Information is at the center of business performance. With so much you could share about your products so they’re leveraged to their best potential, you need a dedicated organizational system.
A knowledge management system (KMS) is an easily accessible hub containing diverse resources that help your teams or customers thrive. Building one has many potential benefits, from improved organizational alignment to better customer satisfaction.
We’ve created a complete guide to knowledge management systems to help you understand their value and build one of your own.
What is a knowledge management system?
A knowledge management system is a digital tool businesses use to store and manage information. It centralizes valuable resources in a single hub to ensure everyone who needs them has easy access.
Knowledge management systems can be designed for internal use or to serve customers. The same fundamental technology powers both types of knowledge management systems, but they serve different purposes:
An internal KMS streamlines the organization of internal company knowledge, including resources like onboarding documents, process walkthroughs, brand guidelines and useful data.
A customer-facing KMS offers self-service support resources such as FAQs, product manuals and troubleshooting guides that help customers solve specific challenges.
There are many dedicated knowledge management software solutions designed for knowledge sharing, like Google Drive and HelpScout. However, any platform capable of storing and organizing information can work as a knowledge repository.
Some businesses looking for a comprehensive, bespoke solution will build their own from scratch. Others with more straightforward needs might use intranets, conventional content management systems or customer relationship management (CRM) systems as their internal KMS.
What does a knowledge management system contain?
A knowledge management system can contain any type of information that’s relevant to your business or customers. What information you choose to collate in yours depends on your objectives.
There are three “categories” that information can fit into, all of which are relevant to businesses:
Explicit knowledge. Basic information that’s easy to record and store, like product data, process documents and human resources (HR) policies.
Implicit knowledge. Applied knowledge typically gained through experience, but that can be codified and taught, like sales workflows or CRM best practices.
Tacit knowledge. Information gained through experience that’s difficult to articulate, like subtle signs that a sales lead is close to being converted into a customer.
Resources that deliver explicit and implicit knowledge are simple to create and store in a KMS.
Creating evergreen tacit knowledge resources is more challenging but can be achieved using multimedia resources like videos.
More specifically, a knowledge management system might contain:
Documents covering company policies and HR processes
Internal best practices or standard operating procedures (SOPs)
Onboarding resources, training materials and system tutorials
Detailed customer information, including contact details
Product or service information, including specifications, manuals or FAQs
Summaries of past projects or initiatives in the form of data or case studies
A customer support knowledge base and troubleshooting guides
Brand guidelines, internal wikis or shared knowledge forums
These resources can range from short text documents to detailed video tutorials.
One key benefit of a knowledge management system versus a less structured information storage solution is that it allows diverse formats to be organized in one central hub.
How to build an effective knowledge management system
Building a knowledge management system that works for your business relies on solid planning. Taking a structured approach to the task will ensure that your KMS fits your specific needs.
Follow this five-step process to build an effective knowledge management solution that helps your internal teams or customers access the information they need:
Step 1: set objectives
Your first task is to decide whether you need a KMS for internal use, your customers or both. This will determine what resources you need to create and how you build your system.
It should be clear which type you need based on your challenges.
If your business struggles due to poor availability of organizational knowledge, resources or documentation, an internal KMS is a good solution. If you get a high volume of support requests from customers, a customer-facing KMS can help.
You can then drill down into the specifics of your knowledge management strategy’s goals. This will indicate what knowledge you need to cover in the resources you create.
Here are some examples of potential knowledge management process objectives and resultant resources to include in a KMS:
Objective | Resources |
To reduce the burden on customer support teams |
|
To increase operational consistency and efficiency |
|
To streamline back-office information management |
|
Once you’ve established your objective, choose key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your success.
For example, if you aim to reduce the burden on your customer support team, your primary KPI could be decreasing customer support requests by 25% in the 6 months following KMS implementation.
Note: Use SMART goals to create KPIs that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based so that they’re easier to work toward and track.
Step 2: gather data
Data can provide important insights into what you should include in your KMS. Qualitative and quantitative data can help you decide what will help you achieve your objectives, so don’t limit yourself to one or the other.
Qualitative data is descriptive and expressed in words. It can provide details about your target user group’s pain points and needs.
Quantitative data, on the other hand, is measurable and numerical. It’s ideal for identifying quantifiable trends and preferences.
To collect quantitative data, ask representatives from your target KMS user groups for their opinions.
If you’re building an internal KMS, you can meet directly with team leaders or colleagues who’ll use it daily. Interview these stakeholders to get their thoughts on what they need from a knowledge system and make notes to use later.
If you’re building a customer-facing KMS, you’ll need to choose a research outreach method. Surveys, focus groups or direct interviews with key customer profiles can effectively gather data on what your customers need from a KMS.
Example questions you can ask either group to get inspiration for your build process include:
What challenges do you face that could be solved with better information?
What information do you most frequently need access to?
What information formats do you find easiest to absorb?
How do you currently get the information you need?
You can then take advantage of the range of quantitative data sources available, including your CRM, website analytics platform and customer service records.
Look out for data that provides relevant information and builds on the story told by the qualitative insights, like:
Engagement metrics for existing support articles (to identify what topics are most popular and therefore important to cover in your KMS)
Search volume data for keywords relating to the problems your KMS aims to solve
Training course completion rates to identify weak points
Individual product/service popularity or uptake
Together, this information will give you insights into the resources you should create to ensure your KMS is as valuable as possible to everyone who uses it.
Note: The stakeholders you collect qualitative data from will vary depending on whether you’re building a KMS for internal or customer use. In the former case, your HR, sales and marketing teams will have valuable insights. In the latter, data from actual customers and your customer support team will offer the most value.
Step 3: create resources
Each resource in your knowledge management system should be crafted carefully to maximize its usefulness to the user group that needs it.
Start by analyzing the data you collected in the previous stage. While interpreting the data, consider how informational content could best meet your users’ needs.
Don’t just think about what topics you need to cover and how they relate to each other. Each individual piece’s format and style are just as important.
Here are some key considerations to make as you plan the creation of KMS resources:
Type. A range of content types can add value to your KMS. Consider what format will best suit each topic you’re creating a resource for, such as a plain text article or an interactive video.
Length. Some topics require fewer details than others, and over-producing a resource can detract from its usefulness. On the other hand, don’t skimp on details where required.
Tone. The tone and style of your KMS resources should suit the audience you’re creating them for. Resources for internal use can be concise and to the point, for example, while customer-facing resources should align with your broader brand tone of voice (TOV).
Device. For example, if users will primarily access your KMS through a mobile device, you must build resources to suit mobile displays.
Aside from differences in content types and tone, prioritize consistency across your resources. They should all share similar content formatting guidelines, fonts, subheading structures and navigational practices to create a cohesive user experience.
Note: Choose the best multimedia type for the topic. For instance, an FAQ may be served best by a written answer, while a tool walkthrough may be more useful in a video.
Step 4: build a structure
When building your KMS, you have two main options: using a dedicated knowledge management system provider or creating your own system from scratch.
The former is great for getting your KMS off the ground quickly. You can set it up with support, add all the resources you’ve created and finetune the settings to suit your audience.
Knowledge base software comes in many varieties. Some systems are versatile enough to be tweaked to suit diverse use cases, while others are specialized to suit a specific KMS use case.
Pipedrive Smart Docs, for example, is perfectly suited to serve as a knowledge management system for sales teams. It connects with cloud storage tools like Google Drive to centralize templates for sales documents like quotes or proposals.
Sales teams can seamlessly access and edit critical documents this way. Smart Docs also has a range of additional features, like built-in digital signature functionality, further streamlining the sales process.
HelpScout, on the other hand, is designed to simplify the process of building a customer-facing KMS that facilitates self-service support. Its features, such as a live chat support feature, complement the main knowledge base management system.
Building your own KMS offers more flexibility and customizability, so it’s more likely to suit an enterprise knowledge management system that must meet specific needs or ideas.
The downsides are that it’s more expensive, complicated to develop and generally takes longer to set up.
Whichever option you choose, focus on setting your knowledge management system up to be as user-friendly as possible, including considering how to:
Categorize your resources intuitively
Integrate navigational features like a search bar
Use hyperlinks to help create user journeys
Organizing your resources into an intuitive, easy-to-navigate structure helps maximize your KMS's effectiveness by helping your users find the information they need more easily.
Note: When building your KMS, make it recognizable through brand colors, fonts and imagery. You can do this whether you build it yourself or use a dedicated platform. It helps create a consistent experience for users who come from your website.
Step 5: optimize and maintain
Before launching your knowledge management system, get feedback from sample users to help you identify flaws you might have missed during the build process.
The same user groups you used in the research stage are a great place to start when seeking feedback. Give them access to your KMS to explore it and follow up with interviews or surveys.
Questions you can ask to get useful insights include:
How easy was it to find the specific information you wanted?
Were the resources you accessed clear and effective in addressing your needs?
Did you encounter any resource gaps that are important to fill?
Would you like to see more or less multimedia content?
Did you find the search function helpful in delivering relevant results?
Use the feedback to inform changes to your resources and the knowledge management system itself. After this process, you’ll be ready to set it live.
The work doesn’t end there, though. You must also take a rigorous approach to updating your KMS resources.
Schedule a regular system review to ensure all information is still accurate and work quickly to fix any errors or make updates when needed.
Note: As with any page on your website, your knowledge management system should be in good technical health to help users and not hinder them. Aim for good page loading speeds and stay on top of technical problems like broken links to ensure a smooth user journey.
Knowledge management system examples
Building a knowledge management system can offer many potential rewards, but it’s a big task. Before starting your build process, it’s helpful to learn from existing examples.
Although internal knowledge management systems aren’t publicly accessible, the two customer-facing examples below provide an excellent overview of how to build an effective KMS.
Canva Help Centre
Canva’s Help Center is a KMS that covers a lot of ground. It contains resources like account settings, product pricing, technical support and design tips.
Resources are accessible using a search bar. They’re also organized into categories, allowing users to browse for the information they want.
The individual resources use multimedia content, including text, images, GIFs and videos to help users make the most of Canva.
All of the resources are optimized for organic search, with the Help Centre ranking for 100,000+ search queries, meaning that whether a user searches for support on the Canva KMS or a third-party search engine like Google, they can find an appropriate resource.
Pipedrive Learn
Pipedrive Learn is a great example of a KMS that focuses on delivering free product-specific education. It contains a variety of CRM training courses, video tutorials and webinars to help users get the most out of Pipedrive.
It’s complemented by another knowledge base, Pipedrive Help Center, which provides customer support in a more traditional way.
Together, these two resources provide Pipedrive users with everything they need for complete self-service when getting started, learning to use the CRM and troubleshooting issues.
4 ways to use a knowledge management system
Knowledge management systems can serve diverse purposes, which are influenced by who has access to them and what information they contain.
You could build a knowledge management system for your marketing team to centralize information about marketing processes, target customer segments and branding guidelines, for example.
Alternatively, you could create a set of community forums where your users can connect with subject matter experts and share their collective knowledge to help each other get the most from your product.
However, most knowledge management systems function with a broader perspective. They’ll likely serve more than one team or audience, further reinforcing why having one as a single source of truth can be beneficial.
Here are four ways a successful knowledge management platform can help your business:
1. Self-service and personalized customer support
Research from Higher Logic shows that 79% of customers expect organizations to offer self-service support tools. Around 92% said they’d use a knowledge base to access self-service support if it was available.
These stats show the demand for customer-facing knowledge management tools. Building one boosts customer experience by letting people self-serve and solve their issues in their own time. They don’t have to wait for support from one of your customer support agents.
A chat tool integrated into your website means you can even enable chat-based self-service.
Pipedrive’s LeadBooster, for example, has a Live Chat feature that allows team members to direct users to relevant knowledge base articles based on their queries.
The benefits of knowledge management systems designed for customers apply to your business, too.
Facilitating real-time self-service customer support decreases the load on your customer support team, giving them more time to spend on more complex support requests.
2. Employee onboarding
Your onboarding process is an opportunity to prepare new employees for success. By centralizing key information, a knowledge management system boosts efficiency and consistency in employee onboarding.
You can build a comprehensive library of onboarding resources for your KMS, covering both business-wide and role-specific information. For example, sales onboarding resources might include customer personas, case studies, product sheets and sales software tutorials.
Storing these resources in a KMS ensures seamless access. Your new hires can access them on-demand to fuel their early development.
Some knowledge management platforms, like Notion, provide pre-built onboarding templates. You can download and customize these free templates to speed up the process of building an onboarding hub in your KMS.
Using the templates helps your new hires settle in and reach full productivity quicker.
Research from Gallup shows exceptional onboarding makes employees 2.6 times more likely to be extremely satisfied with their job, which can boost long-term retention.
3. Organizational alignment
A knowledge management system can foster better alignment between teams in your business.
Centralizing information relevant to multiple departments, such as marketing, sales and customer support, avoids information silos, ensures everyone follows the same playbook and creates a more consistent customer experience.
For example, KMS resources covering key customer pain points can help marketing and sales focus their messaging approaches on similar topics relevant to customer needs.
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Without access to a KMS, team members must communicate their strategies and share information directly and consistently to boost alignment. Doing so takes time, reducing the effort they can spend on making their campaigns successful.
4. On-demand training
Offering on-demand training resources enables your employees to develop and upskill continuously. An internal knowledge management system is a great way to organize these resources for seamless access.
A KMS’s ability to store multimedia content side by side makes it particularly well-suited to this use case. You can combine text, video and interactive resources to provide a well-rounded training hub that meets diverse needs.
Final thoughts
Businesses thrive when the proper knowledge is readily available to the people who need it, whether that’s internal teams or customers. Building a sound knowledge management system is the best way to make that a reality.
Use our five-step guide to tackle the process effectively. Tailor your KMS to suit your business’s specific needs and maximize ease of use. If you keep it up to date, you’ll have an evergreen resource that provides value long into the future.
