The state of Knowledge Management in the Customer Experience profession

Here is an interesting survey report from Intelliresponse on the status of KM in the customer experience sector. 

Customer services shoot by Phil Dowsing Creative on Flickr

Customer experience KM is a subset of KM, related to the provision of knowledge to customers through online knowledge bases and help desks, often supported by dedicated knowledge base software (Intelliresponse is such a software vendor). Good quality KM can provide a self-service customer knowledge base, or enable your customer-facing agents to respond to queries quickly and knowledgeably.

The survey has the following findings

• Nearly half the organisations surveyed did not have a KM program
• The main reason for this was that they could not justify the investment, or could not find resources to help.

For those which had a KM program - 

• The primary use for KM in this sector is (unsurprisingly) customer service
• The majority of respondents said they still need to learn more and improve their KM
• Over 70% said the intended benefits have not been realised
• The most common metric for the KM programs is customer satisfaction
• The biggest challenge is getting people to use the system
• Investment in KM is generally growing
• One third of the respondents use dedicated KM software, 39% still use multiple systems to store their codified knowledge

The customer experience sector therefore seems to be having similar challenges to other sectors when it comes to implementing KM - developing the knowledge habit, embedding KM, and realising the benefits.