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Introduction

I've often wondered after the 20+ years I have been working in Knowledge Management, why are the same KM issues still happening in customer service organisations?

In my last blog on CX Strategy I spoke about designing an experiential KM system.  I touched upon aspects of Design Thinking to pay attention to customer feedback and reverse engineer the experience you want to deliver to your community of users.

One of the most underrated and under-utilised aspects of Knowledge Management is its ability to lead to innovative solutions for customers and frontline staff. Below is a real example of award winning innovation from early on in my career at WDS (See my KM origin story)

Innovation is a buzzword for organizations striving to be the best in the highly competitive world today. How do we use the collective brains of an organization to innovate?

Whether implementing a new Knowledge Management initiative or maintaining Knowledge Management in BAU, customer service organisations need to consider the following roles for a Knowledge Team. 

All organisations are different, so the size and scale of the team may vary, and you may have individuals performing multiple roles simultaneously. 

After finishing one of my previous blogs on user engagement with customer facing staff, I couldn't help but reflect on how brilliant the brain of a call centre agent is. When a call comes into a contact centre and is received by a top-performing call centre agent, amazing things happen in the agent's brain.

So you've successfully launched a new Knowledge Management initiative; however, several years later, it is deemed a failure!
What happened?

Here are my top 6 reasons Knowledge Management initiatives fail,
the underlying causes, and the best way to mitigate them.

1 - Lack of Senior Management Engagement

Data’s impact on a company’s success is undeniable. Through it, you can learn how to serve customers and employees better, build professional partnerships, and create systems that fuel productivity.

A less-talked-about use of data is in knowledge management. If you’re unfamiliar, knowledge management is the act of collecting, sharing, and managing information and knowledge within a company and ensuring it’s accessible to everyone. 

You can use data to improve knowledge management within a project. But it starts with collecting the most valuable data for this purpose.

Resilience isn't something we normally talk about with knowledge management. We talk about document repositories, collaboration, artificial intelligence (AI), help desks and knowledge centered support, communities of practice, lessons learned and continuous learning, all kinds of things, really. But we don't often talk about resilience when it comes to knowledge management.