Since the start of the pandemic, customer service organizations are doubling down on their investments in knowledge management because these solutions:

  • Empower customer service agents to deliver successful outcomes. One of the top three drivers of customer service success is agent knowledge. The early days of knowledge management focused on streamlining access to curated content. Now, machine learning, natural language search, intent derivation, and personalization enable agents to access journey-specific content in the context of their actions and comply with regulatory policy.
  • Drive customer satisfaction and engagement. Today’s anxious customers use self-service knowledge to quickly find answers to questions, increasing their satisfaction and deflecting inquiries from the contact center.
  • Create lasting customer success. Customers use knowledge management for product and new-feature education, best-practice application, and peer input, which helps with onboarding, product adoption, and, ultimately, customer retention.

Our recent analysis of the market surfaced five categories of knowledge management vendors. They are:

  • Specialist knowledge vendors that provide robust stand-alone solutions.
  • Customer service vendors that have knowledge solutions that are part of their omnichannel customer service products.
  • Digital engagement vendors that provide conversational assistance to uncover intent and deliver answers that are contextual to the customer, product, journey, and behavior.
  • Collaborative knowledge vendors that support crowdsourced knowledge, where knowledge is used companywide to fuel sales enablement or customer service.

Each of these solution categories has its own characteristics and strengths. Read our analysis of this market here.