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Published On: 13th Oct 2026 08:00 - Modified: 6th Oct 2026
Tribal knowledge. Team lore. Shadow knowledge. Whatever you call it, it is the undocumented expertise hidden within teams.
It has been happening for years, but the growing focus on AI and agent-assist tools in the contact centre is now surfacing it as a critical root-level issue – as Adam Boelke and Martin Hobratschk explore.
For a long time, tribal knowledge has been quietly but significantly affecting productivity, costs, customer satisfaction, employee experience, and culture. But even though the issue is widespread, addressing it has rarely made the priority list.
Why? Because it appeared nothing was broken. Tactical workarounds were in place, experienced employees had the answers, and no one was questioning the operational impact.
Until now…
As more companies look to integrate AI into their workflows, they are realizing that AI is only as useful as the knowledge it can access, organize, and apply.
When critical information lives in people’s heads, side conversations, outdated documents, or unofficial workarounds instead of in a usable, searchable, accurate knowledge management system, the organization pays the price.
Your AI journey starts with getting the foundations right. For advice on this, read our article: How to Centralize Your Data – Before Scaling AI
We have all seen the impact. In the moment, it can feel more like an inconvenience than an inefficiency. An agent or employee runs into a customer issue, reaches out to the senior staff member who “always knows”, gets the answer, and everyone moves on.
But that moment is not free! It consumes time. It interrupts the senior employee. It delays the customer. It reinforces dependency.
And when it happens hundreds or thousands of times across an operation, it becomes a hidden tax on performance.
The risk becomes even more obvious when that senior staff member is out, on vacation, promoted, or, worse, retires.
For example, Adam Boelke recalls walking into a consulting assignment where all of the senior staff members in a department had retired at roughly the same time.
No one had fully transferred the knowledge in their heads into a reliable process, playbook, or knowledge base. And the remaining team was left trying to recreate critical work from memory, fragments, and assumptions.
That may sound extreme, but every contact centre has some version of this problem. It shows up in inconsistent answers, where the same issue is handled differently depending on the agent, supervisor, location, or department involved.
It also shows up in longer handle times, as agents search across multiple places, ask peers for help, or wait for someone else to respond – as well as in avoidable escalations, where cases are pushed to higher-cost resources simply because the frontline team does not have easy access to the right answer.
Not only that but it shows up in slower onboarding and longer time to proficiency because new employees are forced to learn through shadowing, repetition, and informal shortcuts instead of a structured source of truth.
Furthermore, it shows up in lower First Contact Resolution because customers need multiple interactions, transfers, callbacks, or delays to get their issue resolved.
If you aren’t sure where to start with this problem, read our article: How to Manage Agent Workarounds and Shortcuts
And it shows up in the employee experience too!
When agents do not have the information they need to serve customers well, they feel unsupported. They are often the ones who have to manage the customer frustration created by internal gaps they did not cause and cannot fix on their own. That is a culture issue as much as it is a knowledge management issue.
So, what’s the solution? As Adam Boelke teaches in his 7 Cs Leadership Operating System, “Caring” for employees means giving them the tools, clarity, and support they need to be successful. And a strong knowledge management approach is one of those tools.
This starts with leaders prioritizing the work, authorizing the resources, aligning on the approach, and reinforcing the behaviours that make knowledge useful in the flow of daily operations.
Beyond the immediate friction of lost time, shadow knowledge creates a persistent drag on customer experience and organizational productivity.
When critical operational details remain unrecorded, answers vary, resolution times increase, and teams are left working from fragmented information.
The culprit is often the proliferation of unwritten, unstructured, and unofficial knowledge silos. Expertise gets trapped in Slack channels, private chat threads, email chains, localized workarounds, and the heads of individual employees.
Sometimes this happens unintentionally. Other times, it stays trapped in the heads of individual agents who may see that knowledge as insurance against being replaced.
When knowledge is treated as personal property rather than a collective asset, the organization lacks a single source of truth, leaving teams to navigate an increasingly complex and ambiguous world with fragmented information.
The good news is that there are practical steps you can take to begin addressing this in your organization:
The first step is to audit your existing team knowledge to identify where silos and hidden operational gaps reside.
This can be as simple as setting up a workflow in a tool like Slack that allows agents to flag new solutions so they can be reviewed and documented in your knowledge base.
Next, implement a high-speed, tiered documentation pipeline designed to capture knowledge continuously as it is used, rather than relying on slow, management-heavy documentation processes.
This approach involves agents at all levels in a closed-loop collaborative process that is at the core of methodologies like Knowledge-Centered Success (KCS®), which foster a culture of knowledge sharing.
Finally, true transformation requires aligning performance incentives to prioritize and reward collaborative knowledge sharing. Focus on metrics that measure impact, not just activity. It is not enough to track the number of articles created. Measure which articles are being used to resolve issues.
When knowledge contribution is recognized as a core metric of success, employees are empowered to move away from gatekeeping information and toward building a sustainable, collective intelligence.
It is not enough to choose a knowledge management platform and hope people use it. Leaders have to make knowledge part of how and why the operation runs, not another tool employees are expected to figure out on their own.
When done well, knowledge management can improve employee engagement, operational efficiency, and customer experience at the same time.
The opportunity is not just to capture information, but also to reduce friction, improve consistency, increase confidence, and help every employee serve customers with the best knowledge the organization already has.
Written by: Adam Boelke and Martin Hobratschk
KCS® is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation™
If you are looking for more information to improve knowledge management in your contact centre, read these articles next:
Adam Boelke, Founder of the Alignment Advantage Group
Adam Boelke is a former F500 Ops VP helping leaders transform their company into top-quartile performance. He is also an award-winning expert in Customer Experience, Employee Experience & Call Center Operations, and Inventor of the 7 Cs to Success method.
Read more by Adam BoelkeReviewed by: Jo Robinson
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13th October 2026
14th October 2026
