6 Knowledge Management Challenges You Need To Fix ASAP + Solutions

Are you facing challenges in knowledge management?

If you’ve ever gone through tons of folders and lost precious hours just to answer one question or clarify one doubt, then yes!

With the enormous amounts of information being generated daily in your organization, it is mission-critical to have an effective system to properly store and manage this information.

This is why customer-first organizations rapidly invest in a robust knowledge management system (KMS) to meet their knowledge needs.

But as much as a KMS solves many problems, it also comes with its own challenges for successful implementation. These challenges can range from adoption to deployment, content creation, and successful maintenance.

However, organizations that respond well to these challenges can reap benefits that will put their business ahead for years.

Let’s delve into some key knowledge management challenges and discuss actionable and practical solutions to fix them.

What Are The Key Knowledge Management Challenges Organizations Face & How To Overcome Them?

1. Continual reliance on legacy software for your KM needs

This is one of the key knowledge management challenges brands face today.

Many businesses already have a wealth of knowledge locked up in their storage systems yet to be put to full use. This is often a waste of potential as this knowledge is not easily accessible company-wide to boost business productivity.

The main reason for this challenge is that many companies still use legacy systems to store all their knowledge. These legacy systems are often clunky and hard to maintain, with insufficient indexing capabilities to keep your knowledge organized and easily discoverable.

Additionally, employees are also often reluctant to switch to new technologies. How they will cope, how difficult it is to use, and how long it will take to learn it are some of the many worries that hinder new tech adoption.

Solution: Upgrade to a fail-proof KMS to boost your knowledge experience

Businesses aware of the importance of seamless knowledge experiences are investing in fail-safe KM solutions to tackle their knowledge management challenges.

One such example of an enterprise-grade solution is a full-suite KMS like Knowmax that helps you effectively collate, store, and disseminate all your organizational knowledge.

Whether you have complex SOPs to organize or frequently asked customer questions to answer, Knowmax allows for versatile content creation in the format that best suits your needs.

Knowmax’s clean and user-friendly interface also makes working on the platform easy for beginners, with guidance notes embedded across the platform for assistance. This way, your team can create new or updated existing ones hassle-free.

2. Ensuring knowledge is always up-to-date and accurate

More often than not, companies treat knowledge management as a one-time process. The usual approach is to create content, upload it to the company’s knowledge base, and leave it untouched for years.

Perhaps a knowledge base is clunky to use, or it is hard to integrate with other in-house tools. Therefore, not updating your knowledge base regularly is a key challenge in the knowledge management process, and it can be disastrous for your knowledge ecosystem.

Solution: Opt for a solution that allows for easy content creation and editing

In the dynamic world that businesses today live in, the worst thing you can do is to let your knowledge go stale. Just like you get your car serviced regularly to ensure smooth functioning, your knowledge base should be no different.

This is why you need a solution that allows you to easily create, upload, and edit content to keep your knowledge repository fresh and running smoothly.

In this regard, Knowmax is a no-code platform, so anyone can get started, even with zero tech expertise. The platform allows users to create and edit content easily to ensure that their knowledge repository is always up-to-date.

Additionally, you can add, delete or edit any step in your workflow to update it. Errors in any content format can be corrected without recreating the content from scratch.

3. Information is hard to find on demand

This is one of the Knowledge management challenges customer service agents face daily.

With the amount of information, your employees deal with daily, remembering each file name or email subject is impossible.

Imagine this:

A customer emails their problem about a recent purchase from your brand. Your service rep assures you a solution by the end of the day.

He spent hours searching for that one document in your drive with the right information to solve this customer problem but failed. The clock is ticking, and time’s up.

He has no solution. Your customer is frustrated and disgruntled; your agent is upset and disappointed.

In this case, you know how important it is to find the right knowledge at the right time.

So what can you do to make it easier for your service team to surface the knowledge they need on demand?

Solution: Ensure Google-like search function for seamless knowledge discovery

Modern-day KM solutions have advanced search capabilities to instantly dig through your entire knowledge base to surface the needed knowledge. Their google-like search engine discovers the content piece you need with a simple keyword input.

In addition to the above capabilities of an advanced KMS, Knowmax has an in-document search filter to dig deep into your knowledge repository and get the knowledge you need. This way, you or your employees no longer waste time or effort looking for information and can focus on other critical tasks.

4. Complex SOPs that hinder seamless troubleshooting processes

The key to every business’s success is how efficiently it can tackle customer problems and challenges. If your business can ace customer service, it is already miles ahead of your competitors.

But the challenge in delivering top-grade customer service occurs when complex and disorganized SOPs disrupt smooth customer interactions and troubleshooting processes.

Suppose your employees have to put your customer on hold to seek advice and clarity from colleagues and supervisors. In that case, the likelihood of your customers returning to you for business is slim. Research by Velaro says that customers will hang up after just 60 seconds if put on hold.

Solution: Create guided workflows for each troubleshooting use case

In order to deliver timely and effective answers, set your service team up for success with actionable knowledge at their fingertips.

One way to do this is to use interactive decision tree software to create bite-sized dialogues for predefined support scenarios. This way, complex problems are broken down into next-best actions so your support rep can give accurate guidance to ensure frictionless troubleshooting.

Read here: 5 Main Reasons Why You Should Use Decision Trees For Support Agents

Additionally, Knowmax’s decision trees allow your reps to auto-traverse any step of a decision tree based on a customer’s input. This way, the probing process is shortened and reduces any chances of human errors. Your agents become confident problem solvers, and your customers leave with their problems effectively resolved.

5. Difficulty analyzing content performance

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. This is true for your organization’s knowledge as it is for other things.

Perhaps your team is creating knowledge regularly, but the impact of this new content is low. Your handling time hasn’t improved, self-service channels aren’t working effectively, and your customer satisfaction score is declining.

Surely, there is something wrong with the process. This is why tracking your content’s performance and user engagement will help you identify the cracks in your strategy.

Solution: Invest in technology that gives you detailed reports and analytics

Investing in a solution that gives detailed reports on your content’s performance is a game changer. It will help you eliminate the stress and guesswork in figuring out what knowledge your employees and customers find helpful and valuable.

In-built micro-segmented analytics like Knowmax’s helps you track your support team’s user journey on any content piece, including the time spent on each piece. You can extract data on your knowledge base content’s performance to evaluate its usefulness and work on areas of improvement. This way, you can create actionable and valuable content to boost customer experience.

6. Fostering a knowledge-sharing culture among employees

Lastly, encouraging a knowledge-sharing culture in your workplace is essential to ensure no siloed knowledge. However, getting everyone to share their experiences and expertise is challenging.

Your employees might be uncomfortable sharing their opinions or experiences. Or perhaps they’ve done so in the past, but their knowledge wasn’t used properly. Either way, building a positive place for healthy knowledge exchange is invaluable for your team’s productivity and efficiency.

Solution: Make knowledge-sharing simple and enjoyable

Make knowledge-sharing an enjoyable experience in your organization. The best way is to:

• Build a positive workplace for healthy knowledge-exchange
• Ensure that employees feel heard when they share their experiences
• Cater to different knowledge-sharing and learning techniques – videos, pictures, help articles, and how-to guides to make the knowledge experience seamless

The bottom line is that even if you use the best knowledge management software or spend countless hours creating new content to share, your efforts and investments will be in vain if your organization’s knowledge-sharing is not right.

Final thoughts

For your business to thrive in a rapidly changing market, your employees must have the right knowledge at their fingertips. Whether it is to answer customer questions or understand internal policies, a seamless knowledge experience is what they need to function efficiently.

The right tool, culture, and process can help improve how you and your teams engage with your existing and new knowledge to create stellar experiences across customer journeys. You can beat your knowledge management challenges with the abovementioned solutions to leverage your rich knowledge economy.