This past autumn, we introduced Seismic Knowledge, a just-in-time enablement solution that provides teams with faster access to answers, documentation and assets right within the flow of work and tools they already use.
It should come as no surprise that our internal teams rely heavily on Seismic Knowledge for day-to-day tasks. So far, Knowledge has helped our enablement team gain visibility into our sellers’ most pressing questions and how they can use these insights to improve enablement best practices, as well as the content we create.
To get a better understanding of Seismic Knowledge, we spoke with Senior Product Manager Chris Buttenham. Let’s take a look at what he had to say about knowledge management, how we’re using Knowledge internally and how you can foster a culture of knowledge sharing within your own organisation.
Tony: What is Seismic Knowledge?
Chris: Knowledge is a tool that helps fast-growing companies enable better access to answers, content and training wherever their frontline employees are actually working.
Tony: How and where does knowledge fit within the Seismic Enablement Cloud™?
Chris: Knowledge is a cool addition to the Enablement Cloud because it fills an important gap where we are natively embedded into the flow of work for frontline employees. With our robust Slack integration or Chrome extension, we can meet workers where they are. We also have a unique value proposition by making content that lives within Seismic more accessible through highly intelligent, federated search technology.
Tony: How does the internal Seismic team currently use Knowledge?
Chris: We have a few different internal use cases that are gaining maturity. The enablement team is using Knowledge to glean insights – mostly by monitoring frequently asked questions in slack channels that have a lot of traffic.
The readiness team uses Knowledge for specific artefacts. They’ve put all of our launch FAQs and go-to-market FAQs into the system. Similarly, the enablement team also uses Knowledge to embed content within product hubs on Seismic Pages and create artefacts within Knowledge for general enablement on different products and new offerings that we have.
And what’s cool about Knowledge is that the product can help an organisation identify insights that they wouldn’t otherwise know. Teams can’t know what they don’t know. With Knowledge, they are capturing a lot of queries and questions that are asked both explicitly to the product, but also within Slack channels. Then, an enablement team can look at its data and say, “We get a lot of questions about integrations. Do we have appropriate training or enabling material on integrations?” That’s something that they wouldn’t have otherwise.
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Tony: What’s one thing Seismic customers should know about Knowledge that they may not know?
Chris: Most enterprise productivity tools require a cultural change and a lot of work to embed them into workflows, processes and the habits of an organisation. When organisations do this well, the ROI is off the charts. For example, I don’t need to run all over the place looking for stuff. So, the word autonomy really comes to mind, and I think that can be a cultural change. And FAQs can reinforce the mindset that everyone is working together. If I add an FAQ, I’m adding to the team and our overall mission. This makes a cultural change positive because you democratise the creation and capture of knowledge and enable autonomy around access to it.
Tony: What can our customers do to jumpstart their own instance of Seismic Knowledge?
Chris: I would suggest thinking about where their organisation gets questions today. So, with many of our customers, that can be through a Slack channel or an internal help desk. Or, if your enablement teams get a lot of similar questions, you can quickly identify bottlenecks. Use these questions to generate a list of 10 initial FAQs and ask yourself if the organisation has the right documentation, training and answers codified for those questions.
Oftentimes, what we find is that organisations don’t. To solve this, you can start off by adding FAQs to the knowledge management system. And that’s how you sort of seed the system with knowledge to fix that cold start problem because you don’t want to roll out the product without anything codified within it, or anything connected to it.
Once your organisation has answers codified, check to ensure that your answers are hosted in a place that can connect to Seismic Knowledge. You may have documentation that lives in Seismic or training that lives in Lessonly that can connect to Knowledge – this makes content more accessible when questions naturally arise.
See Seismic Knowledge for yourself!
We’ve seen for ourselves how a knowledge management system can help our team get the answers and content they need when they need it. If you’d like to see Seismic Knowledge for yourself, please reach out to your account manager.