Knowledge Management Best Practices in 2025: Build a Scalable Support Strategy with Salesforce Experience Cloud
In 2025, organizations aren’t just competing on products or pricing—they’re competing on knowledge. Whether it’s delivering lightning-fast customer support, onboarding new employees seamlessly, or enabling remote teams to collaborate effectively, the ability to harness and scale knowledge has become a defining advantage in the digital era.
Today’s customers expect immediate, accurate answers across self-service portals, chatbots, and digital channels. Internally, hybrid and distributed teams need reliable access to collective insights, without digging through outdated documentation or chasing down subject matter experts. This shift from reactive support to proactive enablement demands more than a static help center—it requires a dynamic, intelligent knowledge management system.
That’s where Salesforce Experience Cloud comes in. As a powerful platform for building connected, personalized self-service experiences, Experience Cloud helps businesses transform knowledge into an asset that scales across departments, teams, and customer touchpoints.
In this guide, we’ll walk through the best practices for building a modern knowledge management process, show how Salesforce Experience Cloud empowers that strategy at scale, and explore how to close knowledge gaps, capture tribal wisdom, and foster a culture of continuous learning.
Let’s explore how forward-thinking organizations are future-proofing their support operations by putting knowledge at the core.
Why Knowledge Management Matters in 2025
Knowledge management refers to the systematic process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge to meet organizational objectives. In 2025, it’s not just a business function—it’s a competitive differentiator. Whether through onboarding efficiencies, AI-driven support, or continuous innovation, organizations that invest in a knowledge management system are reaping the rewards of better customer experiences and operational resilience.
To understand the scope of knowledge management, consider three knowledge types:
- Explicit knowledge: Easily documented and shared—think manuals, FAQs, product guides.
- Tacit knowledge: Intuitive, experience-based know-how that lives in people’s minds.
- Implicit knowledge: Knowledge that is not yet documented but can be inferred through behavior or processes.
As businesses digitize and hybrid teams become the norm, intellectual capital—the combined know-how of employees, processes, and systems—has never been more valuable. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 85% of customer interactions will begin with self-service, making the quality of your knowledge base a core brand differentiator.
Other driving forces include:
- AI and automation: Surface knowledge faster and personalize customer experiences.
- Remote and hybrid teams: Require seamless access to centralized, authoritative resources.
- Knowledge overload: Teams need tools to distill and share what matters most.
Effective knowledge management helps organizations close knowledge gaps, innovate faster, reduce onboarding time, resolve customer issues efficiently, and retain institutional wisdom, even amid turnover. The result? More agile, empowered organizations ready to thrive in a competitive environment.
Best Knowledge Management Practices for Modern Enterprises
A modern knowledge management strategy is essential for enterprises that want to scale intelligently and sustainably. In a world where agility, speed, and self-service define customer and employee expectations, successful knowledge management initiatives go far beyond documentation—they build organizational resilience and improve decision-making at every level. The following knowledge management best practices serve as a blueprint for creating a knowledge-driven culture that grows with your business.
Conduct a Knowledge Audit
The foundation of any knowledge management initiative begins with a clear understanding of your current state. A knowledge audit helps you take inventory of existing resources, identify where your company knowledge lives, and uncover critical gaps. It surfaces inefficiencies like duplicated content, outdated materials, or information locked within teams or individuals. Speaking with employees and analyzing usage patterns reveals where people struggle to find answers, where knowledge is underutilized, and which areas require immediate attention. This process provides strategic clarity and ensures your knowledge management efforts are based on evidence, not assumptions.
Create a Centralized Knowledge Management System
To eliminate silos and ensure consistent, accessible information across your organization, a centralized system is key. A single, unified knowledge base—especially one integrated with Salesforce Experience Cloud—gives teams and customers a shared source of truth. Centralization streamlines updates, improves searchability, and allows knowledge to flow naturally within daily workflows. When knowledge is no longer trapped in disconnected tools or departments, productivity rises, confusion decreases, and support costs go down.
Build a Dedicated Knowledge Management Team
To implement knowledge management system, you’ll need champions. A dedicated team ensures clear accountability for content creation, maintenance, governance, and performance tracking. While different organizations may assign different roles, the principle is the same: there must be people who own and advocate for company knowledge management as an ongoing business function. Cross-functional collaboration is crucial—subject matter experts from different departments should contribute insights and help shape content to meet real-world needs. Without a team driving this effort, even the best technology will fall flat.
Define a Clear Knowledge Management Strategy
Without a defined strategy, knowledge efforts can become inconsistent or directionless. Your knowledge management strategy should align with business goals and clarify how knowledge is captured, reviewed, and published. It should also include a governance model that sets expectations for updates and accuracy. Strategic planning helps teams prioritize high-impact areas—like onboarding, customer support, or compliance—and ensures consistent workflows for managing the content lifecycle. When the strategy is clear, adoption rises, and the value of knowledge management becomes measurable.
Promote a Knowledge Sharing Culture
Technology can’t fix a culture that doesn’t support sharing. Encouraging a knowledge-first mindset means embedding knowledge sharing behaviors into everyday work. Leaders should model transparency, highlight the importance of knowledge contributions, and recognize employees who help grow institutional knowledge. Whether through informal conversations, peer mentoring, or structured documentation habits, teams must see knowledge sharing as a routine expectation. When employees understand that shared knowledge fuels success, collaboration becomes the norm.
Provide Ongoing Employee Training
Effective knowledge management systems are only as strong as the people using them. Employees need regular, targeted training to stay up to date on tools, processes, and best practices. New hires should be introduced to the knowledge base early in their onboarding, and all employees should have access to resources that help them contribute and consume information effectively. Periodic refreshers and updates keep the system relevant and ensure everyone understands how knowledge management fits into their role. Over time, this reduces dependency on tribal knowledge and improves organizational agility.
Sustain Momentum Over Time
Knowledge management is not a one-time project—it’s an ongoing discipline. Sustaining momentum means reviewing content regularly, updating materials in response to feedback, and continually measuring performance. Teams should celebrate progress, share success stories, and adjust strategies based on evolving needs. With dedicated governance and executive support, knowledge management becomes a durable capability that grows with your business. It’s about ensuring that as your organization scales, your knowledge scales with it—accurate, timely, and always within reach.
How to Create a Knowledge Base That Drives Self-Service on Salesforce Experience Cloud
How to Implement Knowledge Management Using Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud empowers organizations to build intelligent, scalable, and user-centric knowledge ecosystems. Its flexibility and deep integration with the Salesforce platform make it a powerful tool for embedding knowledge management into every layer of your support and customer experience strategy.
Building and Maintaining a Dynamic Knowledge Base
At the heart of any successful knowledge management system is a well-structured, dynamic knowledge base. With Salesforce Knowledge, organizations can create, organize, and manage articles that serve both internal teams and external users. Content is easy to categorize and tag, allowing users to quickly locate relevant information. Integrated feedback tools and revision histories help keep content fresh, accurate, and continuously optimized based on real-world usage.
Delivering Personalized Experiences Through Branded Portals
Salesforce Experience Cloud enables the creation of customizable, branded support portals tailored to specific audiences—whether they are customers, employees, or partners. These portals offer role-based access to curated knowledge and tools, supporting seamless self-service journeys. From multimedia content to case submission and live support widgets, every portal element is designed to meet user needs in a modern, intuitive interface.
Enhancing Knowledge Discovery with AI and Automation
AI-driven features, powered by Salesforce Einstein, elevate the platform’s ability to deliver the right knowledge at the right time. Smart article recommendations assist agents and customers by automatically surfacing helpful content during key interactions, such as case submission or resolution. Advanced search capabilities understand natural language queries, while usage analytics identify content gaps and inform future updates, ensuring your knowledge base evolves intelligently.
Measuring Success with Built-In Analytics
Robust analytics within Experience Cloud allow organizations to track the effectiveness of their knowledge initiatives. Custom dashboards present data on article performance, user engagement, self-service deflection rates, and case resolution efficiency. This insight enables knowledge managers to pinpoint what’s working, identify content that needs revision, and demonstrate the impact of knowledge management on operational KPIs and customer satisfaction.
Seamlessly Integrating with Your CRM Strategy
One of the key advantages of Salesforce Experience Cloud is its native integration with Salesforce Service Cloud and the wider CRM ecosystem. Knowledge is made available in context, surfacing directly within agent workflows, case records, or community pages. This ensures that users always have access to the most relevant content without switching systems, driving greater efficiency and consistency in service delivery.
Enhancing Experience Cloud with AC Knowledge Management Enterprise and AI-Powered Assistance
As organizations invest in scalable support strategies and advanced knowledge ecosystems, many are turning to specialized knowledge management tools that extend the native capabilities of Salesforce Experience Cloud. One such tool gaining widespread adoption is the AC Knowledge Management Enterprise app—an advanced solution purpose-built for accelerating knowledge capture, streamlining content operations, and delivering a more intelligent, responsive user experience.
AC Knowledge Management Enterprise acts as a robust extension layer to Salesforce Knowledge and Experience Cloud, offering more granular controls, advanced workflows, and enhanced authoring capabilities. It enables organizations to build high-performing knowledge bases that scale across multiple business units, brands, and geographies. With intuitive content lifecycle management, versioning controls, multi-language support, and role-based permissions, knowledge managers can efficiently maintain content quality and compliance while ensuring relevance for different audiences.
In 2025, the platform took a leap forward with its integration with OpenAI technologies, including a powerful AI-driven Answer Assistant. This new capability transforms how both agents and customers interact with knowledge by using natural language understanding and generative AI to deliver instant, context-aware answers. Rather than relying solely on keyword search or static articles, users can now ask open-ended questions and receive synthesized, conversational responses drawn from verified knowledge sources within the Experience Cloud environment.
The Answer Assistant doesn’t just enhance search—it redefines it. It pulls from multiple articles, links users to supporting content, and even summarizes complex information into digestible responses. For support agents, this means faster resolutions with fewer clicks. For customers, it means more accurate self-service and a dramatically improved digital experience. And for knowledge managers, it offers insights into user intent and article performance, helping teams refine their content strategy over time.
AC Knowledge Management Enterprise 3.1: Smarter Than Ever with OpenAI Integration
Empowering Teams to Share Knowledge and Capture Tribal Wisdom
Tribal knowledge—unwritten expertise, unique workflows, and informal practices developed over time—is often among the most valuable forms of intellectual capital within an organization. Yet it’s also the most vulnerable. When employees retire, switch roles, or leave the company, they often take this knowledge with them unless proactive measures are in place to capture it. A thoughtful knowledge sharing and management approach must prioritize the identification, documentation, and sharing of this invisible asset before it’s lost.
Capturing Knowledge Before It Walks Out the Door
Organizations should begin by incorporating knowledge preservation into transitional processes such as exit interviews and role changes. These interviews shouldn’t just focus on HR logistics, but should also extract meaningful insights about how departing employees solved problems, handled edge cases, or navigated complex systems. Supplementing this with tools like screen recordings, guided walkthroughs, or even informal video demonstrations can help preserve institutional wisdom in a format that’s easy for others to understand. Inviting experienced employees to co-author knowledge articles or contribute to wikis ensures that critical know-how becomes part of your structured knowledge base, not just passed on through word-of-mouth.
Fostering a Culture of Everyday Documentation
One of the most effective ways to build long-term resilience is by making documentation a normal part of everyday work. Employees should be encouraged to routinely capture lessons learned, common solutions, and standard operating procedures—especially in fast-moving or complex environments. Providing simple templates or documentation workflows lowers the barrier to contribution. Leadership can strengthen these efforts by recognizing contributors, gamifying participation, or setting aside dedicated “knowledge hours” during which teams take time to reflect and document what they’ve learned. Over time, this creates a culture in which documentation isn’t viewed as an extra task, but as a natural extension of the work itself.
Encouraging Cross-Team Knowledge Sharing
Breaking down departmental silos is essential to creating a free-flowing knowledge environment. Informal communities of practice—cross-functional groups centered around a domain, technology, or challenge—can foster collaboration and knowledge exchange between teams that might not otherwise interact. Digital collaboration tools such as Salesforce Chatter and Slack can also play a role in encouraging real-time, conversational knowledge sharing. Leaders may also consider rotational programs or cross-training sessions that give employees exposure to different roles and workflows, thereby distributing knowledge more evenly across the organization and reducing single points of failure.
Preserving Tacit Knowledge Through Human Connection
Not all knowledge can be written down. Much of what makes tribal knowledge so powerful is that it’s experiential, context-specific, and sometimes difficult to codify. That’s why organizations must also invest in practices that preserve tacit knowledge through relationships and storytelling. Encouraging senior employees to mentor junior team members creates a natural channel for wisdom transfer, especially when paired with structured onboarding experiences. Storytelling—whether through onboarding talks, case study retrospectives, or internal blog posts—helps bring real-world context to processes, illuminating the “why” behind decisions and fostering deeper understanding. Video snippets and informal interviews with subject matter experts can also help retain complex insights in a more digestible, human format.
Conclusion
In an era where information is power, intelligent knowledge management is the engine of customer satisfaction, employee empowerment, and business agility. Now’s the time to ask: Is your knowledge strategy ready for the future?
Take the first step—audit your current knowledge management approach, identify your biggest gaps, and explore how Salesforce Experience Cloud and AC Knowledge Management Enterprise can help. Contact us today!
FAQ
What are knowledge management best practices?
Knowledge management best practices are strategies and processes designed to capture, organize, share, and maintain valuable organizational knowledge. These include conducting regular knowledge audits to identify gaps, centralizing content in a searchable knowledge base, aligning knowledge management efforts with business goals, and creating a culture of knowledge sharing. Best-in-class organizations also invest in ongoing employee training, implement governance frameworks, and leverage tools like Salesforce Experience Cloud to automate and scale knowledge delivery. Sustained success depends on continuous iteration, cross-functional collaboration, and measurable performance tracking.
What are the three main areas of knowledge management?
The three core areas of knowledge management are:
1. Knowledge Creation and Capture focuses on generating new knowledge and recording tacit or tribal knowledge from individuals and teams.
2. Knowledge Organization and Storage, where captured information is structured, categorized, and stored in a centralized, accessible knowledge management system.
3. Knowledge Sharing and Application involve distributing knowledge across the organization and enabling employees, customers, and partners to apply it effectively in decision-making, problem-solving, and service delivery.
What is the primary goal of knowledge management?
The primary goal of knowledge management is to ensure the right knowledge is available to the right people at the right time, improving efficiency, innovation, and decision-making. By making institutional knowledge discoverable and reusable, knowledge management reduces redundancy, shortens learning curves, enhances customer service, and preserves intellectual capital. Ultimately, effective knowledge management transforms information into a strategic asset that drives organizational agility and competitive advantage.
