What is a Knowledge Management System?

A knowledge management system (KMS) is a software platform used to capture, organize, and retrieve knowledge within a business, making it easy to access information for decision-making and collaboration. A KMS is commonly built into customer service software to help businesses improve the customer experience.

Our research finds that 86% of service professionals say that customer expectations are higher than ever. Plus, 78% say customers seem more rushed than they used to. The right KMS can make a big difference. When customer service reps can quickly and easily access the information they need, they’ll be able to provide a better customer service experience.

Here, we’ll explore why a knowledge management system is so important, some use cases, how to choose and implement a KMS, and much more.

A knowledge management system (KMS) is a dynamic platform designed to store large amounts of information. Its features make it easy to search, organize, update, and share that information as needed internally and externally.

For customer service teams, a KMS is often used internally to help agents find the right information quickly. It’s also used as an external self-service tool that lets customers find answers on their own.

A good knowledge management system can produce significant benefits for your customer service such as:

Improved efficiency: When you bring all your knowledge resources into one place, employees always know where to look for an answer. That alone saves time, but KMS solutions offer the following additional features to improve efficiency:

• Organizational features — such as topic categorization — that make articles easier to find
• Search functionality that surfaces the right resources instantaneously
• Generative AI and templates to speed up writing a response
• AI features that can update and expand the KMS by identifying knowledge gaps and suggesting new content based on customer interactions

Quicker response times: If your reps craft every customer response from scratch, that can add up to hours of time a day and leave customers hanging for an answer. But with generative AI, which can access and synthesize relevant information from a KMS, they can provide helpful responses fasters.

Better customer experiences: Effective knowledge management makes it easy for reps to find the information they need, leading to faster customer service resolutions. Even better, you can offer customers self-service options for simpler support issues. Our research finds that 61% of customers prefer self-service options and 65% list knowledge bases as an option they've used. So, helping customers help themselves saves service teams time and creates positive customer experiences.

24/7 support: Another benefit of self-service is that customers can get the help they need at the moment they need it. Having customer service reps available at all hours of the day isn't always practical from a resource or cost standpoint. A self-service knowledge base is efficient and more cost-effective.

Simplified employee training: Getting new reps up to speed on important information about your brand and products is a big and vital task. A knowledge management system makes it easy for them to access training materials in one place. It allows for consistent, up-to-date content that can be easily updated, reducing the need for repetitive in-person training. It also lets employees learn at their own pace.

Knowledge retention: Losing employees is inevitable for many reasons. Don't risk losing important institutional knowledge with them. By recording and storing their various knowledge in a single, secure place, you ensure your business can weather employee churn — and keep their knowledge.

A knowledge management system is a key investment for most businesses. But before you can start building one, you should be aware of the types of knowledge your team uses when helping customers. This will help with the categorization process.

Here are some common types to consider:

• Explicit or structured: This includes all the knowledge and information you can document (or already have) in a clear format, such as an employee handbook, FAQs, and monthly reports.
• Unstructured: This is information that's been recorded somewhere, but not in a formalized way. It includes answers sent via email or shared in a company's messaging app channels or communities, like the Serviceblazer Community. Often, these sources contain valuable information worth capturing, but it must be collected and organized.
• Tacit: Tacit knowledge is trickier to record — it's the knowledge your team has gained through experience over time, like honing their intuition on how best to handle an upset customer.
• Declarative: This refers to factual information, like the date your company was founded or straightforward metrics such as the number of customer calls you received in a given month.
• Procedural: Procedural knowledge covers how to do something, step-by-step. This can include video tutorials, written instructions, or methodologies your team has developed.

When adopting a new knowledge management system, follow these best practices to ensure you get the results you want:

1. Choose the right tool

To start, make sure you choose the best knowledge management system for your business needs. Some features to look for include:

• Intuitive design: For your team to fully embrace a new KMS, it should be easy to learn and use. Look for a tool with intuitive features that doesn't involve a big learning curve.
• Organization and search: A knowledge base should simplify the process of finding the right information quickly. Look for content classification features to help you organize resources and search functionality for fast information retrieval.
• Self-service: Consider a KMS that offers customer-facing features. Making selected content public and easy to find can improve the customer experience, while also saving your reps time.
• AI functionality: AI features, such as Einstein bots, can pull from your knowledge base to answer common customer questions. AI can also automate some aspects of content management, such as monitoring asset health so you know when a resource needs updating, or helping pull knowledge from various sources into your knowledge base automatically to simplify content creation.

2. Develop an organizational strategy

The right solution will do some organization and information retrieval work for you, but you should still create a content organizational system. Think through the high-level categories, subcategories, and tags you'll need for intuitive content classification.

You might want to divide resources based on product type, develop labels for different stages of the customer journey, or organize resources based on common product use cases. Every team will handle this part a little differently, so think about what makes the most sense for you.

3. Invest in developing knowledge base articles

The value of your KMS depends on how comprehensive and useful the knowledge within it is. If you already have an extensive asset library, this step may be relatively easy. If not, consider putting your time and resources toward building a collection of knowledge base articles that cover the most important topics for employees and customers.

Even if your content library looks scarce, you don't necessarily need to start from scratch. It may take some extra time and resources to uncover and record, but you likely have a wealth of knowledge contained in emails, forums, instant messages, and devices. It's worth taking some time to explore what you already have rather than starting from square one. Generative AI can help create content — just be sure to have a human review for accuracy.

4. Develop a strategy for employee adoption

A KMS is only useful if your team uses it. Don't assume that once you buy it, employees will hop on board. Any big business change requires the right change management approach to be successful, and adopting a new knowledge management system is no exception.

Develop a strategy to help service reps understand how your KMS works, the value it provides, and the features that will be most useful to them. Commit time to product training to get everyone up to speed and set use expectations. Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, is a great resource for your employees to learn more about knowledge management.

Once the software is implemented, encourage and listen to employee feedback — they may have suggestions for better organization strategies or knowledge gaps that still exist.

5. Perform regular information audits and updates

Brand and product updates are inevitable, but they can make existing resources outdated overnight. A big benefit of a KMS is that it provides a single place to put updated content where everyone can find it. But keeping your content current requires intention and work.

Plan for periodic audits to monitor the quality and accuracy of your knowledge base resources. Load updated content to the platform every time there's a major product update. And have your customer service team provide feedback on the content and answers in your KMS. They can identify whether there are content gaps, confusingly worded resources, or articles that aren't thorough enough to answer a customer's questions. Regular updates ensure employees and customers have access to the best answers at any given time.

Choosing the right knowledge management system is essential, but establishing a strong knowledge management process is just as important. AI tools are advancing the way that service teams build and handle this process. Let's look at a few key components of a knowledge management process:

• Build a content library: Create knowledge base articles from existing content saved in your database, but also across the third-party systems you use.
• Use AI tools: Implement tools like Unified Knowledge to help your service agents deliver faster, more personalized customer experiences. This tool integrates organizational knowledge resources from third-party systems and pairs them with your stored customer data to produce generative AI content.
• Provide self-service options: Make it easier for customers to solve problems on their own. Invest in an autonomous AI agent that can automatically serve up answers based on information in your knowledge base.
• Keep your resources up to date: Content audits and updates are necessary but can be time consuming. With tools like Proactive Asset Management, you can automate the process of monitoring asset health, giving you a head start on identifying resources due for an update.
• Ensure findability: A knowledge base is only valuable if your employees and customers can find what they need when they need it. Look for AI tools like Einstein Copilot that let remote employees ask questions and get immediate answers pulled from your knowledge base. Search Answers automatically generates answers to customer and employee questions based on information housed in your KMS.

The right knowledge management system can be put to use in a few main ways, such as:

• Providing a central location to store all current resources — no more digging through old emails to find an answer from three years ago that may be out of date.
• Improving employee onboarding by having all the important information new hires need to learn stored in one easy-to-navigate system
• Providing customer service reps a go-to place to find the best answer for customer issues within moments, making their job easier while also improving the customer service experience
• Offering customers an intuitive self-service portal where they can quickly find answers on their own
• Supplying an extensive array of vetted content for generative AI tools to pull from, to ensure they can offer accurate information to customers and employees
• Using AI features to make common tasks easier through workflow automation, such as letting generative AI create an email first draft to a customer's inquiry that an agent can simply tweak before sending

All of that can add up to better employee satisfaction, happier customers, greater efficiency, and cost savings for your business.

Technological innovations have brought some significant changes to the knowledge management field in recent years — a KMS looks very different from the filing cabinets and rolodexes of the past. Some trends likely to impact knowledge management in the years to come include:

• Higher adoption of generative AI: Many companies see the potential of AI to improve efficiency. Incorporating generative AI into knowledge management processes came in second in APQC's 2024 survey of the top five knowledge management priorities. For many companies that aren't using it yet, adoption may simply be a matter of time.
• A greater emphasis on collaboration: One of the big benefits of a good KMS is that it simplifies sharing information among team members and departments. When valuable business information is siloed within specific departments (or in the heads of individuals), other employees can't benefit from it. As businesses invest more in KMS products that integrate seamlessly with other software, they enable seamless knowledge sharing across departments.
• Improved training and knowledge retention: Losing an employee is costly — you not only lose their unique knowledge but must also incur the costs of hiring and training someone new. A comprehensive KMS can help you retain valuable knowledge and serve as a training resource.

A standalone knowledge management tool is an option for businesses, but choosing comprehensive customer service software that includes knowledge base features can help you get even more from your KMS. With Service Cloud, you can:

• Host your knowledge base in the same platform that houses your customer data, allowing for omnichannel customer service
• Ensure all your knowledge resources are stored securely, while still being easy for the right people to find
• Provide a self-service portal to help customers handle simple issues faster
• Use AI features to automatically provide accurate self-service answers to customers, aid in creating knowledge base articles, and help keep them updated
• Set up seamless integrations with the other software products your team depends on

Implementing a knowledge management system is just one part of building a successful knowledge management process, but choosing the right one can make developing (and following) a strong process much easier. By investing in your company's knowledge resources, you set up your current and future employees for success, make sharing resources and inter-departmental collaboration easy, help customers find answers to their questions all on their own, and improve efficiencies in nearly every aspect of customer service for the business.