Software companies are desperate to get ahead as more competitors pop up from all corners of the globe. One way they can do this is by enabling their long tail of partners, with personalized content and support powered by AI, to drive growth. Managing that partnership effectively is vital, but offering personalized enablement manually can be a challenge because of high costs, for example. This is why most software companies end up focusing on their top 10 to maybe 50 partners and leave the long tail of hundreds or even thousands of partners to onboard themselves with generalized content when they sign up.
So, how can software companies overcome these challenges and build scalable partnerships in the future? Let’s take a look.
What Is an Automated Knowledge Management System (AKMS)?
An automated knowledge management system (AKMS) uses an agentic AI to collect and deliver information to the right stakeholders within an organization. Usually, through the form of a partnership, the system integrates with either of the partners for content sources like documentation, support systems, and knowledge bases to construct a domain-centric knowledge graph to map complex information. It features intelligent query understanding and personalized proficiency mapping to tailor responses based on the user’s expertise and needs. That way, it provides the user with accurate information and addresses common issues like information overload and high support costs.
Improved Training and Onboarding
Training and onboarding have always been tricky hurdles to overcome in a business partnership, especially when you need to personalize effective training materials for every partner’s business domain, use cases and proficiency levels. An automated solution can be a game changer in that it can use technology to deliver personalized and up-to-date training content, even with the inclusion of learning paths all specifically designed for each individual’s proficiency level.
For software training in particular, you can deliver content as part of an LMS or KMS that isn’t specific to the user, role or proficiency. Here, an agentic AI platform can help by creating specific learning pathways with several prompts to give detailed responses beyond something like ChatGPT. For example, if a partner is learning about how to use the database platform MongoDB in an e-commerce context, you can provide hyper-personalized tutorials outlining how to use it for transactions, how to scale the setup, and best security practices.
Better Support and Quality Control
Another potential pitfall in a partnership is maintaining high standards for service delivery and customer satisfaction when implementing something new. The issue is that end-users often do not provide extensive details about their requirements, so addressing their problems with a traditional, single-response automated support system difficult. Here, a dynamic workflow with deep domain knowledge can probe more effectively to get accurate answers.
Clear guidelines and continuous monitoring are crucial to ensuring consistency and quality across diverse partner networks. Autonomous software knowledge management platforms driven by automation can address this by providing step-by-step implementation guidelines and AI-driven solutions to ad-hoc problems faced by partners, therefore enhancing service quality and partner satisfaction.
Smarter Technological Integration
The kind of quality control you can achieve here is not completely foolproof, however. That’s especially true when you’re trying to integrate partners’ systems with the other company’s software. In fact, doing so can be a real technical challenge. So, you need to have technological support within partner enablement strategies so that processes and collaboration run smoothly.
Support teams are usually limited by the number of requests that they can service at a time, however. Generally, teams prioritize the support requests of the top 1 to 10 percent of the partners. Meanwhile, long-tail partners have to wait for days and weeks to have their support tickets answered due to resource constraints.
An autonomous knowledge management system (AKMS), featuring single sign-on (SSO) can get around this issue. It can support embedding through JavaScript or iFrame on existing support portals, which allows for seamless integration of its agentic search capabilities directly into a website or support portal. Additionally, the system can give comprehensive APIs for deep integration to customize and adapt the platform to fit your unique software ecosystem and workflows.
This structure means partners can align their systems with the software effortlessly, reducing integration complexities, and allowing smoother operations.
Solved Regional Regulation Issues
If you’re partnering with a company in a different region, then complying with industry standards and legal requirements across borders can be another complex aspect of a good partnership. Most people think compliance just means adhering to regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA). Tons of broad external regulations can impact businesses without their knowledge, however.
If you work with a partner who doesn’t comply with legal requirements, this could be a real problem for your business, too. In one famous example, accounting fraud from one of Enron’s business partners, Arthur Andersen, led to its dissolution in 2002. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure that both sides diligently follow budget and policies, and a partnership management platform can help you with this. Autonomous knowledge management platforms can help scale this process efficiently by automatically aggregating knowledge of different regions and regulatory bodies to provide the right checks and balances and compliance guidelines automatically to the company and its partners.
Clearer Communication and Collaboration
Communication is absolutely essential for managing expectations, sharing updates and resolving issues in business partner relationships. Communication strategies facilitate collaboration and minimize misunderstandings. Collaborative tools within a partnership management platform can improve communication channels between software companies and their partners.
A platform shared between the partners offers the option for a comprehensive support system whereby both sides can exchange personalized resources like best practices, case studies and marketing materials. This, in turn, can put both sides in a better position to deliver high-quality service and hopefully improve net promoter scores (NPS). Naturally, more efficient operations can drive revenue for both partners. Sharing only relevant resources with the right partner at the right time helps reduce information overload and increases productivity.
Manage Your Partnerships Intelligently
An advanced platform for partnership management can also help with process automation. For example, new partner employees can move through automated workflows to make the steps that can be tedious, such as system integration and account setup, a little more simple. Another process that it can help automate is content generation for various use cases, such as responding to RFPs, sales proposals, and marketing collateral, generating reference architectures and solution architectures, and doing general competitive and other market research.
An advanced partner enablement platform that we have discussed in this piece can integrate AI-driven training, along with detailed implementation guidelines and communication tools, to improve the way software companies manage their partnerships. Companies that address these traditional challenges platforms like these can create more productive partnerships, which could lead to growth and success in the software market.
