KM Solution in Enterprise Eco System is a necessity than just an additional tool. When world is talking about automation, digitization, what and what not; KM Solution has huge contribution in enabling enterprise achieving goals and meeting objectives. This Quadrant explains where KM can really help Enterprise; Knowledge Sharing, Collaboration, Self Service, and Agent Productivity.  

Knowledge Sharing:

Knowledge Sharing" is a huge problem across industry, team, business unit, you can keep adding area in the list. Small to Large companies spend millions of $$ training their employees every year and it keep increasing by almost 1% every year. Research also says with class room training only 10% skills can be enhanced. So, what about rest of the skill development. Those come from On-The-Job experience. Can we just deploy people on critical assignments post-classroom training? Answer is Yes and No. "Yes", because that's how you make him/her learn on-the-job. "No", because you cannot leave him/her alone and/or expose to customer. You need to mentor, coach, and provide right feedback at right time.  This is the issue in Service Industry, Corporate, Product Companies and any other. So, the question is can KM solve this issue? Probably yes. It gives a platform where people can learn, get help while on-the-job, mentor/coach can spend their some of the time in doing other productive work.

Collaboration:

The idea of collaboration is not new. We see people talking about it all the time and at all the places. But the question is how does this help, why is it so important and most importantly how KM helps? Too many questions and answer is also not very straight. Collaboration is something which has hidden return. This is probably something which has hidden return. This is not something which can be measured but certainly experienced. When we talk about team; can each one in the team work alone and at the end combining individual's work will complete the assignment? In most of the cases no. So, collaboration is required. When we say team, its collaboration, work together and make sure that team is moving in right direction from day one. Now what is KM? It's knowledge repository, brain dump of each and every one to help the mass. So, shouldn't Knowledge Base be an invaluable asset. Enabling collaboration feature in KM Solution helps contributor collaborate with peers, SMEs and other colleagues get their view point, feedback and input to ensure what is going in repository is thought through not something which is just written by someone for no reason. Collaboration in KM world brings KM maturity.

Self Service:

Companies spend unaccounted dollars to make sure customer is "Happy". This is not an easy task. There are so many delivery systems have been researched and implemented over the period to make customers happy. KM is one of them. KM has huge role in customer service. Customer can call to helpdesk, you can deploy very intelligent people in handling customer's call. This is all good but wouldn't it be good to avoid getting calls from customers at first place? Yes, it is easy to say but the question is how? Self Service is one of way to overcome from this problem. This is also called as "Case Deflection". Let customer find the right information by delivering information through omni channel. Deflect the problem by exposing the information they need. If you have mature KB repository it's difficult and brings huge value add in customer service.

Agent Productivity:

Companies spend unaccounted dollars to make sure customer is "Happy".Other side of Customer Satisfaction is how to increase the Agent's productivity. How to make sure that Agent is spending less time resolving the customer issue and at the same time able to handle more and more calls. One way is to deflect the customer problem by enabling Self Service. But it doesn't work alone. Agent should equally productive. To do so, KM should also be exposed to Agent. Agent actually needs little more than just exposing KM to them. It has to be Contextual. We don't want agent to scan through entire repository to look for the right answer of the problem customer is facing. Rather, system should be intelligent enough understand the context of the problem like who is the customer, area of concern, etc.Agents are the best contributors in maturing KM repository. They have tons of information within by working in diverse situation, so enable KM to agents to increase their productivity, get best ROI, make customers happy and progressing towards matured KM repository. Finally, these are said at many places and many times but still we have Industries and Companies lacking in this area. KM is an integral part of Automation, Digitization, and Customer Experience.

Who Can use It?

"Who needs Knowledge Management and Why?" seems difficult question but answer is simple "Everyone needs it". Every Enterprise needs Knowledge Management irrespective of industry they belong to. Below is why?