Inefficient knowledge sharing is a major issue. According to the Panopto Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report, it costs businesses between $2.7 million to $265 million. Poor organizational learning is expensive since it delays workflow. Team members must wait for answers or muddle through a challenge that they are unsure how to solve.
Inadequate knowledge management also harms customer relationships in support teams. Waiting clients feel annoyed or irritated when representatives struggle to discover solutions, and they may eventually churn.
Knowledge management has an effect not just on customer and agent satisfaction, but also on productivity and profit. As a result, businesses need to implement a system for gathering and disseminating institutional information.
What Exactly is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge management is the process by which businesses collect, organize, and exchange information with their customers, workers, business partners, and others. It also refers to the technology that allows us to access, add and update all of this information.
An employee’s expertise is a one-of-a-kind combination of formal education, work experience, tenure with your organization, and specific competencies and life experiences. Some of an employee’s expertise may be transferable to other team members, but not all of it.
Advantages of Knowledge Management
Companies utilize knowledge management internally to transfer expertise and vital information across divisions. Establishing a knowledge-sharing organizational culture allows all employees equal access to institutional knowledge that can help them accomplish their jobs well. It also allows everyone to contribute in some way to that knowledge.
Knowledge management is also important for utilizing customer experience. Self-service features enable users to complete simple activities on their own, such as changing a password or printing a return label. When done correctly, self-service promotes client happiness while also increasing agent efficiency.
When it comes to minor concerns, customers prefer to help themselves in general, but they need access to relevant information to find solutions on their own. Knowledge management systems can also be helpful to agents in seeking answers to their own inquiries. All team members have access to the company’s collective knowledge repository, which allows them to find internal information without having to rely on a single team member or department.
What Exactly Are Knowledge Management Systems (KMS)?
While you could manually structure your support team’s knowledge management system, the process would be time-consuming and likely error-prone. Instead, we advocate relying on tools such as Microsoft’s Viva Topics that allow you to obtain and retain information fast and reliably.
Your knowledge management platform and solutions should deliver the information that customers and employees require in a scalable and efficient manner.
Viva Topics and Knowledge Management
Microsoft Viva Themes identifies material and expertise within an organization using artificial intelligence and the Microsoft Graph, essentially creating a “wiki” of organizational knowledge grouped into logical subjects depending on the subject matter.
Employees can have access to this knowledge by marking topic keywords inside the content they are viewing in technologies such as; Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. Hovering your pointer over a highlighted term will bring up a topic card with a summary of the relevant project/topic. You can get to a more thorough topic page by clicking on the topic card.
When an employee comes across an acronym, a project, or an unfamiliar term; a topic card provides a summary of the subject. Background material, documents, and subject matter experts are all included in each topic card.
An All-Inclusive Knowledge Management System
Themes uses Microsoft graphics to organize its content into topics. Microsoft 365 currently organizes information, but organizations can add content connections to allow them to pull in information from other sources; there are over 130 connectors available.
Of course, not all firm information is suited for broad interpretation. Microsoft Viva Topics is protected by the same security and compliance controls as the rest of the organization’s Microsoft 365 ecosystem. This is done to keep sensitive information out of the wrong hands. It includes access permissions, retention labels, data sovereignty, and information obstacles. As long as they deploy properly in the first place.
Furthermore, special limits to the breadth and availability of topic information provided by Microsoft Viva Topics can be implemented if necessary. Viva Topics inherits the connector’s security and compliance capabilities, ensuring that employees only see what they are authorized to see.
As a result, you don’t have to be concerned about data security. It’s simple to use and allows you to swiftly populate your internal pages; no searching, no switching apps; it finds the content and delivers it to you instantaneously! It also integrates with SharePoint and Viva Connections.
Viva Topics allows users to ask subject matter experts questions directly, it regularly finds (and captures) critical business knowledge that we cannot find in more formal documentation. When combined with the documents, chats, and other information created by experts as part of their normal workflow. This creates a comprehensive, organized, and searchable knowledge repository that can outlast any employment contract. Therefore, Viva Topics is a fantastic knowledge-sharing and management tool. Conventional knowledge management techniques are time-consuming and error-prone. Instead, we advise depending on resources that help you learn and remember material quickly and effectively, like Microsoft’s Viva Topics.
