What We’ve Learned from Our Customers since the Beginning of Elium

,

Roughly 12 years ago, Elium entered the scene during the peak of the knowledge sharing industry’s popularity. Plenty of knowledge sharing platforms were popping up at the time. Over the past decade or so, our platform has changed with the times. While knowledge sharing was once focused on simply storing information in one place, these days, customers demand a much more sophisticated system for storing, managing, and using their knowledge.

After helping customers with knowledge management for more than a decade, we’ve learned a lot from our customers about what works and what doesn’t.

Our customers’ needs have changed

A lot can change in 12 years—especially when it comes to technology. In the world of knowledge management, we’ve seen that from year to year, our customers’ needs have shifted.

When Elium began, knowledge management was a fairly new concept. The main focus was on finding a tool that facilitated the storage and collation of information. Back then, storing knowledge took time and technological expertise. We sought to create a user-friendly tool that made the process simple for our customers.

Soon, our customers wanted more. While the system proved to be great for collecting information, the demand rose for more interactive elements. After all, what good is information if it can’t be changed or used? Around that time, social media was on the rise. Rather than creating a social platform, we began to incorporate more interactive elements into our service, such as commenting, editing, and liking.

The next major shift came as we began to realise that information collection was no longer about quantity—it was more about quality. Over the past few years, we have been bombarded with information online. As Harvard Business Review once noted, we’re living in an age of information overload. So, we began to focus on delivering a tool that allowed our customers to capture the _right _information.

Storing high-quality information means making it codified and verifiable. As we like to put it, turning information into knowledge.

The most recent changes in demand have arisen from a changing physical workplace. While remote working was already becoming more popular prior to COVID-19, since the pandemic, we have seen a boom in remote offices. Now, customers need a clear, multi-faceted knowledge management system that allows its users to store, find, edit, and share knowledge seamlessly in a completely digital sphere.

Customers value time-saving, recyclable knowledge

Over the years we have learned what our customers really need from a knowledge database. We’ve begun to focus our attention on making a system that allows knowledge to live rather than stagnate.

These days, our customers seem to have less and less time for researching projects. We’ve responded by creating a knowledge management system that makes it easy for customers to find old pieces of knowledge, then add to them as they see fit. In this way, our customers are able to learn from one another without having to “reinvent the wheel,” thus saving precious time.

There’s a need for a method of capturing knowledge from scratch

We’ve learned that our customers sometimes struggle to capture brand new information. That’s why one of our most exciting new developments is the addition of a range of highly specific templates to our system. These templates make it easy for users to create a piece of knowledge without the daunting task of staring at a blank page.

Each customer approaches knowledge management with different expectations

As our customer base has expanded, we’ve learned that each customer has a different notion of what knowledge management will mean for their company. While some customers hope to use our system to collect information, others are more interested in the potential to encourage internal digital collaborative sharing of knowledge.

We’ve learned that in order to satisfy customers with such a range of needs when it comes to knowledge, our system must be robust and intuitive for its users.

How we help customers optimise their internal knowledge processes

Elium works best for customers who are willing to embrace a collaborative, proactive approach to knowledge management and knowledge sharing. We’ve learned that this can often mean a somewhat drastic shift in mentality. In fact, many experts believe that the implementation of new software can often take a company by surprise—in some cases, it can take as long as two to three years for a company to adjust to a new system or process.

That’s why we offer on-going, hands-on support for our customers. Our team specialises in helping your company adjust to a new way of working and a new way of thinking. With our support, we can help you and your team avoid some common mistakes that new customers have made in the past.

Our customer success department is incredibly involved, because we’ve learned that the tool alone is often not enough to get you started on the right foot.

Discover how Elium can help your business capture, organise, and use knowledge

Elium makes it possible for your business to centralise and share knowledge so that you can save time across all departments and grow together as a unit. To find out if our service is right for you, get started with a free 14-day trial today.