What is knowledge management? A guide for 2025

Picture this: Your junk drawer is filled to the brim with Allen wrenches, appliance instruction manuals, pens, paperclips, and various other useful gadgets, but it’s unorganized, making it difficult to find anything. You can barely close the drawer, and even though you know it’s full of practical tools, you avoid opening it because you can never find what you need.

This is exactly what poor knowledge management is like. It slows down workflows, can harm customer relationships, and causes team members to muddle through problems while searching for answers, allowing satisfaction, productivity, and company profit to plummet.

In our guide, we cover the importance of knowledge management along with the tools, use cases, and best practices you need to understand the strategies that impact customer experiences (CX) and lead to success.

More in this guide:

• Types of knowledge
• Knowledge management process
• Knowledge management tools
• Knowledge management use cases
• Benefits of knowledge management
• What does a knowledge manager do?
• Knowledge management best practices
• Frequently asked questions
• Improve knowledge management with Zendesk

Types of knowledge

There are five types of knowledge, and each one plays a role in helping your business operate efficiently. Below, we cover these knowledge types:

• Explicit knowledge is structured, tangible information that’s easy to document, share, and learn from—like standard operating procedures (SOPs).
• Implicit knowledge is the application of learned (explicit) knowledge, such as watching a webinar about video conferencing software and then trying it out with clients.
• Tacit knowledge is information gained through experience or intuition, such as knowing that a customer enjoys chatting about baseball before placing their order.
• Declarative knowledge is factual information or static principles, such as the date your company was founded.
• Procedural knowledge is information that describes how to do something, such as how-to articles about setting up your email on a new device.

Typically, you’ll want to capture and share this knowledge management with your employees and customers.

Knowledge management process

Creating a company-wide culture around knowledge management starts with building a formal process. Here are the five key steps:

1. Knowledge ideation: Organizations identify existing and new knowledge they want to be accessible across teams.
2. Knowledge organization: Also known as codification, this step requires businesses to interview experts, categorize information, tag existing knowledge sources, and more.
3. Knowledge storage: Teams decide how to store gathered information, including in knowledge bases or intranets.
4. Knowledge sharing: Dissemination is the internal and external circulation of knowledge, which requires teams to make data accessible and alert relevant parties to its existence.
5. Knowledge updating: This step allows businesses to use personalization to customize information access and delivery.

An effective knowledge-sharing process provides users access to valuable knowledge and allows everyone to contribute to and continuously improve on the information available across the business.

Key knowledge management tools

Knowledge management tools and platforms should provide customers and employees with the information they need in a scalable, efficient way. Here are a few examples of important KM tools that allow you to quickly and accurately gather, organize, and store information:

• Knowledge bases: Businesses can optimize knowledge base software for employees and customers, and it can help teams access organizational knowledge, draft new articles, flag outdated content, and share article recommendations with customers.
• Document management storage (DMS): DMSs store digital documents—PDFs, images, and more—in secure, centralized storage systems and control user access.
• Community forums: These online spaces allow customers and businesses to interact, share information, ask questions, and offer insights and support.
• Intranet: An intranet is only accessible to employees and allows users to capture customer data, gain insights, share expertise across departments, and improve CX.

While this is not a complete list of the tools used during the knowledge management process, these are crucial platforms for effectively collaborating with customers and employees.

Knowledge management use cases

Knowledge management has diverse applications across various industries and situations. Here’s a glimpse into a few of KM’s key use cases:

• Customer support: Empower customers with a self-service portal containing FAQ pages, troubleshooting guides, and product manuals, reducing support ticket volume.
• Employee onboarding: Allow new and existing employees to access SOPs and other key training materials at all times.
• Skill development: Make bite-sized learning modules and training resources accessible to all employees, promoting continuous learning and development.
• Product innovation: Facilitate knowledge exchange and co-creation among engineers, designers, and other stakeholders, fostering innovation and faster product cycles.
• Problem-solving: Share proven solutions and successful approaches to similar challenges across departments, enabling knowledge reuse and informed decision-making.

Each organization can identify unique use cases based on the areas where knowledge sharing and collaboration impact performance the most.

Benefits of knowledge management

By embracing a KM strategy, organizations can embrace various employee- and customer-specific benefits, including:

• Streamlined service: KM systems help agents quickly find information and simplify customer self-service so individuals can resolve simple or repetitive inquiries, deflecting potential tickets.
• Improved employee development: All team members can access the knowledge base to find the internal information they need without relying on a specific team member or department.
• Enhanced customer onboarding: KM tools empower customers to quickly unlock a product or service’s full potential, thereby enhancing the value they derive from it early on.
• 24/7 support: Customers can access self-service support at all hours through AI agents, FAQ pages, and help centers, so they can get answers without waiting on a human agent.
• Increased internal collaboration: Team members can work together to create internal documentation, develop new products, and align on common goals.
• Boosted data security: Powerful KM systems allow organizations to customize data access controls and require identity verification to update internal and external knowledge.

The exact benefits your business experiences depend on the scope of your knowledge management initiatives and how you implement them.

What does a knowledge manager do?

Knowledge managers are the architects of information flow, ensuring everyone has the right knowledge at the right time. Knowledge managers:

• Curate and organize valuable information.

• Build systems for easy access.

• Bridge the gap between individuals and the knowledge they need.

With knowledge managers, teams can make more informed decisions, improve organizational performance and efficiency, and drive innovation.

Knowledge management best practices

Whether you’re consolidating pre-existing knowledge or building a KM system from scratch, consider these knowledge management best practices:

• Do your research: Before adopting your own KM process, connect with other businesses that have implemented successful knowledge initiatives to discuss their experiences and how they got started so you can plan your course of action.
• Build a skilled team: Set up a team—including project managers, content managers, and technical writers—responsible for updating the knowledge base or delegating to contributors and subject matter experts as needed.
• Lean on AI: Use AI tools like AI agents and AI copilot to analyze existing knowledge base content, generate complete articles, and adjust the tone of your writing to cater to diverse audiences.
• Establish a sharing process: Make it easy for people to contribute to your KM process and create a mission statement describing your purpose and objectives.
• Revisit your content: Knowledge management isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it scenario, so periodically review your content to make sure it’s still relevant as your product and business evolve.

Remember to also invest in tools and resources that support the continuous improvement of KM content as you build a knowledge management framework.

Veeva

Zendesk helps Veeva handle 35K tickets each month

Zendesk has given us best practices, and when we need something, they provide us with the answers we’re looking for.”

- Sahar Padash

Support Operations Manager

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Frequently asked questions

Improve knowledge management with Zendesk

Your company’s knowledge management junk drawer is a goldmine—if you choose to clean, organize, and continuously improve it. Lean on AI-powered knowledge management resources to help you keep up with your growth, and leverage Zendesk AI to automate knowledge organization and optimization.