Regardless of the size of a business, benefits of knowledge management are more understood today than they have ever been. More organizations now realize that implementing a knowledge management strategy not only improves the customer and employee experience, but in an age of higher attrition, it also protects companies from vital knowledge being drained as more tenured staff move on.

In a recent survey by KMWorld, only 15% of executives said they were completely confident that the knowledge in their organizations was up to date and reliable, and from a reliable source. While there may be many factors that drive this skepticism, the fact that they feel this to be the case opens the question on how knowledge is being created and managed to deliver the best results for different use cases.

For example, there will be use cases where there is a need to guide the user through a set of processes each time to ensure that all interactions are compliant, whereas other use cases may need to give the user autonomy to find knowledge that relates to various types of queries throughout the day.

For each of these use cases, two of our knowledge management products have features, such as decision trees and search capabilities, that would help achieve the desired results.  The choice comes down to what you prioritize as the approach that will benefit the user most. Features alone don’t drive value, benefits do.

Panviva

Panviva is at the forefront of delivering compliant knowledge in highly regulated industries such as banking, insurance, and healthcare. Knowledge is written by experts and flows can be designed to give the most efficient user experience, drawing from the single source of truth as well as contextual knowledge from other systems such as CRMs. This allows agents to consistently curate the best response for a customer’s individual needs.

Think of vehicle insurance, for example. A renewal would need the agent to follow the same process many times in a day, but the knowledge would change based on the personalized details of the customer’s current policy, changes to their vehicle or circumstances, and any offers or conditions they would need to know about. Asking an agent to find all this information manually would be time-consuming. No matter how many times they may have repeated the process before, it could leave them open to making an error. The impact of that error could have serious implications for the customer’s coverage and potential legal issues because of it.

At the same time, there may be occasions where customers call to confirm a common aspect in all policies. In this instance, it would not make sense for an agent to be forced through a specific flow; instead, they would benefit from being able to search for the answer or having a quick link to the information. While there is flexibility in how Panviva would be used in this type of use case, the requirements would dictate that the guided flows are the most important.

RightAnswers

With RightAnswers, the power of search takes the lead while still being able to create decision trees as an option. A typical use case could be for a tech manufacturer that makes consumer products. Here, customers could call for a whole host of reasons across a diverse product range. The calls an agent may take could range from software compatibility, guidance on functionality, or even a password reset enquiry. For this agent, the primary benefit is being able to search to find the answers to their customers’ questions while still being able to give them the attention they deserve.

RightAnswers allows organizations to connect multiple repositories out of the box, returning searches alongside articles written directly in the knowledgebase. Having access to additional content in one place, usually integrated into a CRM including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Genesys Cloud and ITSM tools including ServiceNow, Ivanti and Jira speeds up the interaction and removes the need for the agent to frantically jump from screen to screen.

Imagine if the customer has an issue with a product and has attempted the steps to resolve on the self-service site, but still has to make contact with the service center and gets connected to an agent who is new to the business. This is where a RightAnswers decision tree could come into play. While not bound by regulatory compliance, it would help the agent carry out step-by-step diagnostics to confidently find the best resolution for the customer.

BA Insight

If enterprise search is the main challenge and there is not a need to author content, then the third product in our knowledge management portfolio, BA Insight, would be ideal for you.

BA Insight also has more than 90 pre-built connectors to search existing repositories across the enterprise and return the most relevant results for the user in one place, driven by the access levels within each source product. BA Insight’s software also supports in-app search to allow for enterprise-wide search from within applications such as Microsoft Teams, NetDocuments, ServiceNow and more.

An example use case here could be a large legal organization where the content required could include legislative documents, historic reference cases or client data. Another key requirement, especially in legal practices, would be the need to ensure segregation of content where attorneys are working on opposite sides of a case. The ability to restrict sensitive information can be easily done from the host application to remove any risk of that occurring.

BA Insight not only helps you find content, but it can also use the power of its search capabilities to find the right people who can help with its Expertise Locator/Finder. This allows you to find experts within a field, leveraging information from their corporate profiles or information from previously stored contributions such as documents, emails, blogs, project histories, work and billing records, and more. Web-like filters make it easy to specify what you are looking for and filter across a variety of attributes, including location. Having a list of experts served up in search results cuts out time wasted finding the right people to leverage in big organizations.

These use cases only scratch the surface of the benefits that either Panviva, RightAnswers or BA Insight could unlock. All three have other great features that can help drive efficiencies across businesses and unlock the most complex of use cases. We would love to speak to you about your specific challenges, contact the team and we will be happy to discuss how we can help you overcome them.

Our expertise goes beyond just tech

At Upland, we pride ourselves on taking Knowledge Management seriously, not only at a product level, but also with a team of experts with years of experience. We can help with training and health checks to keep you on track – whether through KCS training and certification or carrying out health checks to assess the current state of your knowledge and offering best practice advice. We welcome you to use our expertise and allow us to partner with you to deliver success. If you would like more information, our team will be happy to help.