Product Knowledge - One Solution Fits all?

Organized product knowledge is the “energy” driving customer engagements, enabling success and underlining an effortless experience.

CSMs and their colleagues from other teams should be interested in a shared knowledge solution. There are multiple benefits to consider:

?? It is a source of truth for all customer-facing teams for product/service inquiries.

?? It improves user experience as customer-facing teams provide a consistent and professional response.

?? It is the underlying source of information for the external knowledge bases/FAQ for the end users.

?? It drives a “Customer first” mindset across the organization.

?? It will support future digital experiences and the introduction of AI to address customer’s

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Developers who document their code diligently.

QA engineers clearly describe the main “happy flow.”

The product team consolidates the “know-how” into one repository.

Pre/sales, CS, and support teams addressing customer inquiries.

But who is the ??????????? ????? ???? ?????? ????????? ???? ???? ???? ?? ?????????????????????????? ?????????????

Even if officially “titled” as an internal initiative, the product knowledge solution ultimately benefits the customers. Any human, Bot, or present/future AI will utilize this repository and enhance the user experience.

CSMs, being at the junction between the product and the customer, can proactively promote knowledge management across the organization. It does not mean they are the “owners” or solely responsible for the quality of the information, but they should be influential stakeholders as part of the process.

Who should be involved?

All customer-facing teams:

1.?Customer Success

2.?Support

3.?Pre-sales

4.?Professional services (if applicable)

5.?Product

When is the right time:

Small startups in the early stage are busy firefighting. ?They have little attention and willingness to invest in building a knowledge base. However, there are a few valuable steps to think about, which will save time at a later stage:

• Introduce a ticketing system to track and manage technical issues.
• Think about the future employees who can follow and understand the information recorded in earlier stages.
• Create tags to mark specific categories. It can be the name of a user flow, module name, or use case name.
• You can categorize the issue's complexity level (High to low).

As companies mature, multiple customer-facing teams are involved and deal with technical and non-technical inquiries at different stages of the customer journey. ?Pre-sales manage PoCs and respond to RFPs. Support teams address customer issues via tickets and create a significant portion of the organizational, technical knowledge and know-how. CSMs handle various questions related to best practices and proper product usage.

Then, there are ???????????????????? ?????????? ???????????????????? the need for a shared knowledge base:

?? Teams approach each other, seeking information and answers to similar questions.

?? Field-facing teams acknowledge the value of frequent internal calls to share challenges, establishing the case for documenting technical issues and respective solutions.

?? There were a few cases of signing non-ideal customers and use case misfits. Subsequently, the lessons learned exercise indicates that the teams will mitigate the risks by bridging product knowledge gaps.

What should you know before implementing and maintaining a knowledge management solution?

??Identify the Owner.? Having multiple “owners” usually means no one is accountable, while each one expects the others to lead the initiative.?

Assume there will be a need for “Internal selling” to the other teams based on:

• What are the reasons for the initiative?
• The expected benefits
• Clarifying the need for a consolidated data management process

The one owner can then form a task force with reps from each team - all of them will be tasked to make this happen.

??Design the data collection process.

Map the data “islands” such as ticketing systems, notes taken by different teams, “local” knowledge initiatives by the teams, reports, and lessons learned from failed POCs and customers.

Categorize the data (using tagging) to improve search accuracy. A few examples of categorization:

• Customer journey phase: pre-sales, onboarding, different levels of adoption
• Product module
• Use case
• Customer segment/market
• Internal/external audience - which items should be visible in the customer-facing knowledge.

?? Accuracy and verification. Figure out who the technical authority is to verify the accuracy of the information logged by the different teams.? You can also design a process involving multiple stakeholders, such as the head of support, the engineering lead, and the product manager.

Put in place a procedure to prevent duplicates and merging of multiple answers to the same question.

??Platform/Tool. You can leverage existing platforms such as the support internal knowledge base SharePoint, Office 365, Gsuite, etc. When evaluating the technology underlining the knowledge management solution, consider the flexibility to integrate additional data sources, the existence of an external module for the end users, the ability to categorize/tag the data, and maintain repositories to different customer segments.

?? Seek executive sponsorship and budget.? The shared knowledgebase initiative should have clear objectives and plans in place. ?Sponsorship will be “translated” to budget to cover required tools and the expected effort.

?? Like any other project, it should have reasonable timelines and milestones.? The project team will likely not be fully allocated as they also have their “day job.” It would be wise to split the effort into multiple stages/cycles. Another approach is to start “small” with a POC and iterate from there.

?? Consider the “day after” syndrome, meaning how the solution will be maintained and updated continuously.? All involved teams should commit to keeping the knowledge base up to date. There is little value in spending time, effort, and funds on one-off activities that will not yield the expected benefits in the future.

CSM should care about having a consolidated knowledge management solution. Even if there is no inherent organizational appetite for such an initiative, they should promote the idea and encourage the other customer-facing teams to take action. It is a cross-team collaboration activity that will reduce internal effort and significantly contribute to the company’s business outcomes.

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