Meetups

July 16: Information and Expertise - Scaling the Knowledge Base Across Veolia North America

Key takeaways:

• Award-winning knowledge program: Veolia North America's Elizabeth Reina and Josh shared how their knowledge base, recognized this year with the Knowledge Management Trailblazer Award, grew from about 150 articles at launch to more than 800 pages in less than a year - supporting call center teams across six states and roughly 2.2 million customer connections.
• 100% adoption from day one: Rather than a phased rollout, Veolia set a mandatory usage expectation across every business unit at launch - "no easing in period." Adoption was tracked from day one using customer experience and customer insight reports, giving the team real usage and search data to act on immediately.
• Training was the foundation, not an afterthought: Every business unit received live, hands-on training before go-live, and every new hire still receives a standard 30-minute knowledge base introduction. Refresher sessions are always available on request, ensuring comfort with the system stayed high even as resistance to change surfaced early on.
• A 24-business-hour feedback commitment builds trust: Users can submit feedback directly from any article into a shared inbox, and the team commits to acknowledging and acting on it within 24 business hours. Tags help divide and track open vs. completed items, keeping the loop tight and visible to users.
• Ongoing engagement keeps usage sticky: Veolia built a quarterly "Knowledge News" newsletter highlighting tips, tricks, and new features, and is launching a gamified knowledge base scavenger hunt in September - complete with "awesome points" redeemable for prizes - to keep users exploring the system.
• User groups and conditional content power scale across six states: With business units that are roughly 70% consistent and 30% state-specific, Veolia relies heavily on user groups and conditional content to maintain one article per process instead of five or six near-duplicates - letting each user see only what's relevant to them.
• Out-of-the-box features drove real efficiency gains: The team highlighted embedded Google Sheets, embedded training videos, mail-to functionality that auto-populates recipient/subject/body fields, content reuse across pages, and templates for consistent processes like customer contact documentation - all reinforcing a single source of truth.
• Success is spreading organically: Other teams - including Veolia's team in France - have taken notice and asked to see the knowledge base for themselves, with internal business units increasingly requesting their own sections after seeing what colleagues built.
• What's next: Veolia's top priority for the rest of 2026 is a major overhaul of its most widely used process, which will touch a large number of articles. The team is also beginning to explore AI features - starting with FAQs and content-shortening tools - with plans to apply them more broadly to existing articles in 2027.