Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Knowledge Management: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research. All enterprises maintain storehouses of knowledge about themselves and their activities. Knowledge management is the practice of using technology to organize that information for practical purposes: to create it, store it, keep it current and make it accessible to employees when needed. Knowledge is fundamentally different from data; it is made up of data, but it adds critical context that allows it to be used or evaluated in particular situations. In customer experience management (CXM) situations, enterprise knowledge can consist of customer histories, product details, insights and commentaries on products by users and developers—essentially any recorded information that is deemed notable and potentially beneficial for someone to use in the course of interacting with customers. Knowledge management software is available as both standalone niche tools and as part of comprehensive CXM suites. In either case, it is focused mainly on helping employees record organizational insights so that they can be reused when context demands. The emergence of AI as a customer support tool has spotlighted the need for enterprises to rethink how they organize their company knowledge. AI is not just a new technology, but an amplification of knowledge management itself. AI finally provides a way to organize and maintain vast repositories of relevant knowledge for use in all sorts of service-related applications. Knowledge is the key to better service outcomes, and AI is the key to mastering that knowledge. Software providers are only just starting to make that connection clear to AI buyers. If an enterprise has flawed (or rudimentary) knowledge awareness and technology, AI tools will be challenged to produce meaningful and productive output. By 2028, we assert that 80% of contact centers will overhaul their knowledge management tools and processes, largely to serve the requirements of GenAI applications. Fortunately, among CXM software providers there is a subset that has incorporated knowledge management features into their suites. In this research we evaluate the KM functionality of those software providers, with special consideration of how KM is being used to provide contextual assistance to customers and employees who support them. Knowledge resources must be funneled into agent-facing guidance tools, self-service chatbots and field service technical systems. Some aspects of KM also dovetail with aspects of product development, marketing and promotion, and digital (and physical) asset management. In this evaluation we looked at KM as a set of functions supported, rather than as a standalone solution. We selected features that dovetailed most closely with CX operations, including service and marketing. This included areas like content creation and updating; support for multimedia content including video; integration with existing systems and platforms like CRM and ERP; mobile accessibility; and the different user roles supported by the tools We also considered features related to how knowledge management coordinated with AI platforms, including whether solutions used AI to extract knowledge contextually and use it for recommendations or guidance. Separate Buyers Guides on Customer Experience Management and Customer Journey Management are available to more specifically examine those software categories and requirements of enterprises. To be included in this Buyers Guide, software providers and products must have included KM capabilities as part of an overall CXM platform. This research evaluates the following providers that offer products that deliver Knowledge Management applications as we defined it above: Adobe, eGain, Freshworks, Genesys, NICE, Salesforce, Sprinklr, SugarCRM, Verint, Zendesk and Zoho. This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of knowledge management software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating knowledge management offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI. The Buyers Guide for Knowledge Management in 2024 finds Salesforce first on the list, followed by Verint and NICE. Providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader. The Leaders in Product Experience are: Verint NICE Zoho Salesforce The Leaders in Customer Experience are: Salesforce Verint NICE The Leaders across any of the seven categories are: NICE and Salesforce, which has achieved this rating in six of the seven categories. Verint in five categories. Zoho in two categories. Adobe and Genesys in one category. The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating. Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle knowledge management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another. ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our knowledge management blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects. You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.

The Buyers Guide for Knowledge Management Classifies and Rates Software Providers

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