Stop Counting "Page Views": How to Prove Your KB’s Value to the CFO
Picture this: a budget meeting where a well-meaning Knowledge Manager proudly displays a chart showing "Article Views" trending upward and to the right.
Now, picture this: The CFO’s eyes glazing over.
One thing I’ve learned in my time as a well-meaning Knowledge Manager: Your CFO doesn't care about page views. They care about the bottom line. If you want to secure a budget for a new platform or a dedicated Knowledge Curator, you have to speak their language. You have to stop reporting on activity and start reporting on value.
Here is how to calculate the real ROI of your Knowledge Base.
The Hard Metrics: Deflection and Efficiency
When you walk into that finance meeting, bring two numbers: Ticket Deflection and Average Handle Time (AHT).
Ticket Deflection is the holy grail. If a customer finds the answer on your self-service portal, that is a support ticket that never happens. It’s a cost avoided entirely.
AHT Reduction is where you prove efficiency. If your agents can find the right answer in 30 seconds instead of digging through a digital landfill for 3 minutes, you’re saving money on every interaction.
Let’s look at the math. In my book, MVP KB, I use a fictional company, Moxy Solar, to illustrate this. Let’s say a contact center handles 505,000 requests per year. If you implement a knowledge strategy that drives a 10% reduction in AHT, you aren't just saving time, you’re saving over $200,000 annually.
That’s a number that wakes a CFO up.
The Soft Metrics: The Human Element
While the hard dollars get the budget approved, the "soft" metrics determine if your system actually survives. These measure the health of your operation and the sanity of your team.
Time to Proficiency: How long does it take a new hire to stop asking their neighbor for help and start answering tickets solo? I’ve seen organizations where onboarding took 16 weeks because new hires had to rely on "tribal knowledge." A solid KB can cut that ramp-up time significantly, sometimes by as much as 25%,.
Search Failure Rate: This is a metric I watch like a hawk. It tracks how often a user searches for a term and gets zero results (or clicks nothing). A high failure rate means your agents are frustrated and your customers are dead-ends.
Employee Engagement: When agents have the tools to do their jobs, they stay longer. When they don't, they burn out. High turnover is a hidden tax on your budget that a good KB can help alleviate.
A Warning: Don’t Die by the Spreadsheet
Finally, a word of caution. While I love a good ROI calculation, focusing solely on ROI can backfire. If you treat knowledge management purely as a cost-cutting exercise, you risk stripping away the human judgment and wisdom that actually solves complex problems.
You need to pair your data with anecdotal evidence. Capture the wins. Did a specific knowledge article help an agent save a high-value account from churning? Did a new troubleshooting guide help the engineering team identify a bug faster?
ROI gets you the funding, but the stories are what build the culture.
Ready to build a business case that actually gets signed? Let’s talk.
Beyond the Checklist: The Truth About KM Maturity Models
Is it worthwhile to do a KM Maturity Assessment?
A client recently asked which maturity model would be best to follow when assessing an organization’s KM functionality. It’s an excellent question. Answering it is made all the more complex because of the debate around how useful a maturity model really is.
If you’re not familiar with what a maturity model is, think of it as a rating system for how capable an organization is for fulfilling some sort of function. In the business world, common frameworks include the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) for software development, the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) for process improvement, or the Agile ISO Maturity Model (AIMM).
In the knowledge management world, two of the better-known maturity models are the APQC’s Levels of Knowledge Management Maturity (LKMM) and the KMI’s Knowledge Management Maturity Model (KMMM).
Both are the same in that they assess organizational KM capabilities from level 1 (initial/ad hoc) to Level 5 (embedded/optimized). The two approaches have different labels for levels two through four, but the concepts are all fairly similar.
LKMM is highly detailed and focused on enterprise-wide initiatives; it’s great for a highly-structured, benchmark focused approach. KMMM, on the other hand, is more process-centered and feeds into a step-by-step approach for improving KM.
I’m partial to the KMMM model because I got my certification through KMI. It’s also lighter; there are 60 or so questions. LKMM is a mutli-sheet spreadsheet of multiple measures per tab – more than 100 all told.
In the KM world, there’s a fairly robust discourse around the pros and cons of maturity models. While they can be useful tools that provide great insights and clear metrics, it’s easy for them to become overly rigid and cause organizations to overlook less measurable things like culture.
That’s why I look at the maturity model assessment as one of many tools in the box. In my experience, KM isn’t often a “tree model” – it doesn’t grow in neat stages, like a tree adding rings. Instead, it’s more like a forest fire. It starts in small pockets and then (with the right conditions) it spreads throughout the org.
You need to understand the condition of your KM ecosystem, and a maturity model is one way to diagnose what’s needed; it’s not the whole treatment plan though. It’s a snapshot that’s useful in creating a shared understanding. It’s something that should be adapted to organizational reality and focused on enabling behaviors and culture, not just documenting processes and resources.
My approach with clients is to do a short survey of stakeholders and leadership using a KMMM-bassed questionnaire, and follow that with more in-depth conversations around KM with as many stakeholders as possible. I’ve found that approach gives a clear snapshot of the current state, but also lays the groundwork for the type of cultural change required for real KM transformation.
Interested in learning more about how to approach your own maturity assessment? Get in touch!
Your Knowledge Base Is Failing. The Reason Is People (And the Fix Is, Too).
One of the biggest misconceptions I see in customer service is the belief that creating a successful knowledge base is a technology problem. The thinking goes: find the right software, populate it with a few documents, and you're set. In my experience, this approach is one of the single biggest predictors of failure for a knowledge base project.
If you don't put serious thought into the people who will create, maintain, and share knowledge, your project is doomed from the start.
The "Set It and Forget It" Graveyard
I once met with a client in 2024 to discuss their knowledge management ecosystem. They showed me their knowledge base, and as I scanned the list of articles, I noticed the "published" date for nearly every single one was from 2017. I told them, "Well, I know why nobody wants to use your knowledge base. Your content is ancient.".
This is a classic example of the "set it and forget it" mindset that plagues so many organizations. They focus on the system and the initial content load, but give little thought to how that content will be managed over time. This reluctance to invest in the people who maintain the content is a critical mistake.
The Old, Broken Model
The legacy approach to knowledge management often involved fairly heavy staffing. You'd have a knowledge manager and a team of technical writers responsible for managing all, or at least most, of the content. When a new support issue was identified, a tech writer would have to work with a subject matter expert (SME) to get a draft into shape, often leading to a long back-and-forth process. After all that, the article would still have to wait for a manager's review before it could be published.
This system extends the content publishing cycle from what could be hours or days into weeks or even months. By the time the information is available, it might already be obsolete.
A Better Way: Source Knowledge from the Front Line
The solution is to flip the model on its head. Empower the people on the front lines—your agents and SMEs within that population—to create and share knowledge directly.
This doesn't mean every agent needs to be a polished writer. But every single agent is skilled at recognizing knowledge gaps or incorrect information when a supposed solution fails with a customer. More tenured agents, in particular, are perfectly suited to share new knowledge and help review updates.
This is why I strongly advocate for creating two key roles within your organization: the
Knowledge Contributor and the Knowledge Curator.
Knowledge Contributors: These are not full-time positions. These are roles filled by your experienced Tier 2 or Tier 3 agents who have the tenure and deep knowledge of how things are supposed to work—and what to do when they break. With modern, AI-infused knowledge management systems, these contributors don't have to be expert writers. AI can help format their insights, which can then be passed to a curator for review.
Knowledge Curators: Like contributors, curators are not full-time staff dedicated solely to the knowledge base. Curation is simply a subset of their job. They review contributions for accuracy and also manage the feedback coming in from the wider agent population. It's crucial that when a frontline agent provides feedback on an article, it doesn't just go into a void. Curators ensure that feedback is reviewed and applied, closing the loop and continuously improving your content.
From Top-Down to Bottom-Up
By adopting this approach, you stop pushing knowledge from the top down and start sourcing it organically from the bottom up. This has massive benefits. Companies that adopt similar people-centric approaches like the Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®) methodology have seen a 30–50% reduction in time to resolve issues, a 20% improvement in employee retention, and 70 percent faster time to proficiency for new agents.
This model engages your employees in a powerful new way. It allows them to share their hard-won expertise and develop new skills, helping them to further their careers. Even newer agents can be engaged by giving them easy-to-use tools to provide detailed written feedback on articles, knowing that a curator will see it and act on it.
Stop thinking about your knowledge base as a library and start thinking about it as a living, breathing part of your team. Invest in your people, and you’ll build a knowledge practice that actually works.
Transform Your Digital Landfill: The Essential Guide to Content Audits
If you’ve spent any amount of time in a customer service organization, you’re likely familiar with those sprawling knowledge repositories that feel less like a helpful resource and more like a "digital landfill." It's a dumping ground of unmanaged, uncategorized content where finding what you need is a struggle, and even if you do, you're left wondering if it's the right, authoritative version.
Getting a handle on all of it can be a challenge. The first step is to complete a comprehensive content audit; it's your treasure map to transform that landfill into a goldmine of useful information. Through an audit, you can identify valuable content, flag what desperately needs revision, uncover gaps, and truly understand what you’re working with. Ensuring the accuracy and relevance of your knowledge base has far-reaching effects – not just on agent performance but also on those tricky AI projects many customer service organizations are wrestling with today.
So, how do you conduct an effective content audit without getting completely overwhelmed? Let's break it down.
Step 1: Define Your Scope – Don't Try to Eat the Whole Elephant at Once!
The very first thing to do is decide which content sources you're going to audit. This could be your existing knowledge base in Salesforce or Zendesk, documents tucked away in SharePoint or Google Drive, or even content in Confluence or Microsoft OneNote.
The key here is to focus. Don't try to tackle everything at once. I highly recommend applying the Pareto Principle: aim to audit the 20% of content that solves 80% of your problems. In my experience, knowledge repositories often house hundreds or thousands of documents, and a microscopic look at each one is simply too time-consuming and resource-intensive. Narrowing your focus will get you a long way.
Step 2: Inventory Your Content – Get Organized!
Once you've identified your scope, it's time to create an inventory. A simple spreadsheet can work wonders here. You'll want to list each content item and include crucial details like:
Content title
Where it's located
Who authored it
When it was last updated
Any additional criteria relevant to your organization
Crucially, this tracker should also include a clear indication of the final action for that content. Are you going to archive it? Import it into your knowledge base? Or update it first, then import it? Tracking these decisions centrally is incredibly important.
Step 3: Systematically Audit Each Item – The Nitty-Gritty Evaluation
Now for the real detective work: evaluate every piece of content against specific criteria to ensure its quality and usefulness. Here’s what you should be looking for:
Accuracy and Relevance: Is the information correct, up-to-date, relevant to your audience, appropriate, and actionable?
Duplicates or Inconsistencies: Is the content unique? Does it conflict with other information? Is it internally and externally consistent?
Article Structure: Does it have a clear title? Does it flow logically? Is it scannable, concise, and searchable? Is the structure useful for both human agents and AI?
Language and Tone: Depending on your audience, the language will vary. For internal agents, it can be professional and a bit more technical. But if it's customer-facing or feeding AI chatbots, it needs to be friendlier and less technical.
Format and Accessibility: Is it in a knowledge-base-friendly format? Is it effectively formatted with consistent headers and clearly labeled sections that both humans and AI agents can easily understand?
Ownership and Review Dates: Who owns this content? Is that person identifiable? Does it have a clear review or expiration date to signal if it's outdated?
Step 4: Decide on Actions – What's Next for Each Piece?
After your thorough evaluation, you need to assign a clear action in your spreadsheet. These actions typically include:
Keep as is
Revise or update
Consolidate (merge with other content)
Archive or retire (remove it permanently)
This entire exercise is fantastic for getting a new knowledge base up and running, or even adding new material to an existing KB, especially when you're importing content from multiple repositories into a single source of truth.
Beyond the Initial Audit: Continuous Improvement is Key!
But the work doesn't stop once your knowledge base is live! You still need to conduct regular audits. Pay close attention to signals from your knowledge base metrics, such as:
Page views
User feedback
Article use
Failed search results
Expiration dates
Broken links
Content gaps
Redundant content
These are crucial indicators that an article needs attention or your knowledge base needs clarification to remain useful. If agents perceive it's not useful, they simply won't use it, and their work will suffer.
And here’s a pro-tip: involve Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) all along the way. They are absolutely indispensable for verifying the accuracy and relevance of your content. Often, these aren't just tech writers, but senior agents or managers who truly understand customer problems and what content is most useful for quick resolution.
Regular content audits are the key to continuous improvement for any knowledge base. By paying close attention to these signals and involving your SMEs, you ensure your knowledge base remains a valuable and trusted resource, both internally and externally. This helps you proactively avoid that dreaded "garbage in, garbage out" problem that a digital landfill will inevitably give you.
If you're looking to tackle your own content audit, Cognita Knowledge Management can help. Get in touch today or schedule a no-strings 15 minute consultation.