Calculating Business Benefits of Knowledge Management: Metric Improvements and Cost Savings Using Real-World Data and Examples

Measuring the impact of knowledge management (KM) initiatives is critical in order to understand the benefits received by the technology and to verify you are leveraging the implementation to receive the maximum return on investment (ROI). Though increasing support technician productivity is one of KM’s biggest selling points, there are other important impacts as well, including changes to interaction volumes and cost, and even customer satisfaction. Understanding what potential savings are possible from improved KM processes and technology can also help guide the budget for additional KM expenditures.

When starting a new KM project, service organizations should benchmark their current performance against the performance of their peers and identify the specific operational metrics needing improvement. Armed with this prioritized list, work with your technology provider to understand which specific functionality has a proven track record of impacting these metrics, and build an implementation plan that will ensure the biggest "bang for your buck" early in the project. To assist, some technology providers offer an ROI calculator to estimate the potential business benefit from additional KM investments.