ensure his knowledge orientation is aligned to exposing him/her to extensive exposure to problem solving.

However, if as leaders we only feel ecstatic that KM has been accepted and not acknowledged we fail to build the right system that is aligned to bringing in the ability to deal with unknown interactions and unseen situation. There by we remain at the know-how stage only as we fail to encourage employees to participate in the problem solving and get a feel for the issue-at-hand. It is important we are clear about the KM touchpoints, and we allow employees to get together fortnightly and share their Failures / Lessons learnt, talk about their failure moments and this improves the overall culture that it is ok to speak up.

6) Grow: While running a design thinking workshop we surveyed twenty-five leaders across various departments like Marketing, HR, Finance, Sales and few more aligned to the cohort of designing an org-wide customer portal. We intended to understand how does KM enable / impact their roles. There was a mixed consensus as the room was pivoted to design a better system based on standardizing KM templates aligned to marketing case studies, offering decks aligned to how the sales present it to clients etc.

The larger issue at hand was there was not anyone who shared that we have enabled a People Champion to talk about the need for knowledge management in not duplicating our content. Many times effective KM can come out of a conference deck, a networking dinner or a sales representative traveling to the client side.

7) Contribute: Lastly knowledge cannot be consumed unless someone creates or shares it. Having a governance policy in-place and a well-trained KM team are just enablers unless the individual is intrinsically motivated.

The larger issue at hand is how can we advance a user to promote KM and be an evangelist and along the journey help us build systems , define policies and be a true people champion.

The next time you take that all important induction remember you are advancing someone's career and hopefully this article helps you to address the user's persona-based needs rather than your structured KM approach. Who knows you might help someone turn into a believer?

Pundits have long talked about the importance of customer experience for business performance. You may have received the edict from the CEO or advice from your consulting firm to differentiate yourself through CX. However, you may also know that businesses have been at it for years with only a handful having any semblance of success. Just look at CX benchmarks, such as the Forrester CX Index, which have plateaued or dropped with not a single organization delivering “excellent” customer service in Forrester’s evaluation. How do you separate yourself from the pack?

The answer lies in knowledge management. According to Gartner, Inc. (paywall), organizations with a high level of CX maturity are investing disproportionately in KM.

Based on my experience working for a company that offers knowledge hub solutions, I want to help you understand what to look for in a provider. But first, let’s explore an approach to knowledge-powered CX differentiation based on the ability to solve customer queries.

Recognize not all customer queries are equal.

Customer queries come in different shapes and sizes. They can be broadly grouped into the following categories, organized in ascending order of customer effort involved: 

• Informational queries: Informational queries are of the “garden variety,” where customers are looking for basic information like when a store may be open, what their account balance might be or the status of an order they placed with a retailer.

• Procedural queries: More complex than informational queries, procedural queries are about how to do something like return a product, get a refund or fill out a form. Another example would be helping a customer open a certain type of account by not only answering customer questions but also taking compliant conversational and action steps with the customer along the way.

• Problem resolution: This is where the customer states the symptom of a problem and the self-service system or the contact center agent converses with the customer, diagnoses the problem and prescribes a solution. This requires reasoning expertise, where the agent can get from symptom to problem by asking the right questions, looking at similar cases from the past and what resolution worked and prescribing that resolution to the customer. Depending on the query and the industry that the business is in, the conversation may also need to go through some steps that are required for compliance. For example, when a customer calls the contact center regarding a mortgage loan in progress, the agent is required to identify the customer by asking a certain set of questions.

• Advice: Examples of advice queries include suggestions on what dishwasher to buy from a big-box retail store or what type of investment to make in the case of a financial services firm. Not that different from problem resolution queries, the agent or advisor has to have a conversation, asking the right questions of the customer and prescribing the right product or plan to buy that meets the customer needs, while still making sure to comply with industry regulations.

• Coaching: The next frontier in knowledge-powered customer engagement, coaching is not a query type, per se. In fact, it typically entails all the above query types. Customers are not only given answers and prescriptions but are taken through a coaching journey that adapts with evolving customer context and gamification motivation to help them reach a certain goal. An example is coaching a consumer to financial wellness over time so they can buy a house or car.

Understand the different query types and CX differentiation.

Handling informational queries may seem like table stakes, though many businesses are not even doing a good job in handling these basic queries. While perfecting the handling of informational queries is a good start, handling the more advanced query types that create significant effort for customers — procedural, problem resolution, advice and coaching — presents an even bigger opportunity for CX differentiation. Let’s categorize each query type by differentiation:

• Medium: Informational.

• Medium High: Procedural.

• High: Problem resolution.

• High: Advice.

• Super High: Coaching.

Handling queries well and getting to high levels of differentiation is not easy to do. The answer lies in seamlessly combining knowledge tools or technology building blocks into a unified and complete knowledge hub. In fact, per that earlier Gartner, Inc. study, a common challenge that organizations face is they need all the tools to achieve their CX goals but have just one or two of them, which hinders their effort to improve CX.

Look for certain criteria as you seek a solution partner.

A knowledge hub can maximize your CX differentiation by enabling you to handle a broad range of customer queries with context, content, consistency and compliance at scale. But not all knowledge hubs are created equal. Here’s what to look for:

• The knowledge hub should have rich functionality immediately out of the box for quick business value. If you have to start from scratch with a toolkit or do extensive development and customization to get deep functionality, you may wind up with a multimonth or multiyear project, which you likely can’t afford at today’s speed of business. Ask unambiguous yes/no questions upfront to determine if vendors offer your required capabilities out of the box.

• The company demonstrates domain expertise in knowledge management best practices. Have they deployed knowledge management at scale for demanding enterprise clients? What is their deployment and business value assessment methodology?

• Do they have a track record of successful deployments at scale in your own industry? Ask for customer testimonials and references.

• There should be a risk-free way to try out the solution. For example, do they offer a production pilot with no cost and no obligation to you? This tells you whether the vendor is willing to put real skin in the game.

Understanding what a knowledge hub can do for you and working with the right solution partner can get you to high CX differentiation, great agent experience and market domination at warp speed!

Originally published on Forbes.com.

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