The customer knowledge gap — the divide between what customers know and what they need to know— can make or break a business. In B2B, products are complex and continuously evolving which makes knowledge gaps a constant blocker to customer growth. As customers increasingly expect self-service options, businesses are struggling to scale access to expertise on demand.

Shifts in demand for instant, trusted knowledge have made closing the knowledge gap more challenging than ever. Without a new approach to customer knowledge sharing, businesses risk missing valuable opportunities to create, retain, and grow strong customer relationships.

Now is the time to act. We’ll explore why customer knowledge gaps are growing and how you can transform your knowledge-sharing strategy to ensure the right customers receive the right information at the right time.

Unpacking the traditional approach to customer knowledge sharing and why it's broken

B2B companies devote significant resources to keep customers engaged by producing educational content, hosting events, offering online courses, and much more. This approach aims to scale expertise on demand to protect internal teams' time, but production costs can quickly skyrocket.

To mitigate this, many companies create customer forums where users can ask for help from their community of peers. But when discussions lack structure and true experts, these forums can quickly become noisy and unhelpful.

While many businesses are doing their best to create the information needed to close customer knowledge gaps, all fails if that information isn't received by the customers that need it, when they need it.

Our research has show that 67% of B2B customers are forced to navigate five or more channels to find the information they need. An overload of irrelevant content quickly leads to frustration, disengagement, and, ultimately, lost customers.

Fragmented knowledge is ruining the B2B customer journey. To effectively close customer knowledge gaps, businesses must streamline and personalize how customers access the knowledge they need to succeed. 

Why Customer Knowledge Gaps Are Growing

There are many factors that have contributed to the growing customer knowledge gap in B2B. This graph plots some of the key trends that have shaped customers’ demand for knowledge and the amount of documented knowledge businesses have made available.

• Increasing product complexity: As B2B products evolve, especially with integrated software and ERP systems, the need for more structured, strategic knowledge-sharing grows.

• Multiple decision-makers: More stakeholders involved in B2B purchasing decisions create diverse needs for tailored knowledge. Sharing information relevant to each group becomes challenging.

• Rapid product development: Faster innovation cycles mean product knowledge can quickly become outdated, frustrating customers trying to stay informed.

• Information overload: In an attempt to stand out, businesses produce more content, overwhelming customers with too many options and channels to navigate.

• Self-service expectations: Customers now prefer to find answers themselves, requiring businesses to provide accessible, easy-to-navigate platforms.

• AI and instant knowledge: Customers expect quick and accurate responses thanks to AI advancements. Delays or incomplete answers risk losing their trust.

To move forward, businesses must address these trends, streamlining how they share knowledge and ensuring customers have easy access to the right information at the right time.

Identifying Customer Knowledge Gaps

Too often, businesses underestimate the severity of customer knowledge gaps. Yet the effects are unmistakable. Left unresolved, these gaps lead to lost opportunities to protect and grow revenue, as disengaged customers quickly seek alternatives. Here are some of the most common symptoms of a widening knowledge gap:

• Low customer lifetime value (CLV)

• High churn rate

• Low product adoption

• Low lead-close rates

• High volumes of support tickets

These gaps disrupt every stage of the customer lifecycle. During acquisition, fragmented knowledge prevents potential buyers from fully understanding your value proposition, leading to missed sales opportunities. In the adoption phase, customers without proper onboarding get frustrated, increasing the likelihood of churn. Retention suffers when customers aren’t continuously educated, and advocacy dwindles without the proper knowledge-sharing opportunities, limiting referrals and scalable growth.

A telling sign of an existing knowledge gap is when resources are only created in response to customer complaints. Without a clear strategy, businesses waste time and energy, struggling to prioritize the resources that will have the most significant impact. Disconnected platforms further complicate the process, making it difficult to track customer engagement, identify common issues, and address individual needs.

To assess the current state of your knowledge-sharing strategy, ask yourself these questions:

• Can customers quickly search across all knowledge formats in one place?

• Can they easily identify and connect with experts if the knowledge they need isn’t available?

• Do they receive personalized content suggestions based on their interests?

• Can they interact and share insights with peers, not just brand representatives?

• Are they empowered to contribute their own expertise and knowledge?

If these elements are missing, it's time for a new approach.

Strategies to close the customer knowledge gap

Fragmented knowledge disrupts the B2B customer journey, resulting in lost revenue and missed opportunities. Because no two customers will have the exact same needs, the journey they take is rarely predictable or straightforward. To address this, businesses must focus on delivering relevant, timely knowledge to every individual customer based on their personal interests and goals. Below are key strategies to do this effectively, at scale.

Centralize all resources to improve search

Every customer has unique learning preferences, so offering knowledge in various formats — such as articles, videos, and courses — is crucial. However, without a centralized system, this content can become fragmented, making it harder for customers to find what they need. By consolidating all resources on a single platform, businesses can create a more streamlined experience. This enables customers to search across formats and quickly find relevant content or experts which can support their needs. Empowering customers with the right knowledge, when they need it most, keeps them engaged and informed at every stage of their journey.

Personalize how customers discover knowledge 

Today, B2B customers expect experiences that are tailored to their professional, experience and specifc use case. Broadcasting content to all customers fails to meet the demand for relevant, expert-led guidance. To provide this more personalized knowledge sharing experience at scale, data such as selected preferences and online behaviour can help businesses provide suggestions that directly aligns with a customer’s needs. With an accurate insight into individual customers' interests and needs, you can begin to guide customers through learning journeys which help them reach their goals. 

Leverage community expertise and AI for scalability

To scale knowledge sharing effectively, businesses must harness the knowledge of their community —customers, internal experts, and external specialists. To effectively close customer knowledge gaps as they evolve over time, its important customers can not only discover existing knowledge but also co-create new knowledge alongside trusted experts. This collaborative, expert-led approach ensures that knowledge gaps are filled with high-quality, relevant information.

AI will play an increasingly pivotal role in how customers search and discovery the right knowledge. While AI ensures customers can quickly navigate to the right resources and experiences, human expertise breeds confidence in its accuracy and value. This combination of AI and expert input empowers businesses to provide up-to-date, actionable knowledge at scale.

The importance of feedback loops

Feedback loops are essential for identifying knowledge gaps early. By gathering insights through surveys, customer interactions, and usage data, businesses can pinpoint where customers are struggling. This allows them to adjust content strategies in real-time, ensuring that knowledge resources stay aligned with evolving customer needs.

Through a combination of centralized resources, personalized experiences, expert collaboration, and ongoing feedback, businesses can effectively close customer knowledge gaps, keeping customers engaged and preventing missed opportunities.

Close the customer knowledge gap with Zapnito

Zapnito provides an all-in-one solution to close customer knowledge gaps by seamlessly integrating resources, communities, and learning into a single platform. This eliminates the fragmentation that disrupts customer journeys and offers personalized experiences based on individual behavior and needs.

In just a few weeks, Zapnito enables you to build a branded knowledge hub tailored to your users. With expert support throughout implementation, you can quickly provide a streamlined, scalable, and engaging knowledge-sharing experience for your customers.  If you’d like to learn more about how Zapnito works, you can watch a platform walkthrough or book a custom demo with one of our experts.