2024 KM REALITY AWARD WINNER: Crunchyroll

The KM Reality Award recognizes an organization in which knowledge management is a positive reality, not just rhetoric. The award recipient has demonstrated leadership in the implementation of knowledge management practices and processes, realizing measurable business benefits.

To be considered for the reality award, the knowledge management program must be in place for at least 1 year, receive support from senior management, and have defined metrics to evaluate the initiative and its impact on organizational goals.

During the KMWorld 2024 conference, on Thursday November 21, 2024, Crunchyroll was announced as the winner of the 2024 KM Reality Award.

Crunchyroll is a global anime brand that fuels fans’ love of anime. With the ambition to make anime an even bigger part of pop culture, Crunchyroll offers fans the ultimate anime experience and destination centered around a premium streaming service.

Crunchyroll has one of the largest dedicated anime libraries, an immersive world of events, exciting theatrical releases, unique games, must-have merchandise, timely news, and more. Anime is for everyone and is accessible to stream across territories through Crunchyroll—whether on the go on mobile, through gaming consoles and big-screen devices at home, or on desktops anywhere.

Challenge

Over the past few years, Crunchyroll has undergone acquisitions and consolidation of various Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD)services and evolved to include games and ecommerce lines of business. These changes impacted operations, affecting people, processes, and tools.

Amidst these shifts, the company made efforts to keep our agents and customers informed, though often at a minimal capacity. Consequently, it became clear that the company’s internal knowledge base and external Help Center needed a complete overhaul. With new leaders and enhancements to technologies, the company transformed not only the internal experiences for its agent population but also revitalized the external Help Center to create a more user friendly, cohesive experience.

Strategy

The company redirected 46% of its contacts to a self-service path to allow agents to focus on more complex inquiries. These improvements empowered customers to resolve their issues quickly and efficiently, enhancing their overall experience and satisfaction with services.

The company started by transforming the look and feel to be more category-driven and enhanced search capabilities by adding more metadata and tagging. The same held true for internal users. By cleaning up content, creating structured templates, adding categories and a notification center, Crunchyroll provided its agent base with ways to easily find information to support customers. All these efforts translated into a better customer experience.

Company leadership played a pivotal role in driving the organization’s objectives by embedding them into company-wide OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). This strategic approach was instrumental in fostering robust partnerships across various teams, all working synergistically to support the initiative. By providing a clear, strategic vision and meticulously outlining the steps required to achieve goals, leadership enabled employees to execute incremental phases of the project with precision and effectiveness.

This methodical approach ensured that each initiative was carefully planned and executed, driving overall success and alignment throughout the organization.

To ensure Crunchyroll effectively creates, shares, and applies the right knowledge at the right time, the company introduced several strategic initiatives. It established new feedback mechanisms that allowed the organization to gather insights from its agent population, ensuring that content remains accurate, relevant, and up-to-date. To maintain consistency across all knowledge assets, the company developed comprehensive standards and guidelines, incorporating considerations for cultural diversity, and varying perspectives in content creation.

The company also implemented thorough intake processes to collect detailed information, covering all support areas. This comprehensive approach equipped agents with precise and relevant support information, enhancing their ability to assist customers effectively. Crunchyroll’s content was organized into well-defined categories, making it easily accessible and consumable for both internal and external users, thereby accelerating the time needed to locate and utilize the knowledge.

Results

The overall benefits were substantial. After implementing content clean-up and restructuring, there was a marked increase in confidence in Crunchyroll’s knowledgebase, which led to greater utilization of internal articles. The revamped, user-friendly, and humanized articles, combined with an enhanced chatbot experience, significantly improved user interactions, allowing customers to navigate and resolve issues more swiftly.

This positive impact on the user experience was not limited to a single market. The successful outcomes and improved satisfaction metrics prompted the company to extend these enhancements globally, adapting the improved knowledge management practices and chatbot solutions to our other markets. This global expansion further optimized the support experience and ensured consistency across all regions.