Should businesses that prioritize Trust, Safety & Security rely on AI tools to assist their customers, prospects, and partners?

Yes, they should. However, they should exercise caution and be mindful of utilizing secure, safe, and trusted sources of information to guide their staff, customers, prospects, partners, and providers.

This is an obvious and logical approach as the reputation and core existence of these businesses are built upon the values of Trust, Safety, and Security.

Which types of businesses are we referring to?

Immediate and evident answers include Banks, Financial Institutions, Insurance companies, as well as other compliance and risk-driven activities such as healthcare and accounting. Furthermore, industries like aeronautics, construction, and transportation have their own unique compliance requirements, expanding the list beyond the aforementioned sectors.

When customers or prospects inquire about the recommendations of SHA team Knowledge Experts regarding the implementation of AI Conversational Tools and Bots, our stance as Knowledge Management Operational Experts is unequivocal:

AI Bots and Conversational tools can undoubtedly fulfill CSAT, Cost Reduction, Productivity, and Reputation objectives, but only if there is a solid Knowledge Management foundation supporting these AI tools.

And yes, you’re correct in suspecting us of promoting our own business (solid KM), but it is worth noting that independent voices are echoing the same message: “Do not allow your AI-bot to scour uncontrolled areas for information; maintain control and ownership.”

Additionally, it is imperative to ensure the seamless functioning of your data infrastructure (SHA cloud architecture excels in this regard).

For instance,

Gartner recently proclaimed: “By 2025, 100% of generative AI virtual customer assistant and virtual agent assistant projects lacking integration to modern knowledge management systems will fail to meet their customer experience and operational cost-reduction goals.”

According to IDC’s 2024 white paper (IDC #US52048524 sponsored by NetApp), “Around 20% of AI projects may encounter failure without adequate support in data infrastructure,” as revealed by a recent study conducted by intelligent data infrastructure provider NetApp.

SHA is a Knowledge Management System designed and developed by experienced seasoned Customer Service experts who have brought their vision and daily operational experience to deliver a system that enhances Customer Experience, improves Staff Experience, and reduces the cost of service!

For more information on how SHA can support your Customer Service Operations get in touch with us:

/https://sha-saas.com/contact-us/

February 7, 2025February 7, 2025

Faced with the challenge of sharing company knowledge and finding a high-performance training monitoring tool? SHA has a solution for you!

SHA is a platform that combines Learning Management functionalities with Knowledge
Management tools, or in simpler terms: SHA offers a solution that merges LMS (Learning Management System) functionalities with a KMS (Knowledge Management System).

Introducing Solution Management System (SMS) by SHA, a new concept that simplifies Knowledge and Learning Management:

SMS is the result of combining KMS and LMS.

The SHA platform is for companies that handle a lot of information daily and need to ensure quick and easy access for their teams to share it with customers, prospects, suppliers, etc. These companies understand that knowledge is an essential part of their value and must be managed effectively. Users should also be able to contribute to improving the data by providing their opinions on its relevance.

SHA combines Knowledge Management with advanced Learning Management features by directing users to important content for optimal task performance (Cost, Quality, Velocity).

The sectors that benefit most from these tools are those that interact with customers (Customer Services, Call Center, etc.), but all divisions of a company seeking operational performance optimization are involved.

Through extensive discussions with our customers and prospects, we have identified the different types of content and their volatility over time (an important factor for content management).

The documents are the ones most frequently cited as priority content in KMS and LMS.

Tableau Statique

Category	Types of Documents	Activity Staff	Format	LifeCycle
Policies & Procedures	Employee handbooks, SOPs, guidelines	HR, Admin, Legal, General Affairs	PDF, Word (protected)	Medium (annual updates)
Contracts	Client contracts, vendor agreements	Legal, Sales, Providers, Customers	PDF (protected)	Definitive (rarely updated)
Financial Reports	Balance sheets, income statements, audits	Financial Staff, Admin	XLS, PDF	Medium (quarterly or annual updates)
Marketing Materials	Brochures, campaigns, presentations	Marketing, Sales, Communication, Prospects	PDF, PNG, PPT	Short (frequent updates)
Design Documents	Blueprints, CAD files, design drafts	Design, R&D	CAD, PDF, proprietary	Short (frequent updates)
Production Plans	Schedules, specifications, quality logs	Production, R&D, Customers	XLS, Word	Short (frequent updates)
Customer Records	CRM entries, customer feedback	CS Staff, Sales, Customers	XLS Database export	Medium (periodic updates)
Training Materials	E-learning modules, onboarding guides	HR, Service Staff, General Affairs	PDF, Video, PPT	Medium (review every 1-3 years)
Meeting Records	Agendas, minutes, action items	General Affairs, Admin, All Teams	Word, PDF	Short (specific project cycles)
Legal Filings	Compliance reports, patent filings	Legal, Financial Staff, R&D	PDF, Word	Definitive (rarely updated)
Internal Memos	Announcements, updates, notices	Admin, All Staff	Email, PDF	Short (one-time use)
Service Logs	Maintenance reports, issue tracking	Service Staff, Production	XLS, Word	Medium (regular updates)
Supplier Records	Invoices, delivery logs, contracts	Providers, Financial Staff, Admin	PDF, XLS	Medium (periodic updates)
Employee Records	Performance reviews, payroll, leave forms	HR Staff	XLS, Word	Medium (yearly updates)
R&D Reports	Experiment logs, technical reports	R&D, Design	PDF, XLS	Medium (review post-project or annually)

Key Highlights:

Formats:

The document format often balances usability (e.g., Excel for analysis, PDF for sharing) and security (protected formats for sensitive information).

Life Cycle:

Short: Updated frequently due to dynamic needs, e.g., marketing materials, production plans.

Medium: Updated periodically based on cycles, e.g., training materials, financial reports.

Definitive: Rarely updated, often for records with legal significance, e.g., contracts, legal filings

The most common question our prospects ask is how SHA manages to be efficient by merging two activities that usually require separate platforms.

How does SHA introduce LMS capabilities into a content management KMS platform?

It’s simple, thanks to three main factors:

Consider training content as standard “knowledge” content, even if the format, life cycle, and structure may differ from other content.
Use the Content/User duality, which is one of SHA’s unique features. SHA manages the interactions between content and users, always considering the relevance of the content from the user’s perspective. Did the information help them complete their tasks, or does it need improvement?
Focus on apprenticeship rather than training. Operational managers know that training doesn’t always have an impact, but learning does. Taking a training course doesn’t always lead to progress or improved KPIs, whereas learning with SHA’s quality control and monitoring tools ensures that training brings the expected benefits.

Whether your organization already uses an LMS or not, SHA easily integrates learning content, from structured courses to flash briefs, and helps management teams ensure knowledge acquisition.

If you’re already using Knowledge Management tools without Learning Management features, SHA can easily integrate your existing content and facilitate Knowledge Management while providing the benefits of Learning Management for your teams.

To experience the advantages of unified Business Knowledge and team Learning management, contact our Solution Management System experts. They will share their extensive experience in this field!

For more information on how SHA can support your Customer Service Operations get in touch with us:

/https://sha-saas.com/contact-us/

September 16, 2024September 17, 2024

How to meet the specific needs of Financial Services Customer Support?

Are all Customer Service queries (Pre-Sales, Sales, and Post-Sales) the same across industries and organizations? Let’s first acknowledge that the general requirements for Customer Service are:

Staff with extensive product and process knowledge
Customer-oriented processes and policies
Waiting time (including abandon rate and other operational KPIs)
Empathy (among other soft skills)
Strong leadership from agents to guide customers to the desired solution.

Let’s now try to answer the next question: are those requirements’ expected level of delivery similar across all industries?

The initial answer that comes to mind is that different products/services may require different levels of delivery. However, it’s not necessarily because the products/services are different, but rather the potential consequences of failing to meet the expected level that differentiate businesses.

For example, having an issue with a delivery address can cause a 24-hour delay in delivering a book, which is frustrating for the client. However, a wrong address entry can have severe consequences for an emergency ambulance.

Another factor is the organization’s setup, which means that the ways processes, policies, and product/service knowledge are generated and shared depend on the overall business organization.

For instance, if all business activities are in-house and located in a single location, the workflow for sourcing, authoring, and sharing key information (knowledge) will be completely different compared to an organization with multiple sites and a mix of in-house and outsourced service operations.

The level of compliance and legal constraints can also vary greatly depending on the type of service. Certain markets are subject to strict legal rules and are required to provide information within a specific format.

For example, if you’re selling shoes online or if you’re in the bank loan business, your constraints and corporate liabilities are of a very different nature.

Additionally, some industries have inherently complex processes and must keep track of historical legacy. Keeping track of past policies and long-term procedures requires managing a significant amount of information and knowledge with discipline.

For instance, in the consumer electronics industry, it’s not vital to keep track of the hardware specs of a CD ROM burner a customer purchased 10 years ago, but it is critical for a bank to understand the conditions under which a client was granted a certain mortgage rate 15 years ago.

Now, let’s review what makes Financial Services Customer Support so specific in terms of expectations for Customer Service and what makes Financial Industries (banks, credit providers, insurances, etc.) different in the way they provide information to customers.

At SHA, we worked closely with one of our highly reputed financial institution clients to ensure that our Knowledge Management Solution fits their market-specific quality levels while improving their cost of service and enhancing the staff experience.

So, what is so specific about financial information provision? Based on SHA’s experience, the following points stand out:

Massive volume of information from different data sources and formats. Financial processes often include legacy documentation as well as recently edited documents from legal, financial, commercial, and marketing departments.
Long and complex processes and procedures. This requires special techniques, such as tree-decision flows, to improve communication and interactions with customers. It’s not feasible for Customer Service staff to absorb all the details of each procedure.
Bidding procedures with legal exposure most of the time. Providing inaccurate information can lead to major image and financial risks. If Customer Service is outsourced to a BPO, the content must be validated by in-house experts as critical responsibilities cannot be delegated.
Customer experience affected by being “easy to do business with.” It’s a known fact that Customer Service staff can explain things better and faster when information is presented in a friendly manner.
Difficulty in training and retaining knowledge by users. With volatile product specifications and policy changes, it’s challenging to keep up with knowledge even on basic questions like exchange rates and interest rates.
Addressing 100% of the questions is crucial. Unlike other businesses, even a non-frequently asked question deserves the same attention as the top 10 queries. Public AI knowledge tools cannot be considered safe enough to retrieve critical information.

SHA-SAAS also brings our Customer Expertise to the solution, providing the following areas of opportunities:

Single system to control all processes and procedures. All inputs from legal, marketing, sales, finance, etc. are consolidated into one system with a simple and highly efficient search tool.
Quality control and distribution control. Agent and client experience feedback is used to identify the most difficult-to-understand processes, allowing authors to rework and improve them.
Change management. Knowledge must be dynamic, and ways of providing knowledge require continuous improvement plans for both the knowledge itself and its users.
Creation of formal/approved documentation/standard operation procedures. Thorough approval processes ensure compliance with Financial Institution governance rules, accommodating both simple and complex operation setups.
Integrated training control and planning features. The knowledge is critical, but the usage of knowledge by Customer Service staff is even more important. Advanced training modules, individual customized training programs, and individual knowledge performance monitoring are integrated into the Knowledge Management System.
Gap analysis and suggestions for improvement. Our in-house AI-based Knowledge Management Quality tools enable the detection of low signals of quality drifts in the content and suggest improvements.

SHA clients have enjoyed the following benefits using our Knowledge Management System:

Major reduction of paperwork. Not only eliminating “paper” based knowledge, but also reducing and optimizing process flows in a one-stop-knowledge shop.
Reinforcement and streamlining of approval processes. Alignment of approval processes with Corporate Governance Guidelines, providing a transparent, fast, and thorough workflow for authoring knowledge.
Reduction of “in class” training needs. Reduced training duration for new staff and update training, leading to higher productivity per head and better synchronicity with new products and policy announcements.
Improvement in troubleshooting accuracy and reduction in invested time. Better information provided to Customer Service teams leads to better productivity.
Improvement of Customer Experience and Staff Experience. Accurate, up-to-date information provision and efficient guidance result in an improved experience for both customers and staff.

Generic Requirements	SHA Features & Benefits	Financial Services CS Fit
Staff with top product and process knowledge:	Core Knowledge Management with integrated Training Feature	supports multi-format information and ensures freshness of data used by Customer Service teams. It is a perfect fit for in-house core validation governance with remote BPO operations.
Customer-oriented processes & Customer-friendly policies:	Integrated Customer Service staff feedback on the Knowledge Management System and SHA coaching module enable continuous staff improvements.	Clear explanations are essential for complex financial processes.
Waiting time	Reduced call duration with easy-to-find accurate information improves operational efficiency,	Crucial for cost-efficient financial operations
Empathy (within other soft skills):	Well-trained Customer Service staff provided with clear support information can focus on customer satisfaction and improve retention and acquisition.	Customer satisfaction has become a strong differentiator as financial services customers are becoming more volatile with the growth of online banking and insurance offerings.
Agent strong leadership to guide customers to the expected solution or offering:	Staff training and education focus shifts to call flow management rather than pure hard knowledge. Individual and team training track monitoring reinforces the quality of interactions with clients and prospects, leading to cost reduction and revenue growth through	First-time resolution for support and conversion rate, up and cross sales for commercial interactions.

Table1: quick summary of SHA KMS fit with Financial Services CS needs.

In conclusion, while Financial Services requires the basic Customer Service requirements to be fulfilled, there are additional elements that must be considered and addressed. SHA’s Knowledge Management System delivers these elements in a practical and cost-effective manner.

And if SHA excels in delivering the most demanding expectations, it is also a great fit for all other markets with different levels of expected performance.

For more information on how SHA can support your Customer Service Operations get in touch with us:

/https://sha-saas.com/contact-us/

December 1, 2022December 27, 2022

Video Killed the Radio Stars but Have Chatbot Killed Knowledge Management Systems?

As most of tools existing for quite a while, Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) were recently challenged by tools that looked more dynamic and more adapted to current tech trends: CHATBOT for example were expected to take over the support of clients having all kind of questions & queries.

Image by kjpargeter on Freepik

After a few years of hype, where do we stand?

Facts:

Let’s look at the bright side first:

Yes, CHABOT are up and running 7 days a week
Yes, CHABOT can address some easy to ask and easy to analyse queries. It is important to note that those queries have to be easy ones – means the customer have to ask those queries in a very simple manner, so the bot replying, will not get lost with too many words …

BUT

Facts again:

Studies shown that users don’t like to get support from bots (and very probably it is because they could not get proper answers from them…) Recent studies (ie study from Statista.com) found that the huge majority of customers (rough average 80%) prefer human interaction to AI driven interfaces as chatbot.

More studies forecast that bot assistants lacking integration with Knowledge Systems will NOT bring the expected CS and savings.

Very few businesses require 24/7 replies on queries, and when there is a critical need (health, security, financial transactions for instance) most of the time it is low volume and high quality required so human interfaces have to be there.

So KMS seems to be considered as the fundamental foundation which should not be neglected for both human and virtual Customer Support.

Designed by rawpixel.com / Freepik

Knowledge Management: a fundamental element that is here to stay?

No surprise that some other studies shows that KM has a bright future to help and support human beings (but not only) to reply accurately and consistently to queries from other precious human beings: customers and prospects.

Gartner found that 74% of Customer Support Professionals mentioned improving knowledge and content to their customers and employees as a priority.

There is a spot for bots and probably in the forthcoming years, technology will evolve so the current rejection could reduce. But we also need to consider that robots need to be fed, and when they’ll be working better, they’ll need to use some fundamental pieces of knowledge, and they’ll find in your KMS.

The days IA/Bots/ML will create their own knowledge (and mimic the current knowledge life cycle and workflow: identification of need, authoring, validating, monitoring, improving, and managing obsolescence…) are not there yet. And when it will happen, we’ll still have to ensure that 2 different lines of code would not generate 2 different solutions to similar queries just because some synonyms were used…

Some advices from the Customer Support Experts at SHA:

Start today with a KMS solution that will enable you to create, maintain and monitor your enterprise knowledge for your contact center staff as well as for your digital virtual agents, today and tomorrow!
Video might have killed the video stars some years ago (same as streaming has killed some others) but LPs are still there and Chatbot did not killed KMS, just made their existence more critical and more visible…
If you need to set up a KMS from scratch or move your existing KMS to a much more agile and cost-efficient system, have a look at what SHA can provide you!

October 13, 2022October 23, 2022

Can Knowledge Management be isolated from Training? How to close the loop?

Introduction

If Knowledge Management is based on the idea that an organization’s most valuable asset is the knowledge of its people and if we accept the fact that Knowledge freshness can be volatile then it becomes clear that both Knowledge Management and Learning Management are to be considered together.

Operational Context: what are the issues?

When running a Contact Center Operation, the relation between Knowledge and Learning is even more critical:

Once the initial and fundamental trainings are delivered, how to ensure your teams’ knowledge keep up with new information, changes, update?

How to avoid to pile up the necessary updates in one regular training session (ie 1hr per week or half a day per month), stuffing the staff with a lot of new things at the same time, and with little or no chance to digest the info?

As a result it is difficult for customer fronting staff managers to keep their team knowledge up to date.

Operational and Financial impact

The regular training updates, (are they short and weekly or long and monthly), bring constraints and costs such as having staff not productive for hours, training room, trainers, support materials…

It can be hard for contact center agents (for anyone!) to digest in one batch a lot of updates on a lot of different topics. It is also very well known that it is difficult to get trainees full attention and focus if there are a lot of different subjects to be covered in a short time.

Real time can be critical:

Regular consolidated updates can’t be real time by essence. So info freshness is at risk and communication to clients can be obsolete during a few days, meaning some customers might be given wrong info for a while.

In the other hand providing updates in advance, before the changes are implemented can also be misleading and confidentiality has also to be considered: some info can be under embargo (till they are live) like: product new specs, new price list, promotion…

Home working:

Today’s natural trend to favour Home Working can make the situation worse, it can be difficult to ensure that everyone is aware that they have news in the mail box which requires attention!

Knowledge Quality:

Knowledge Quality is extremely dependant on its freshness: Knowledge is alive, Training is its heart and KMS is its blood…

One strong point having a Knowledge Management System (KMS) is to get feedback on the content, so authors, writers can amend and improve their articles and make them easier to understand and to share.

In the contact center daily context, it is easy to understand that an agent looking for a solution in the KMS will not spend a lot of time about what could be done to improve the article, he’ll (rightly) focus on the customer experience not on the knowledge improvement.

When reading a training update during a quiet time during the day, the agent is not under the same immediate delivery stress so not only he can read and absorb better the content he’s submitted but he’s more likely to provide useful and relevant comments to the article.

Conclusion (and Solution)

We at SHA, led by experience, strongly believe Training, Learning and Knowledge Sharing are tightly interconnected.

This means that both Knowledge Sharing and Training have to be considered together.

We’d all agree that fundamental, theoretical, specialised trainings require hours/days and most of the time require classroom setup, but Knowledge update, process adjustments, products specification upgrade and the likes can fit in a totally different and far more efficient format.

That’s why SHA has developed a Training Module to “Close the Loop”

With SHA Training Update Module solution you will:

Avoid double flow management (training delivery and content sharing) for new updated, adjusted knowledge workflow.
Free up your training resources (trainers, equipment, rooms…) from the heavy load of minor training updates.
Keep your agent productive and focused during the peak periods.
Provide your agent guidance and support to absorb new things at the right moment.
Track and monitor training progresses and fix potential stress areas within the team
Provide your team more time and thoughts to give feedback on existing solution, hence enhance the content!
Manage your knowledge freshness and deliver real time up to date solutions to your clients and prospects.

Contact us to see more about SHA!

(s.lissillour@sha-saas.com)

SHA put together your massive Knowledge Encyclopaedia and your Real Time Training News Feed, in one app!

Never let your precious knowledge get obsolete!

Use SHA KMS Training Module and close the loop!

June 6, 2022

In less than 3 minutes evaluate your need for a (new) Knowledge Management System

Knowledge Management System Return on Investment (aka KMS ROI) … trust me, with such a headline it can be difficult to attract someone’s interest, we all keen on reading easy stuff and learn new things and much less likely to read complex calculations that are not fitting our business specifics (and we ALL have our own specific business, don’t we?)

So instead of writing a nice and long article on the hidden benefits of KMS or a very comprehensive suite of questions to estimate what could be the ROI (basically, when would your KMS bring tangible, monetized value to your business) we decided to play an easy game: just allocate points to each of the 10 features below

0 point if you believe this item is irrelevant to your business

1 point if you believe this item is of low importance to your business

2 points if you trust this item is important to your business

3 points if you strongly believe this item is totally critical to your business

And to have a proper evaluation: provide DELTA in the second column to evaluate how far you think you are from where you’d like to be. (using the same logic with points: 0 is low, 3 is high)

“your business” is not restricted to your bottom line, your sales number, but you’d agree that the your business’ ultimate value is made of a lot of others items such as: brand image, product innovation, customer experience, talent retention, financial health…

Knowledge Management Evaluation

Irrespective of how you performed this test, just contact us at SHA, we have extensive business experience on how KMS can support your business and operations and get a fairly good estimate on how quickly you can achieve a proper ROI using KMS (it can be a few weeks!)

April 26, 2022

Centralized vs Decentralized Knowledge Management Systems

Just as a starting point: have you thought about the amount of knowledge stored in your organization’s laptops, memory sticks, external drives,…? Do you think it will be easily shared?

Even if this is just an anecdote, when you are facing the implementation of a Knowledge Management System (KMS), one of the topics very often put on the table is the discussion about centralized or decentralized approach. It is not rare that within organization senior management different opinions may exist about the need to maintain regional, national or business unit or product particularities. Most of the times, discussion about centralized/decentralized is a source of conflict between management, when some actors may consider that their area of influence is being limited, putting at risk the success of the project.

From a high-level perspective, If we consider a centralized managed system, employees create knowledge that is stored and organized and maybe only accessible within the organization. This approach may collide with the internet-cloud-metaverse era. But in fairness, for some organizations, where security and process management are a must and, even information may be binding to customers, this approach is still relevant: you can find examples on several verticals: financial & insurance, health, pharmaceutical & biotechnology, or government. Under this model, a common source of information is available, removing silos and conflicting information from the equation. Additionally, common processes and procedures for Quality, Workflow and Monitoring are available.

On the other hand, decentralized managed systems may fit companies with mobile employees, providers/suppliers or users/customers. Without considering who owns the supporting platform, in decentralized systems, the responsibility of creating, sharing, and managing content lives with authors or content creators. This approach is more versatile but brings other problems into the equation: processes and procedures for structuring, managing, and sharing contents, may be set at individual level by authors, which may lead to content discrepancies, visual differences or inaccessible knowledge to the broarder user community.

We mentioned before that we are in the internet-cloud-metaverse era. That’s relevant and will influence for sure the KM strategy. But on top of that, the talent is global, and you would like to capture the knowledge of that global talent, wherever is located, if you want your organization to go into the next level of execution success.

So, what to do? To get some clarity on this point, let’s come back to the ultimate knowledge management aim: spreading information across organizations in ways that impact performance. You can formulate this as “sharing best practices” as well, a kind of shortcut. With this in mind, some aspects become key when setting the strategy:

KMS must improve content accessibility, providing access to updated information.
KMS should bring consistency to the content: structuring, organizing and even visual aspect.
KMS must include content life cycle management rules. Otherwise, you may be creating an obsolete monster in a few months.
KMS needs to be managed, which requires measurement.

So, at the end, it seems that maybe a good approach could be a “mixed model”, with the following characteristics:

Common platform: information must be stored in a single place, accessible to both creators and users.
Content creation: even though authors must have the liberty of using their creativity in generating impactful content, aspect matters so, common organization, structure and design rules are required.
Management framework: it is a combination of life cycle and workflow rules, with reporting capabilities addressing the performance impact on the organization (no more page visits, please!!!).

SHA is a Simple, Agile, Connectable, Easy to Use, Easy to administrate platform despite its internal sophistication.

March 31, 2022

What can go wrong on Knowledge Management (KM) implementation (and anytime after… )

With more than 50 years of cumulated experience, expertise and operational leadership in businesses where Managing Knowledge key asset is critical , we have, at SHA(*), very clear ideas about what works and what does not when it is time to implement a Knowledge Management System (KMS). And we’re happy to share some of our fundamental findings which guided us designing SHA:

Before starting, let’s all agree (if you disagree, there might be no point for you to read what follows…) that having a KMS is… a must, but it’s not enough to have a KMS, you have to ensure it works!

First, let’s talk about what we heard quite often: “we need to integrate our KMS in our IT ecosystem”

Integration is quite a broad and vague term but we all understand what it means: ensuring we can benefit from a Knowledge Platform which is connected to some other business critical applications such as e-commerce, e-service web site. This all sounds good, but, at SHA we have also clearly identified that trying to overdo it, to integrate a KMS with a lot of other applications can lead to expensive, heavy, and ultimately dead ends. So we integrate our solution on your e-support and e-commerce and trust us, this is enough!

Then second, we heard so often “no need for a multi-lingual platform to start with, we’ll see that later”.

Well later is very often proven to be “too late”…

One could think that, when 99% of the users are sharing the same language, there is no need to think ahead and a mono lingual KMS is good enough, if this can be proven right, it could also lead to some tough headaches or worse, failures. At SHA, how many times have we experienced some companies who extended their market scopes or move some of their operations to other regions speaking different languages or built some alliances with companies located abroad. Having to deal with a massive, one shot, translation project is a headache that could be avoided by thinking ahead and making the choice to implement a multilingual ready KMS right away. And if your market it truly a one language market, SHA works perfectly with one language as well!

Third, a classic “how easy to use is your solution”?

Easiness of use is a common slogan that most of the KMS are using as a benefit, we, at SHA, not only we adhere to this criteria, but we also know, by experience that this is a must, there is no way that users will use the platform if they have to understand how it works, if they have to ask their colleagues which field to use, which process to select …

Easiness of use is vital to ensure implementation of a KMS is successful, we saw so many clunky KMS which were not used by the teams KMS were supposed to help. We experienced too many WEB site smart FAQs which were just driving clients (including us…) mad. So if solutions are not a couple of clicks away, it means your KMS is not delivering and will not bring the expected benefits.

A good solution is two clicks away and the best is one click away! Same goes with input box: one simple input box is enough to interact with your users. If you add categories, products, serial numbers and any other details, you are focused on your own organisation, and not in your customers. Be simple, be customer centric!

You need the users to love looking for solutions and finding solutions on their own using the KMS. It is such a good feeling finding a solution yourself instead of being told by someone else.

Fourth: quite often mentioned as well: “KM deserves top technology so we need top of the art solution”

At SHA, we love technology and we believe we are quite good at using it and sharing its benefits with our clients, this being said, we put the human being first! And this reflects on providing a simple search interface but also and easiness of system administration (Yes you still need to have some very light resources to ensure the system is working fine and this is largely balanced by major savings on support, customer retention and internal education). KMS should not be an IT managed application but should be run by business. There is a need for an IT-Business disconnect to avoid again poor and disappointing KMS implementation. Of course behind the scene, advanced technology such as Automatic Translation, Automatic Summary, Sentiment Management, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence are there, but not for the sake of being High Tech but to support us, Humans…

And finally Fifth: “So if I succeed implementing my KMS, I’m good for the next 10 years”

Well, a good start is encouraging but not enough: It might not be only at implementation phase we have observed most KMS failures, it is during the whole life cycle. The key elements to support growth and avoid growth issues, is to have a system which can maintain the life cycle of the content, that can report on content obsolescence, a system that tracks the low performing solutions, a system which avoid to pile up similar solutions, a system that is also capable to grow in term of performance and adjust its capacities to the need of user (without involving IT in the process as the platform is cloud based)

It is on top of it ready to grow and evolve as your company is. We designed it the way we dreamt about it; we would have loved to have such a platform, we are now happy to share it with you!

(*) SHA is a Simple, Agile, Connectable, Easy to Use, Easy to administrate platform despite its internal sophistication.