Agile Knowledge Management: Enhancing Support Efficiency
Jen Weaver, Customer Success Manager at Tettra, began her support journey in 2014 as the second member of YNAB's support team. Her dedication and versatility played a pivotal role as the team expanded rapidly, ensuring swift responses and exceptional customer satisfaction. Known for her strong customer relationships, Jen transitioned into the realm of Customer Success, driven by her passion for fostering lasting connections.
Check out this video featuring Jen Weaver our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo where she discusses the importance of agile knowledge management, offering practical strategies and tips for knowledge managers to save time, improve recognition, and enhance their skills in the support industry. Get a sneak peek of her compelling ideas before he takes the stage in Las Vegas, NV.
Neal: This is a conversation with Jen Weaver about agile knowledge management and what that means for upcoming talk at the Support Driven Expo here in October.
So Jen, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do and why this topic is so important to you?
Jen: I've worked in support for about nine years now. I made the transition to customer success and I work for a company called Tettra, which makes knowledge management software.
So I think about knowledge management and I talk about it every day, all the time. I think about, and we work on at Tettra, how to get information more efficiently, and save time because it's all about time. The time you spend looking for information is wasted time, right? And nailing your knowledge management practices can save time for an individual and then multiply that times the number of people at the company, and it just saves that much more time. My talk is directed at knowledge managers, how people who end up managing the knowledge at a company, whether that's an actual role that they have, or just a part of a support role and how they can do that better and get recognized for it.
Neal: So specifically, your talk is on agile knowledge management and that knowledge should be easy in managing that.
What is specific to that topic and what makes it easy, versus other types of knowledge management that you focus on?
Jen: Good question. I think the strategies that knowledge managers can use to make it easy to retrieve information. That has to do with what tools you use, which I believe in because of working at a knowledge management company.
We build features into our tool that we think are useful. But too it has to do with knowledge hygiene, like having good practices in your daily life. For example, when I end a meeting I have a bunch of ideas. I always try to write those down and impressions from the meeting right away.
Even if I can't make it an official part of my knowledge base, or make it as pretty and organized as I want it to be, I try to get all those thoughts out, and then I batch that work later. As long as I have the information there, I'm saving time by recording it, and then I can then pretty up my documentation and make it official at the end of the week, which is what I typically do.
I've learned some tips and tricks from knowledge managers that I work with that are my customers. And so I share some more of those in my talk.
Neal: Do you consider what you do in terms of really take it in the moment, write it down and go? Is that what you consider to be agile knowledge management or is it something different?
Jen: That is a great tip for sure. I was talking to a customer this week who, what they do when they're in a hurry and they need to record some documentation, they take a loom video and then they embed that in a page in their knowledge management. And the loom video is just, this is what I need to record, here's what I need to do later. And then our tool actually surfaces unfinished drafts in a to do list. And so then that team will go back to their to do list later, watch their loom video and just write out what they want on the page and get rid of that loom video and then that's their documentation. So it just allows them to record that quickly when they're thinking about it, without having to go deeply into formatting and where should this belong and all of that stuff, which they can do in a focused session later.
Neal: That's crazy. Let's brainstorm. Let's talk about it. And then I'll just regurgitate it later.
Jen: Yeah. And that's one of the things I love most about my job is I get to talk to all of these people who have these great ideas about managing knowledge and then collect them and then teach them to my other customers or in this talk.
Neal: Nice. And what is it that you would expect people to be able to take away from your talk at the expo?
Jen: A couple of things. But one of them, and I think maybe closest to my heart, is getting recognized for knowledge management work. I work with some customers who their role, their title at the company is knowledge manager in some format, right?
But then I work with a lot of people who are in operations or the folks who come to my talk likely in support and maybe are in their second or third year as a support specialist. But they do knowledge management work. They handle a ticket and they use that ticket to update an external doc for customers, or they find an internal doc and they ask a question about it.
This doesn't seem complete. Can somebody update this? That's knowledge work. We're going to talk about some ways to surface that in your job description, and then as you're on your career journey, language to put that into your resume. I think that's important with knowledge management, it's important with any skill that you're developing that's not an official part of your job, to be able to articulate " this is something I have been doing, and it's something I'm good at, and it's something I have to offer."
Neal: It's so great. I think a lot of times, especially when you talk specifically to support people, it's always behind the scenes.
A lot of the work that goes into it is unrecognized or just "thing" that you're doing all the time, but you don't necessarily raise that to the surface of what the real impact that has in the longer term. It's great to hear that you're really focused on the recognition aspect of it.
And will give people some practical tips to be able to give it back to that and recognize those efforts into what they do.
Jen: I think, unfortunately, support people are in that position a lot. Especially now with the uncertainty in the tech world and with some companies just deprecating their support team entirely, or replacing it, I think it's important for us as support people to be able to articulate that what we do is really important to the company's bottom line.
Neal: You just told a personal story as well about how knowledge management reflects in your personal life. Why is knowledge management so important to you and how did you get into it?
Jen: Oh gosh. My first knowledge management job was handling support visuals at the previous company I was at, YNAB. That was my first taste of really organizing and making decisions about what documentation needs to be included in a customer knowledge base and external knowledge base and I really enjoyed the organization aspect.
I'm somebody who, I get energized by sorting things and organizing and collating them. It was really fun to me to think about all of this knowledge and how to communicate it in an organized way. And then in my position as a support person I kept working on knowledge and started working on internal knowledge and internal training, and then onboarding new specialists and all of that involves being really clean and tight with your information. You don't want to give too much information and overwhelm people, but you also don't want to give too little. That kind of balance really intrigued me. When I moved to Tettra, it just felt like a natural fit that I would work primarily in knowledge management because I've been focusing on that more and more for the last several years.
Neal: And so what goes to normally a part of your activity in your day to day now becomes the whole of what you're doing on top of it as well and supporting others in doing it.
Jen: Yeah, and it gets a little meta because I handle our external customer knowledge and some of our internal knowledge about knowledge management for our customers. So it's
Neal: fun. It's like the big infinite loop of knowledge. It's pretty funny that it goes that far and that spirally. So when you go to the expo, is there anything that you're looking forward to specifically?
Jen: Yeah, it just occurred to me recently. I get to see other people's talks. I am interested in career development, so I'll probably see some of those tracks. I've made some friends in Support Driven. So I want to see their talks just because it's them. It's been a long time since I've been to an in-person event after 2020, things have felt really insular and so I'm really looking forward to a new world of meeting people and networking again and making connections.
And then too, I don't know if anybody else is interested in this, but there's a really great Van Gogh exhibit going on at the same time as the expo. So I'm going to try to make that.
Neal: Then you just come here and see the real Van Gogh museum. Thank you so much for taking the time to record a highlight for your talk. I really appreciate it. And of course for the people watching the highlights, you can see Jen's conversation and talk at the expo coming up. How can people reach out to you for the topic?
Jen: The best way is in Support Driven Slack. I am @jen. I'm pretty active there, so that's the best way to reach me.
Neal: Perfect. Thank you so much.
Check out this video now featuring Jen Weaver our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!
