The key to a fast, accurate response — whether it’s created entirely by a human or supported by AI — is the organizational knowledge that informs that response. But that content has to be up-to-date, vetted, and always ready to share with customers. Only then can proposal, sales, InfoSec, and other teams nail the proposal, questionnaire, or real-time answer to customer queries in emails, calls, and virtual meetings.
During Responsive Summit24, Jain Willis, Content Developer at O.C. Tanner, shared how O.C. Tanner restructured their knowledge management approach to improve the effectiveness of their AI-supported Strategic Response Management (SRM).
Watch Willis’ Summit24 session, “The hidden keys to effective knowledge management,” below. Read on to learn five of her knowledge management steps to keep your SRM platform running smoothly — and your AI running optimally — resulting in more wins, greater revenue impact, and happier teams.
1. Build a framework
O.C. Tanner, an employee recognition platform, recognized early on the impact of a reliable knowledge management framework on effective SRM.
“We were using a different platform for both sales assets and proposals. Our team chose to move to Seismic, which is great for sales assets, but not really great for proposals.
We needed a platform that could meet our specific needs. We wanted to get away from downloading and uploading Word documents to respond to requests. We were looking for a scalable way to support our teams with our knowledge base, and we found Responsive.”
Willis continues…
“We had some acquisitions that grew our global presence. We introduced client segments, which means we adjusted our products and support methods based on client complexity, and we had a new product go live. The entire time, our workload was constantly increasing. In fact, we had a 155% increase in RFP requests from international offices during this time period.
“So all these things meant that our library was growing more complex, but we didn’t have a scalable strategy that could easily incorporate these changes.”
2. Engage and empower your users
Willis actively involved core users in the knowledge management revamp. She created focus groups to understand how different teams searched for and used information, discovering that users often needed quick answers without the extra effort of sifting through unnecessary detail.“I don’t think my manager and I could have come up with such a great solution all on our own. Change isn’t really successful if you don’t have buy-in, and people are going to be so much more excited and bought into a change if they help inform it.
“So all these things meant that our library was growing more complex, but we didn’t have a scalable strategy that could easily incorporate these changes.”
“Our focus group would actually report out to their respective teams and then come back with their input so everyone on the team felt like they were being heard.”
3. Build a single source of truth
Strategic Response Management (SRM) is defined as the people, practices, and technology that unlock organizational knowledge for profitable growth. Knowledge management, or content management, involves keeping that organizational knowledge pristine. This ensures that when team members from proposals, sales, InfoSec, or other departments create a response, they can be confident it’s accurate, compliant, and consistent.
Additionally, the success of your use of AI in SRM — especially GenAI results — is wholly dependent on the health of your content library. If content is outdated or not representative of all your product or service offerings, then AI results (machine learning, natural language processing, GenAI, etc.) will be unreliable, exposing you to revenue and compliance risk.
With their knowledge management initiative, O.C. Tanner sought to cement their single source of truth, improving clarity and consistency of every response.
“Our goal throughout this whole process was to create a consistent experience so that users knew how to find information and everyone had the same expectation of what the library looked like. We came up with rules for basically everything that makes up a Q&A pair, like, what should go in an alert? Or how do we clearly show users that this paragraph should only be used in certain situations? Or how can we use the alternate questions to increase searchability?
“I took everything we decided on and implemented it, which took me about two months to go through 1,500 pieces of content and apply the framework.
“We decided that investing this time to increase search speed would, as a result, increase response speed.”
4. Use feedback for continuous improvement
O.C. Tanner conducted regular surveys to assess Responsive user satisfaction, starting with a baseline survey and checking back after 30 and 180 days post-knowledge management initiative. This data revealed a 65% increase in employee satisfaction, proving that their adjustments were on the right track.
“People are less frustrated with the library and so I’d say morale has improved. They’re definitely more confident in it because they know they’ll be able to find the right answer quickly.
“But we also have hard numbers from Responsive that show we’re getting things done faster. Back in 2019, we submitted about a quarter of our proposals early. This year, more than half of our projects have been submitted a day or more before the due date. And this is happening because we’re spending less time on projects.
“We’ve seen an average decrease of six hours working on a project in Responsive. When we ran the numbers, this was a cost savings for the company of nearly $150,000 for 2024.”
5. Recognize outcomes, not just results
While implementing a knowledge management framework accelerates and optimizes responses and SRM AI results, it’s important to track and communicate the extended outcomes of these results, too.
“Even though our workload is consistently increasing, people feel a lot less overwhelmed. They’re not scrambling all the time trying to find the right answer or talking to an SME to get an answer because the information they needed was too hard to find.
And since there’s a lot less of a time pressure, they have more time to write a quality response that’s not just boilerplate. They can really refine a proposal and customize it to the client.
And the team has time to focus on training and development. For years, that was just kind of like an afterthought. But now, there is a dedicated weekly meeting with a training curriculum in place.”
Content management advantages of Responsive AI
One of the biggest challenges with knowledge management is using manual systems to try to collaborate with subject matter experts (SMEs) who review content regularly to keep the library accurate and up-to-date. SMEs are overwhelmed with their primary responsibilities and grow frustrated at being asked the same questions over and over again. They need a workflow that eliminates redundancy, makes it easy for them to update or approve content rather than continually rewrite it, and allows in-app reviews so they don’t have to toggle between multiple applications.
This type of content review workflow is only available on an SRM platform, and Responsive AI simplifies the effort even more for proposal and knowledge managers. For example, Responsive AI:
- Enables SMEs to create, edit, and refine content using prebuilt prompts.
- Notifies and reminds SMEs of content review tasks, which content managers can also monitor from their Responsive dashboard.
- Supports content tagging by guiding content managers through the process of creating hierarchical tags, a hybrid framework that combines the best of folder and tagging systems.
Apply these 5 steps to your knowledge management strategy
For any organization aiming to optimize AI-powered SRM through improved knowledge management, these five steps are critical.
Willis even offers a tip on how to get started: “As for something that you could do right now… identify those topics or categories that might be causing bloat in your library… look at those and think about how you can simplify them and make them consistent.”
For more SRM best practices and insight into how to get more out of Responsive AI, watch all of the Responsive Summit24 sessions — available for free on demand.
