What is Knowledge Management?

A knowledge base is a centralized repository where service teams can store information, documentation, and solutions to common problems — an essential Knowledge Management tool. It serves as a self-service resource where users — whether they’re employees, customers, or other stakeholders—can find answers to their questions quickly and easily. One of the best examples of a successful knowledge management system? Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia is basically one gigantic knowledge base with over 40 million articles, that can be easily accessed and searched by its customers — you, me and everyone else with an internet connection. New knowledge is contributed daily and existing articles are updated rigorously by an active community.

Without a proper knowledge sharing practice in place, service desk employees end up wasting a lot of time hunting for information, slowing down resolution times and leaving end users hanging. Agents end up doing things differently, leading to an inconsistent customer experience. And most importantly, when people leave, their expertise goes with them. Training new hires gets more expensive and time-consuming, and the risk of mistakes and non-compliance goes up.

There are so many reasons why service desks should invest in Knowledge Management. Let’s have a look at 4 of the most important benefits:

• You’ll spend less time on recurring calls. A complete knowledge base helps you to handle recurring calls much faster. In our experience, up to 20%. And if you make knowledge available to your clients through Shift Left, you can even prevent calls in the first place by letting end users solve their own problems.
• Your customer satisfaction will go up. Customers want the right answer quickly. Your knowledge base will help you process more questions in your first line of support. And because your answers will be reviewed continuously, you can be sure you’re giving end users the correct answers.
• New employees will get up and running much faster. Familiarizing new co-workers often takes a lot of time, especially at a skilled service desk. But what if your new employees had a complete knowledge base ready and waiting?
• Working at the service desk will become more fun. Solving things yourself is a lot more satisfying than forwarding them to other people. Working on complex issues makes for more of a challenge than repetitive work. If you get Knowledge Management right, it will make delivering services more fun.

Knowledge Management is an integral part of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), which is a widely adopted framework for IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL defines KM as a central process that provides knowledge to all other IT Service Management processes.

The Knowledge Management process can be broken down into two main parts. Solve and evolve.

Solve

Evolve

Once you’ve been solving calls for a while, you can start evolving. The Evolve stage is about making iterative improvements to your process. This is the time to analyse your knowledge base: which answers are called up frequently, and how can you prevent those questions from being asked?

This is also known as Knowledge Centred Service or KCS.

Knowledge Management can help cut the time to resolve recurring calls by 20% within 2 to 4 months. Around half of that time saved is used for supplementing and updating your knowledge base. This means you’ll reduce the average time to resolve recurring calls by 10%.

What does this mean in practice? Let’s say your organization spends 200 hours a week processing calls. 75% of your calls could be resolved faster, if you would implement Knowledge Management. That means you would save about: 200 hours a week x 0.75 of calls x 0.10 = 15 hours every week.