Today, clients want to "Capture" great ideas, and that is why Project Teams are called to ensure each Idea is tracked and showcased. In enabling Innovation Day as a KMer I have partnered with Six Sigma and other Agile Experts and created Systemic processes around 100's of ideas that were showcased during Innovation Day. The real challenge is if the client likes the idea and asks, "what is the Next Thing that is putting this into Action?"

An Idea Portal is a Centre Stage Tool that enables everyone to Collaborate and Share their Information. The rules are simple:

Step 1: Collect and Track Each Idea.
Step 2: Estimate the Costs and Benefits of Each Idea.
Step 3: Measure the Implementation of Each Idea.
Step 4: Calculate the Added Value of Each Idea.
Step 5: Determine the Innovation Rate Across the Organization

The ideal situation is to ensure the Knowledge Base has a Tracking
tool that everyone uses. It rarely happens as Team Leaders, Project Managers, Project Lead and their teams are busy with many actions during their work week. So, for achieving Step-1 we used a Visual Board and made sure through a Daily Huddle everyone Shared their learnings.

During the Sharing, it was the responsibility of the Scrum Master to evaluate the Novelty of the Lessons Learned and guide the team to engage in a Discussion, aligning some of those Learnings translate into possibilities for Improved processes aligned to Better Ways of Working.  So, the Top Improvement Areas are aligned to the Visual Dashboard and have Process Owners assigned who could take Ownership for the Insight.

As the daily huddle continues, these Process Owners are taught through Coaching with their Team Leads, to align the Idea to one area of Client Delivery Themes that could be automated; improved through lean / six sigma or better new process defined that called for rationale investment. Here is where Creative KM helps...

During the client visits, the Team Leads presented the best Improvements to the Client Sponsor, and it is their responsibility to Select those who can truly be taken for a Nomination to the Portfolio Client Leaders.

On Innovation Day the Best Awarded Ideas are represented with a clear Action Plan and Ownership assigned from both sides for a Proof of Concept and then measured for Business Value. Some of these translate into newly automated processes that save X amount of time, some save cost and other quality.

It is important for these rewarded Ideas to go back into the Knowledge Base and be looked at as Best Practices and those SMEs who aided in the creation - evaluation - presentation / defense and implementation be seen as one Expert Team.

Now we can see how an Idea Portal that starts as a tracking mechanism becomes a Collaborative Portal where both Clients and Service Providers aid in Innovation Management. It involves elevating existing ways of working and investing in celebrating Sharing of Insights into Innovative Ideas. The ultimate goal is to ensure the Expert Network is elevating Individual Learning into Team Experts, who are available to Coach others and Knowledge Build for ensuring the Organizational is winning through some of these becoming Client IPs and patents. 

It is important that such 'in-time Idea' Portals lead to Measuring Continuous Improvements and hence Organizational KPIs around Innovation are important as below.

• Number of new ideas proposed
• Proportion of ideas selected for implementation
• Revenue generated from new ideas
• Percentage of sales from new products
• Customer satisfaction with new products
• Speed to market
• Lessons learned

Source:  https://ideadrop.co/innovation-management/how-to-measure-innovation/

So, have you implemented your Idea Portal and are measuring the ROI around Business Strategy? 

In-Summary

Innovation Management is not new to Knowledge Management Professionals. It is how we enable our teams and support them through planning the Innovation Day or other forums that truly gets Community to come forward and Ideate.

It is important that we drive Engagement through participation where everyone feels they are being rewarded and a Visual Dashboard is a great start.  It is important that through practices like a Daily Huddle we engage Experts like a Scrum Master and continue to Capture Ideas in an idea Portal. The highest contribution is enabling those sharing these Ideas to apply their minds as Process Owners and defend their Solutioning Mindset; and for this we need Team Leads trained in Six Sigma, Lean etc to align their random theories to Structured Thinking that are seen as Measured ways of Implementing an idea.

Our role today as Knowledge Management Professionals is to be an artist. We are called to all be Consultants and engage in many Creative KM Practices that can create a KM Culture enabling Expert Networks that drive Innovation.  Through numerous KM Events and the Champion Networks we aid in sustaining these Creative workspaces and doing lot more leading to impacting Organizational Standards It is important that CXOs see KM as a game-changer and invest in truly creation of a KM Culture that supports Continuous Improvements aligned to Innovation Management.

As a knowledge manager, I often struggle to convey the importance of my role to those outside of the KM community. For most, you can be a content writer or a technical writer, but if you explain that you manage all this knowledge and make it accessible to everyone in the organization, they draw blank.

So here is a simple definition to explain what it is and its purpose in the organization. Hope it helps when next time you have to explain how critical is your role for your organization.

Our role is to ensure that valuable information is not only captured but also made accessible to everyone within the company with the right metadata and tagging to ensure that the right knowledge is delivered when looking for specific topics. This means that we are responsible for creating systems and processes that allow for seamless knowledge sharing and collaboration.

By collecting and organizing data, we can ensure that everyone has access to the knowledge they need to make informed decisions and drive innovation.

But that's not all - knowledge management also involves collaboration and the creation of new ideas. By working together, we can generate fresh insights and push the boundaries of what's possible for the growth of employees and the organization as a whole.

In today's fast-paced business world, having access to the right information at the right time can mean the difference between success and failure. That's why knowledge management is critical to any organization's success.

So the next time someone asks you what you do as a knowledge manager, don't be afraid to share this exciting and important role with them. After all, knowledge is power, and we are the gatekeepers of that power! So KM is much more than storing and sharing knowledge and it's all about managing possibilities to help your employees grow, learn, share and innovate and deliver the best outcomes to clients and customers.
 

Given how competitive contemporary markets are, your organization cannot afford to overlook the importance of gathering insights directly from customers. Knowledge management plays a crucial role in facilitating the collection and utilization of customer feedback. As a specialist in the field, you are central to your company’s efforts to harness the power of insights in ways that drive innovation and boost customer engagement.

While knowledge management is widely recognized for its ability to enhance internal operations and knowledge sharing, its potential as a tool to broaden the scope of customer feedback is often overlooked. By leveraging knowledge management systems and practices, you can empower your company to actively engage with a wider audience and expand the channels through which they receive feedback.

Achieving and Utilizing Seamless Customer Journeys

As a knowledge management professional, you understand that one of the most important uses of consumer insights is creating meaningful customer journeys. Nevertheless, it’s also vital to recognize that a great experience can provide important insights. By effectively utilizing knowledge management practices, you can create a more mutually beneficial consumer journey that helps you tap into authentic feedback from a broader audience.

Some effective approaches to this include:

Tailor your strategy

Design a feedback collection strategy that aligns with your knowledge management goals. Identify the most important touchpoints related to these goals where customers interact with your organization throughout their journey. Wherever possible, incorporate feedback mechanisms into these areas, like satisfaction surveys, feedback forms, and user comments to capture their experiences. By collecting more targeted feedback, you can refine your knowledge management processes to improve consumer journeys.

Foster active collaboration

Gaining truly authentic customer journey insights should involve making consumers active participants in the process. Invite a broader range of consumers to get involved in product testing. Even having customers film their reactions when unboxing a product can be impactful. In essence, you’re getting immediate and unfiltered feedback that you wouldn’t necessarily gain from surveys. By nurturing these knowledge-sharing collaborations, you create a valuable feedback loop that enhances the customer experience and improves the range and efficacy of your organization's knowledge assets.

Leaning into Web Accessibility

Part of the knowledge management specialist’s role is ensuring the information-gathering process is as effective as possible. This is also crucial for making certain you can gain data from the broadest audience. Among the most powerful ways to enable this is to boost the accessibility of your business’ online resources.

Some impactful ways of utilizing web accessibility for gaining knowledge include:

Designing for accessibility

It’s not enough to simply tack superficial accessibility traits on top of your existing website. You need to direct your company’s web designers to create your online knowledge platforms with inclusivity at their core. Begin with steps that meet the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) web accessibility compliance guidelines. Optimize navigation for use with keyboards as well as a mouse. Provide alternative text for images and captions for videos. Make sure these efforts extend to the methods customers can provide feedback online.

Providing accessibility training

While your role as a knowledge management specialist means you drive company-wide efforts, you’re also reliant on other professionals to implement your initiatives. It is, therefore, vital to ensure that all relevant staff receive comprehensive web accessibility training. This helps to ensure workers have a practical understanding of the basic principles of online inclusivity and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). As a result, you can be certain that everyone involved with creating knowledge assets and influencing consumer engagement prioritizes reaching the widest possible audience.

Leveraging Knowledge Management Tech

The rise of the digital landscape has been great for knowledge management specialists. You have the opportunity to leverage technological tools that expand your ability to gather feedback from a broader audience. It’s worth taking the time to understand what platforms specifically geared toward and powered by knowledge management you can adopt into your strategies.

Some of the tools you can use to reach broader audiences include:

Interactive feedback widgets

Feedback widgets have become more practical knowledge management tools over the last decade or so. These specialized tools allow users to provide feedback on individual website components or content sections, so they can rate the helpfulness of the asset and suggest improvements. By incorporating these widgets effectively, you encourage users to actively engage with your knowledge resources and provide specific feedback. As this tends to be a more user-friendly and convenient approach to feedback, you may find it garners a broader range of respondents.

Sentiment analysis and text mining tools

Sometimes the issue is not that you haven’t received a broad range of feedback, but that you don’t have tools to fully analyze the widest possible insights from the data you’ve gained. Sentiment analysis and text mining tools employ natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to extract meaningful insights from qualitative feedback assets, such as customer comments or even support tickets and assess them efficiently. Indeed, the text mining elements can categorize feedback based on topics, keywords, or themes, allowing you to gain deeper insights from large volumes of customer responses.

Conclusion

Knowledge management is a powerful tool for businesses to gather and utilize customer feedback effectively, driving innovation and improving decision-making. By tailoring feedback collection strategies and fostering active collaboration with customers, your company can gain a wider range of relevant insights. It’s also vital to prioritize web accessibility and leveraging knowledge management technology to connect meaningfully with diverse audiences. This creates a positive cycle of engagement and improvement, enabling your business to refine its knowledge management processes, enhance customer journeys, and gain valuable insights for the continuous enhancement of products and services.

As you develop your knowledge management strategies, it’s worth also thinking beyond direct insights from customers. Establish channels and tools to maximize the potential of customer service staff. By fostering an environment where employees are encouraged to provide suggestions and insights based on their interactions with consumers, you can tap into additional sources of knowledge, further broadening your feedback channels.

Most Knowledge Management professionals end up in Knowledge Management by accident, rather than a deliberate career choice, just like i did (Nokia 9210 a KM Origin Story)

So below are my top 5 tips to developing a career in KM for customer service. If you get these right, you will go a long way towards a successful career in KM. 

Customer Focus - The Customer and Customer facing staff are the most crucial stakeholders in Knowledge Management for Customer Service. You need to empathise with both and see the world through their eyes. If you can do so, spend time taking calls or dealing with chats from Customers directly to understand what works well and where the challenges are from a Knowledge Management perspective. If you cannot do that, sit with agents and observe the calls. What do agents do? How do they find content? Is it easy to understand? What do they do when they are stuck? I learn far more from sitting with call centre agents than anyone else. Helping frontline staff and delivering value to them should be your primary focus. 

External Networking - Join various industry events. Use LinkedIn's pwer to connect with similar professionals, and don't be afraid to ask questions, share problems, and offer solutions. If unsure, connect with me, and I will be happy to point you in the right direction. Be aware that there are a lot of different fields of Knowledge Management out there, from KM in Law to consulting firms, to libraries, to organisational knowledge, and of course, Customer Service. Most share common traits and best practices, but be sure you find the proper forums for your context. 

Curiosity – Be curious and be happy to try new things and ways of working across all KM strategy components. Pilot new ideas and see what works and what doesn't. Too many KM professionals get protective over the way they work, especially when it comes to content. Try not to be overprotective with your content and embrace constructive feedback to improve it, especially from the customer and frontline staff. A good Knowledge worker should support and encourage this.

Specific Skills – Learning some core Knowledge Management skills could be advantageous. For example, Copy Writing, Process Design, SEO or Information Architecture / Taxonomy skills, but to be honest, in the longer term, I am not 100% sure they will still be as valid, as AI starts to take over a lot of these tasks.

Technical Skills –  Although not essential, it is worth taking the time to understand how your existing Knowledge estate works from a technical perspective. For example:-

• What systems exist? 
• How are they connected? 
• What are the interdependencies? 
• What is the role of IT for KM in your organisation? 
• What are all the features of the KM products you are using, and are you using them effectively? 

Most KM Vendors will have external events where you can meet and talk to other KM professionals that use the same technology. Again, sharing knowledge and best practice.

What advice would you give to someone starting a career in Knowledge Management for Customer Service? 

In any organizational setting, new knowledge is generated every single day. What was a fact a few years ago is now considered outdated or irrelevant. The decay of knowledge not only affects us as individuals but affects organizations as a whole. Technologies change constantly leading to the decay of knowledge. It is crucial for organizations to have processes in place to capture, harvest, repurpose, and achieve knowledge to keep them relevant to the market, constantly innovate, to stay relevant and competitive.

Organizations generally go through a rigorous process for hiring the right skills and experience. Also, the workforce is trained in specific skills and tools to align with their role and the organization’s goals. But the fact of the matter is that employees leave and take along with them crucial knowledge and experience.  Also, people retire, taking their wealth of experience and insights which is then lost to the organization where an employee gained it all. Organizations are left struggling to fill the skill gaps outgoing employees leave in their wake.

Failure to capture the experience of employees who leave, and past mistakes that proved disastrous and left behind a trail of lessons learned, prove disastrous for the growth of organizations.  These learnings are knowledge that needs to be captured, constantly revisited and revised, and disseminated seamlessly for the growth and progression of organizations in the highly competitive market space.

According to Arnold Kransdorff, when this knowledge is left undocumented, it leaves organizations “plagued with an inability to learn from past experience, which leads to reinvented wheels, unlearned lessons, a pattern of repeated mistakes, productivity shortfalls, and a lack of continuous performance improvement.”

Knowledge decay hampers innovation. Innovation directly implies the services and service delivery which directly impacts the organization’s profitability.

Moreover, when institutional knowledge is lost because of the exit of an employee, and if the organizations fail to capture knowledge and disseminate it, it definitely puts the business in a perilous position. The missing download of insights and knowledge from the outgoing member, makes the joining of the new employee inefficient, affecting his productivity, efficiency, and morale which directly impacts the organization’s business goals.  

To remain informed and relevant in the market, organizations must adopt knowledge management systems for capturing knowledge, preventing the loss of expertise as well as constantly reviewing and updating the knowledge base. Also, KM will only work if it works for the people and they find it closely aligned with their work and goals. Take the monotony out and bring in creative ways of knowledge sharing. Introduce virtual cafes, and icebreaker sessions, bring in the flavor of design thinking, story-telling, and mentoring sessions and you will see employees adapting to the culture of knowledge sharing with ease.

Make collaboration, knowledge sharing, and rewarding the knowledge-sharing efforts, a part of your organizational culture, you can definitely prevent the decay of institutional knowledge, keep your employees armed with the best tool and practices to foster innovation, and stay a mile ahead of your competitors.