Contents:
- 4 reasons to track your knowledge management KPIs
- Some key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep your knowledge management system on track
Companies that encourage knowledge transfer, increase their collective intelligence and boost their ability of decision-making and innovation. As a result, these companies perform better than their peers in developing a culture of continuous improvement. If you want to refresh your knowledge on this topic, check out our previous article dealing with knowledge management basics.
While all of this sounds straightforward on paper, success actually relies on numerous parameters, from your choice of knowledge management system (KMS) to the adoption of a precise framework designed to maximize its efficiency and effect. Then, once you have your KMS implemented, the question of how to evaluate your knowledge management performance in the long run arises.
Here are some knowledge management Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to make your KMS a durable success.
Four reasons to track your knowledge management KPIs
Whatever the investment, effective metrics are important to make sure your goals are met. In the case of knowledge management, the focuses should be on customer and employee satisfaction, organizational productivity, innovation, and improved decision-making.
1. Optimize content to bring more value
Your KMS’ content should be easily accessible and usable by your collaborators. Basically, it must fulfill its role of helping people solve any issue, as directly as possible. By regularly measuring the effectiveness and quality of your content, you are constantly optimizing and improving the quality of the service it provides and making it simpler, more understandable, and more actionable.
2. Boost engagement to make your database richer in detail
People are the backbone of success when it comes to the use of a KMS. Their efforts, successful and unsuccessful, have an enormous effect on the system – the barriers they find are the main impediments to the overall transfer of knowledge. Thus, it is important to track and measure success and failure with the aim of identifying over time the roots of any inefficiencies. Perhaps users have problems determining if the content is sufficiently relevant, or perhaps a delay is due to the wait for approval from a supervisor. In paying attention to their individual successes and struggles, you demonstrate to your people the real importance of their individual contributions to the KMS. Sometimes, all you need is more support from managers to implement a knowledge-friendly culture!
3. Evaluate your knowledge management processes
Efficiently monitoring KPIs will enable you to assess your knowledge management processes. If you observe that the content views in your knowledge base are lagging behind expectation, or that there are only a few interactions with your KMS, you might need to investigate whether there is an issue at a certain level of the process. The origin may be found in knowledge acquisition, storage, distribution, or knowledge use – thankfully, however, the first step towards the optimization of your KMS is singularly found in the tracking of KPIs.
4. Improve your ROI thanks to relevant knowledge management KPIs
To ensure your knowledge management system will function well for your company, you must properly monitor it over time. Only by doing so, you will be able to improve and optimize it. Investing in a KMS takes time (training your team and implementing the system) and money (software costs, setup costs, and maintenance), so the more closely you track your goals the more you can improve your ROI:
- Did we reduce the number of calls?
- Did we reduce the average call time on the first contact?
- Did we increase the first-call resolution rate?
Some key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep your knowledge management system on track
When it comes to having a strategy for framing KPIs, your team needs to start with the basics and understand what your organization’s goals are, and how you plan to achieve them. This should involve discussions with heads of departments and managers. Below is a first-level overview of key performance indicators to get you started.
Size of the knowledge base
To get the best return on investment from your knowledge management software, you need to keep track of collaborator engagement on the platform and how much they contribute to enriching your knowledge base. The higher the volume of knowledge content, the better you can feed FAQs, community forums, tutorials, chatbots, or education portals and training programs.
Top performing content
How many times a given piece of content is viewed or searched for? Not only you want to check the quantity of content created but also you need to track its usage. A document that is frequently accessed is very obviously a useful document. Keep track of which documents are most and least useful, so that you can clean up the database.
Knowledge base quality
Having an increasingly big amount of content is a good thing – but so is tracking the quality of your knowledge base and remove any misleading or outdated content. To ensure the efficiency of the document release process, keep track of the number of documents that have not been reviewed on time.
Number of utilized documents
Knowledge content should help your customer service department in their daily interactions with customers and prospects. Check the number of knowledge management documents that have helped resolve incidents to determine which knowledge management documents have contributed to the resolution of serious problems, and to which extent.
Response time and user engagement
A good KMS improves your customer response rate. Make sure it is easy to find the answer to a question someone posts to your KMS. Then, monitor how quickly the reply arrived, and how quickly the answer was approved. Here the goal is a percentage reduction in the average resolution time. This will help you see if your team has improved its efficiency since you implemented the KMS.
