How to Build a Solid Knowledge Management Strategy? A Pro Approach
- Larry Barker
- Apr 15
- 10 min read
One of your top-performing support agents spends 15 minutes hunting for a critical refund policy.
After finally responding to the customer, they realize that the information they found was outdated.
The correct process?
Buried in an old Slack message from an employee who left months ago.
Companies struggle every day with siloed knowledge, process inefficiencies, and endless ticket escalations.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.
A smart knowledge management strategy can cut costs, streamline onboarding, prevent knowledge loss when employees leave, and empower customers to find answers on their own (without adding another ticket to the queue).
In this article, we’ll explore how to develop a knowledge management strategy that makes knowledge work for you, not against you.
What Is a Knowledge Management Strategy?
A knowledge management (KM) strategy is a systematic approach to creating, storing, sharing, and using information for an organization to achieve its objectives.
It’s about taking the knowledge of individuals and transforming it into collective organizational knowledge that can be used across a whole company by both customers and employees.
A good strategy addresses both explicit knowledge (documented information) and tacit knowledge (experience-based insights), while considering the people, processes, and technology needed to implement it successfully.
The Benefits of a Knowledge Management Strategy
A knowledge management strategy can deeply benefit an organization.
When the right information is shared amongst the right people, business priorities align with people's daily activities, creating a more efficient and cohesive workplace.
This alignment ensures that everyone understands organizational goals and has access to the resources needed to achieve them, ultimately driving better performance and innovation.
Implementing a knowledge management strategy can help you:
Reduce operational costs
There is no need for reinventing the wheel, right? You should spend time on the things that matter and not rewrite processes that already exist (but maybe are stored where you can’t find them!).
Similarly, CS agents shouldn’t struggle finding the information they need to respond to a ticket.
Improve employee onboarding
By reducing the time it takes to get new employees up to speed and ensuring a consistent level of internal knowledge. Information is not siloed on a specific team or department.
Avoid knowledge from leaving an organization
An employee’s departure shouldn't mean valuable knowledge disappears. You’ll have tacit information documented so it's accessible to everyone.
Provide a better customer experience and support
Customers can get quick answers to their questions on their own via the help center, anytime – no need to contact support.
Improve decision-making
Faster access to accurate information across departments means decisions are based on facts and not broken tacit knowledge.
What Are the Key Elements of a Knowledge Management System?
A knowledge management system is just a mix of different pieces working together.
To keep it running smoothly, you need to understand what each part does. Here are the key building blocks:
People: Finds the go-to experts and encourages a culture of sharing.
Processes: How knowledge is captured, stored, shared, and found in an organization.
Technology: Using tools like databases, software, help centers or knowledge bases.
Content management: Keeps info organized and easy to find.
Culture: Encourages a mindset of continuous learning and transparency.
These elements together ensure that knowledge management becomes part of an organization’s strategy and day-to-day ops.
How to Develop a Knowledge Management Strategy?
The recipe to create a knowledge management strategy that works for your business is not set in stone.
Here you have some key steps that can help you get started and make sure you don’t forget any ingredient.
Identify your goals and objectives
Start with the basics, that is, defining what you want to achieve with your knowledge management strategy.
For example, you might be looking to improve your employee onboarding process or deflecting support tickets by adding new self-service articles for your customers with a revamped help center.
Whatever it is, start by having a clear idea of what it is that you want.
Capture knowledge
Take a beat to collect all the existing knowledge about the topic you want to document. Knowledge is usually found in three ways: implicit, explicit and tacit.
Explicit knowledge: Documented knowledge that is easy to access and share. It includes policies, SOPs (standard operating procedures) proposals, documentation, and other tangible records.
Implicit knowledge: The know-how and processes a company runs on. Some of it’s written down, but a lot is tied to individual expertise and can be tricky to capture. Keeping it updated may require effort.
Tacit knowledge: The know-how people pick up from experience and skills. It’s tricky to share because it lives in their heads instead of being written down.
Conduct a knowledge audit
You might already have information scattered across your organization that will need to be reviewed.
In these cases, it's worth carefully examining what already exists.
Ask yourself:
What content can be reused?
What needs to be updated?
What should be archived?
What remains relevant?
Conversely, if you're starting from scratch, an audit of existing content might not be necessary, allowing you to build your knowledge management system with a clean slate.
If your goal is to reduce support tickets, start by reviewing your existing Help Center articles and identifying internal documentation that could be converted into public resources.
If you use Zendesk, using an app for dedicated Help Center management can significantly streamline this process.
Create a knowledge management team
For a knowledge management strategy to work in the long run, you have to define clear ownership of each step in the process.
This prevents your strategy from fading out and ensures information reaches the right people.
Without a person – or people – responsible for your knowledge management, it will be almost impossible for your strategy to succeed.
Consider who will be responsible for determining when a specific article is needed, who will write it (and customize it based on the audience), and who will handle dissemination (making the information circulate throughout your organization and to your customers, ensuring it's accessible and alerting relevant parties to its existence).
Choose a knowledge management tool
Without a knowledge management tool, making information available to customers and employees quickly would be tough.
Depending on your goals, you’ll use one or more platforms, whether to create new knowledge, document it, or circulate it.
Here are a few examples of existing knowledge management tools:
Document management systems: To organize, store and track documents and files. Examples: SharePoint, Google Drive, and Dropbox.
Internal wikis and internal knowledge bases: Used to create internal repositories of searchable information. Examples: Confluence, Notion.
Customer help centers and knowledge bases: Tools to create self-service portals so customers can find answers on their own. Example: Zendesk.
Learning Management Systems (LMS): Solutions like Canvas LMS, Docebo and TalentLMS to create training content and educational resources.
Knowledge management strategy and AIAI is an extremely powerful addition to your knowledge management toolkit because it can help overcome common challenges with your strategy. For example, hard-to-read content often prevents customers and internal teams from getting the help they need. AI can address this by making help articles more digestible, summarizing content or providing a clean version of poorly-written articles. Another valuable use is optimizing your content to improve search engine visibility. If you're using a modern knowledge management system, the search feature likely already comes with some form of natural language processing (NLP). |
Develop a content creation and implementation framework
A framework is a high-level plan of what your knowledge management strategy will look like in practice, step-by-step.
Make each step clear so everyone knows how to create and share knowledge the right way.
Include details like the team in charge, how content gets shared, what tools are used, and how feedback is gathered and used to improve existing content. Add your policies for content creation and maintenance process.
This plan will avoid disruptions in content dissemination, which is often the case between product and customer support teams.
For example, many organizations struggle with customer support teams that are unaware of recent product changes.
This can be fixed by implementing a strong knowledge management strategy to improve how information flows between product and support teams.
Make your content ‘searchable’
Don't leave SEO solely to your marketing team. From your customers’ perspective, there’s no difference between nonexistent content and content they can’t find.
Use relevant tags, titles, and content summaries to enhance discoverability.
Poor searchability can hurt your help center as well.
Optimizing your help center articles for search will improve findability both within your knowledge management platform and on search engines like Google.
Poor search features in a knowledge management system make it harder to find answers quickly, which leads to more frustrated customers, more support tickets, and tougher interactions since customers are already upset when they reach out.
Monitor content and user engagement
This is usually the last item in the list but it’s the most important.
Without tracking, there’s no way to know if you’re on the right path.
It goes without saying that your knowledge management strategy should include regularly gathering feedback from employees and users to identify gaps, outdated content, and inefficiencies.
Now, the specific knowledge management metrics you’ll be tracking will depend on the focus of your KM strategy. Here is an overview of some relevant ones:
Knowledge access metrics
Search volume and successful search rate.
Article view counts.
Time spent finding information.
Content quality metrics
Content freshness (% of up-to-date content).
User feedback ratings on articles.
Content completeness scores.
Number of content revisions required.
Operational impact metrics
Reduction in support ticket volume.
Decreased time to resolution for issues.
Reduced repeat questions.
Decreased onboarding/training time for new employees.
Knowledge Management Strategy Example
Curious about what a strategy looks like in practice?
Here are a few short knowledge management strategy examples tailored to different organizational needs:
Customer support
Goal: Reduce ticket volume and improve customer experience for a multilingual organization.
Strategy:
Conduct quarterly knowledge gap analysis by reviewing customer inquiries that lack documentation.
Create a library of troubleshooting guides enhanced with visual aids (screenshots, videos, GIFs) for common issues.
Implement AI-powered help center translation services to support global customers in their native languages.
Establish a continuous improvement cycle using direct customer feedback from tickets, satisfaction surveys, and feedback from your CS team.
Develop a knowledge base governance system with clear ownership and regular content audits.
Deploy chatbots trained on knowledge base content to handle routine inquiries 24/7.
Training and onboarding
Goal: Accelerate employee proficiency and reduce time-to-productivity.
Strategy:
Create standardized onboarding templates customized by department but consistent in core company information.
Build a library of recorded training sessions, webinars, and micro-learning modules accessible on-demand.
Designate dedicated onboarding specialists responsible for consistent knowledge transfer and experience.
Implement a buddy system pairing new hires with experienced employees for tacit knowledge sharing.
Create an onboarding feedback loop with surveys at 1 week, 1 month, and 3 months to continuously improve.
Develop a central repository for frequently asked questions updated based on new hire inquiries.
Track metrics including time-to-proficiency, knowledge retention rates, and onboarding satisfaction.
Six Best Practices for Developing a Great Knowledge Management Strategy
While we've outlined the main steps for developing your strategy, success ultimately depends on how you execute them and adapt them to your needs.
The following best practices distill insights from organizations that have mastered knowledge management, so you can sidestep common pitfalls and optimize your approach from day one.
1. Measure success with a data-driven approach
Most companies suffer from having access to too much data, rather than too little. Here are a couple of suggestions for practical ways to use some of those metrics:
Implement a Self-Service Score by calculating the ratio of help center visits to ticket submissions, providing clear insight into documentation effectiveness.
Complement this with a Helpfulness Index that tracks article upvotes versus downvotes across your knowledge base.
Leverage visual data including heatmaps, session recordings, and user feedback tools to observe how users actually interact with your documentation.
📌 Pro tip: Combine quantitative metrics with qualitative feedback to understand if users find answers or leave out of frustration.
2. Keep documentation up-to-date with a flexible approach
Documentation quickly loses value when it falls out of sync with your products. Some ways you can improve this is to:
Assign writers to product teams to ensure documentation keeps up with product changes.
Experiment with different structures:
Writers dedicated to specific products.
Writers covering general topics.
Support agents contributing documentation.
Product Managers providing bullet points for writers to expand on.
Most importantly, be prepared to adapt as your company grows. When a structure stops working, don't hesitate to change it.
📌 Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to try “scary” new workflows to keep documentation fresh. Flexibility is key!
3. Collaborate with subject matter experts (SMEs) & customers
Effective knowledge management bridges the gap between technical expertise and user needs.
Knowledge managers should develop deep product knowledge to function as SMEs themselves, while also facilitating collaboration with experts across the organization.
Finding the right balance between these and processes that work for both sides is often the hardest part. This might involve:
Conducting quarterly customer interviews to uncover new use cases, FAQs, and user pain points.
Shadowing customer success and product research calls to gather insights for documentation.
Interviewing internal experts, like engineers, and turning that into customer-facing documentation.
📌 Pro tip: Customer calls provide real-world perspectives and uncover undocumented use cases. Listen to what they have to say!
4. Train customers to use the help center
Even the best knowledge base delivers limited value if customers don't know how to use it.
Systematically embed help center links within support responses using macros (tools like Swifteq's macro search in Zendesk can streamline this process).
Identify high-volume support topics and proactively provide links to relevant articles.
Integrate help center links in the product UI to improve discoverability, placing documentation exactly where users encounter questions.
📌 Pro tip: In-app documentation placement increases discoverability and reduces support ticket volume.
5. Prioritize new content based on customer needs
Content prioritization should follow a two-pronged approach focused on customer impact.
First, identify the most common support tickets and sales questions, which represent immediate opportunities to reduce support volume.
Second, compare high-traffic articles with low helpfulness scores to pinpoint existing content that's failing to meet user needs.
When an article underperforms, conduct a deeper analysis to determine whether the content is too lengthy or complex, missing key information, or would benefit from being split or merged for improved usability.
📌 Pro tip: High-traffic, low-helpfulness articles should be your top priority for updates.
6. Rethink KPIs for knowledge management teams
Traditional performance metrics can undermine knowledge quality by encouraging speed over substance.
Avoid setting arbitrary individual KPIs that measure output without considering impact.
Instead, focus on:
Team-wide goals such as reducing content update time without sacrificing accuracy, or improving overall helpfulness scores across the knowledge base.
Encourage team members to engage in self-reflection about their writing processes to identify efficiency improvements that maintain quality standards.
📌 Pro tip: Track team-wide progress rather than forcing team members to hit rigid KPIs. You’ll boost morale and quality!
If you want more details on these pro tips, check out our interview with Karissa Van Baulen, Customer Education Lead.
Elevate Your Knowledge Management
Having a knowledge management strategy is not a choice, it’s a necessity.
By implementing a process that works for your business, you’ll be improving efficiency, saving costs and empowering employees and customers.
Swifteq's comprehensive suite of Zendesk apps addresses these needs directly, providing solutions like Help Center Manager for streamlined content management, Help Center Analytics for data-driven decision making, and translation tools that streamline translation.
If your support team uses Zendesk, Swifteq can help you manage your knowledge base content. Sign up for a 14-day free trial of Swifteq or ask for a quick demo.
Written by Larry Barker
Larry has spent over a decade leading CX teams at tech companies of various sizes. He also currently operates Supported Content, a niche content marketing company that helps CX brands attract and retain customers.