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.
