Working in silos can destroy any customer-facing team.

A 2018 Panopto study even found that siloed information costs US businesses a whopping $47 million per year!

That makes knowledge sharing essential to scale your team, boost productivity, and improve customer success.

Read on to discover six benefits of knowledge sharing for customer success teams.

1. Better and faster team decisions

When clients face a problem, you’ll need the necessary information to quickly and effectively solve that problem.

However, if you’re working in silos, you’ll need to search for information yourself or contact team members for help — this will kill your productivity and waste precious hours you could have spent improving customer success. 

Instead, if you use repositories to store and manage relevant information, the knowledge will be waiting for you whenever you need it.

You can do this by using a knowledge sharing tool like Elium to streamline your team’s work processes. Elium’s knowledge sharing platform is easy to integrate and prevents siloed information.

2. Improved innovation and growth

Opening up siloed information is an easy way to improve innovation and growth. Employees start to see that some areas can be improved, and once new ideas start flowing, you’ll uncover siloed information.

With knowledge sharing, you can find what worked for other team members and implement those practices into your work process. You can also learn from other people’s mistakes and aim to avoid them in the future. Over a few months or years, this can save your company thousands of dollars.

And if you discover a way to improve customer success, feel free to share it with the rest of your team using a knowledge-sharing platform. This way, everybody can learn and improve.

3. Better customer experience and support

Because your team is making better and faster decisions while coming up with new ideas when sharing knowledge, you improve the customer’s experience. And customers appreciate a company that puts them first and makes them feel valued.

But to improve the customer experience, you must equip employees with the necessary information and knowledge. By using a knowledge sharing tool, you empower your employees, which pays dividends over time.

4. More employee engagement

Every employee loves the feeling of being valued by their employer or team. This is because we love contributing and helping others.

But when you create an environment where everyone works in silos, nobody gets the opportunity to help. This makes everyone’s job harder. But by not helping others, we also don’t get that feeling of engagement.

By creating a more inclusive working environment, people connect with each other. If someone is experiencing a problem, they can contact teammates via a company messaging app, and these teammates can engage more and feel valued.

This is especially powerful when it comes to lower-level employees. Knowledge sharing enables them to learn and collaborate with upper management and leaders, who might not have much connection with their team otherwise.

5. Reusable problem solving

Problems aren’t unique. Thousands of people experience the same challenges you’re dealing with today.

This means that if you’re currently dealing with a problem like acquiring customer analytics, then someone on your team has probably already dealt with it successfully.

So why go through the same trial and error and waste valuable time when you can simply ask them how they solved that problem?

This may not seem significant at first, but if your entire team constantly reuses solutions to specific problems, everyone will streamline their work processes, saving hundreds of hours. Now you can focus on more critical tasks like ensuring customers have a positive experience with your product or service.

6. Reduced loss of knowledge 

When someone leaves your team or company, an entire library of information is lost. This effect is amplified if they work in a silo, and it can lead to serious problems in the future.

Most people leave after around three years at a company, so this revolving door of employees and information loss should be prevented. But using a knowledge sharing tool and encouraging engagement across your team, employees share vital information. That means that when someone leaves, you won’t lose knowledge, because several other teammates will have access to it. 

Streamline your customer success process with knowledge sharing

Silos reduce productivity and lead to a lower customer success rate. Effective knowledge sharing ensures your team isn’t working in silos and that everyone is engaged. It also allows you to retain knowledge whenever an employee resigns.

If you want to reduce confusion and democratise access to knowledge for your entire team, sign up for a free trial with Elium.