What is Knowledge Management Software?

Knowledge Management (KM) software is defined as a tool for content management, intent inference, 360 context, content access, search, interactive guidance, and knowledge analytics, powered by generative AI, conversational AI, and ML, unified into a seamless knowledge hub. Taking a piecemeal approach to knowledge management software creates chaos with disparate, inconsistent, and uncoordinated silos and islands of automation.

Knowledge Management Software: Why use?

KM software can deliver the following benefits, specifically for the customer service organization.

• Improve agent confidence in answers and reduce their stress
• Improve their effectiveness and efficiencies
• Reduce their need for training and onboarding
• Reduce incoming call and chat volumes with intelligent self-service

Customer service continues to be the killer use-case for knowledge management software. However, KM can benefit the entire enterprise by arming all employees with information and knowhow in the flow of their work.

Gartner Market Guide for Customer Service Knowledge Management Systems, Jun 2024

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Knowledge Management Software: Providers

Vendors across various market spaces often define KM software to align with aspects of their focus or marketing messaging. They fall into the following broad categories:

1. Document storage/document management
2. Enterprise Content Management
3. CRM
4. Contact center infrastructure
5. All-function suites
6. Point KM product startups
7. Whole-product KM

Items #1 through #4 are self-explanatory. #5 refers to vendors that offer applications for all enterprise functions from ERP to CRM and are not focused on any one space. #6 refers to point product startups that address one narrow aspect of KM like a standalone chatbot. Whole-product KM refers to a vendor like eGain that offers a complete solution for all aspects and phases of modern KM that have all the ingredients to make you successful: best-in-class technology unified and orchestrated in a hub, proven methodology for quick value creation, implementation and managed services, support services, online and in-person training, self-paced certification, pre-integrations with existing systems, partnerships, and a rich API library for solution extension and innovation, along with a track record of at-scale success.

Knowledge Management Software by eGain

Knowledge Management Software: Clients speak

Rated #1 on Gartner Peer Insights client review site for software vendors with a score of 4.9/5.0 for the last 12 months!

Knowledge Management Software: Users speak

Voted KMWorld magazine’s Readers’ Choice by KM practitioners, members of the kmworld.com community, and print magazine subscribers!

“There are many other awards and designations bestowed on KM vendors by publications and analyst firms, but this is the one where the winners are chosen by the people who matter most—the end users who use these products and services every day,” wrote the editorial staff at the magazine.

Knowledge Management Software: Proof is in the pudding!

eGain clients have realized transformational business value from the eGain Knowledge Platform. Here are some examples:

• Leading telco client improved Net Promoter Score by 30 points, First Contact Resolution by 37%, and training time by 50% across 13,000 contact center agents and retail store associates. The prestigious KMWorld magazine agrees—they selected this company for the KMWorld Reality Award for creating business value “in reality, not rhetoric.”
• 8000 agents at a leading BPO client rely on eGain Knowledge to deliver personalized service to Fortune 500 employees, handling upwards of 25M inquiries per year
• Hypergrowth SaaS client improved agent confidence by 60%, answer consistency by 62%, and speed to answer by 67%

Knowledge Management Software: Success Story

Our client BT transformed their customer service operation across thousands of contact center agents and hundreds of stores with eGain Knowledge Hub™, the top-rated software for knowledge and AI-powered customer service automation. The prestigious KMWorld magazine agrees—they selected BT for the KMWorld Reality Award for creating business value “in reality, not rhetoric.”

Rated #1 by Gartner

Rated #1 by analysts, the eGain Knowledge Hub is a comprehensive knowledge management solution that improves customer service and empowers employees–agents, knowledge authors, and operations managers.

It delivers accurate answers and personalized conversational and process guidance in the flow of work. Part of the Knowledge Hub is eGain AssistGPT™, a comprehensive, no-code, generative AI tool that helps agents, authors, and operations managers become more effective and efficient.

The Knowledge Hub unifies and orchestrates all the building blocks needed for modern knowledge management: content management, profiled content access, generative and conversational AI, search methods, and knowledge analytics.

1. One-stop knowledge management software

eGain Knowledge Hub unifies and orchestrates all the essential building blocks of knowledge management, including content management (CMS), search, generative and conversational AI, workflow management, intent inference, conversational guidance, knowledge analytics, and others, powered by AI, ML, and Natural Language Understanding. This eliminates knowledge silos and islands of automation, enabling better experiences for customers, contact center agents, and business managers.

2. Personalized knowledge

eGain Knowledge Hub delivers personalized knowledge to agents at the point of customer conversations whether it is through self-service or through agents. The access and guidance can be tailored to the role (L1 or L2 support) and experience level of the agent (novice versus experienced).

For example,

• A novice agent could be made to go through an interactive Q&A session where the AI-based guided help interface would handhold them to a resolution of the customer issue.
• An expert on the other hand, would use the browse-and-search access mode to complement the guided help interface to be more efficient.

The business administrator can set up roles for agents that determine their guidance level and the ability to suggest new knowledge.

3. Best practice-embedded

eGain Knowledge  Hub embeds all the best practices garnered from successful knowledge management implementations for hundreds of leading enterprises across the globe. It has helped our clients save millions of dollars while creating wow experiences for agents and customers.

4. Integration with call tracking systems

To improve the call set up and wrap up process, the knowledge management software includes call tracking. During call set up, the IVR data can be captured to pre-populate questions so that the agent can get a running start on the issue resolution process. After the call, the resolution transcript from the KM system can be automatically saved in the call tracking system along with the service request. This speeds up call wrap up, while ensuring high-quality data for reporting and feedback, a great way to improve call center productivity.

5. Quality content, maintained at low cost

Successful and effective knowledge management starts with quality content. Poor quality knowledge — stale, irrelevant, or incorrect — result in customer dissatisfaction and poor agent adoption. eGain Knowledge Hub is based on a unique collaborative knowledge management framework. It allows distributed content creation and editorial workflow that ensures quality and compliance.

Users, based on roles set by the business, can easily suggest knowledge. The content is routed through efficient workflow to ensure consistency and quality. This powerful flexibility allows companies to adapt to customer needs and behavior on the fly. Using self-organizing techniques, the knowledge application offers relevant answers to customer requests based on dynamic relevance ranking and user feedback.

6. Integration with third-party systems for knowledge reuse

The knowledge management software allows you to leverage or reuse existing content across your enterprise through eGain Content Adapter™. A powerful integration tool, it takes information from diverse sources, such as IBM (Lotus) Notes, Microsoft SharePoint, legacy content systems, CRM systems, available in a consistent format to all your users, along with the knowledge within the eGain knowledge framework. The adapter is compatible with over 100 file formats so that existing enterprise data can be easily leveraged in resolving customer issues. External content, or parts of it, can also be easily suggested as new content for the knowledge base. This tight integration further lowers the cost of maintaining the knowledge base.

7. Features for wow self-service

The Knowledge Hub includes rich capabilities for customer self-service, including virtual assistant, search, contextual widgets, brand-aligned templates, conversational AI, with robust knowledge management to back it up. The eGain Conversation Hub makes sure that self-service context is made available to agents in the case of customer escalation to human-assisted service so that the conversation can be moved forward without having to start over.

8. Powerful reporting and management features

Extensive reporting and management features measure agent and self-service effectiveness and guide knowledge improvement. Knowledge analytics enable you to incrementally enhance your knowledge base based on agent and customer feedback. Reports created from wrap-up data help to manage and plan your contact center workforce training and staffing requirement. Finally, knowledge creation and maintenance reports allow you to easily set content contribution goals and usage-based incentives for employees and subject matter experts. The reports have built-in drilldown capabilities and can be exported for further analysis and presentation.

9. Support global deployment with a multilingual, scalable solution

eGain Knowledge can handle multilingual content. It supports localized interfaces in multiple languages. Also, the solution scales to handle several thousand concurrent agents in a distributed configuration. This gives a high level of flexibility to the organization.

10. Pre-integrated with leading customer relationship management (CRM) and contact center solutions

eGain Knowledge Hub is pre-integrated with the leading customer relationship management (CRM) and contact center solutions:

1. Salesforce
2. Microsoft Dynamics
3. SAP
4. ServiceNow
5. Cisco
6. Avaya
7. Genesys
8. Amazon Connect

These out-of-the-box integrations allow organizations to embed eGain’s award-winning knowledge management capability within these desktop tools.

Learn more about the eGain AI Knowledge Hub.