Service leaders are rethinking how expertise gets captured, shared and put to work.
Service organizations have been talking about the “Silver Tsunami” for years.
Experienced technicians retire. Decades of knowledge walk out the door. New employees need to get up to speed faster.
All that is still worth worrying about.
But a recent Service Council IdeaShare discussion made something clear. The service knowledge problem is much bigger than retirement.
Today’s workforce is more fluid. Equipment is more complex. Experienced technicians are stretched thin. And much of the guidance people use to solve problems still lives outside the knowledge base.
That knowledge lives in conversations. Customer history. Troubleshooting judgment. Workarounds. And the instincts of people who have seen the problem before.
The biggest challenge isn’t capturing what experts know before they leave. It’s making what the organization learns every day available to the next person who needs it.
The experience gap is changing
One attendee described a U.S. field workforce where most employees have five years or less in their roles.
That puts pressure on senior engineers and higher-level support teams. Newer technicians inevitably encounter problems they haven’t seen before.
Service Council research shared during the session reinforces the point. 45% of technicians surveyed had been at their current organization for five years or less. More than half of that group was 35 or older.
So this isn’t simply about young technicians replacing retirees.
Experienced people move between companies too. They need to adjust to new environments and ways of working.
The challenge is getting people from “new here” to productive and independent faster.
The best answer may not be in the manual
One participant shared an example from a generative AI and technical support project.
The system had access to extensive formal documentation. But 70% of answers came from tribal knowledge captured from experts.
As he put it:
It was amazing how much of the content actually used to answer day-to-day questions came from the experts and not the boatloads of manuals.
Another participant described technicians posting problems in Microsoft Teams. Higher-tier support engineers would respond to the issues.
Over time, those conversations became an informal repository of real-world troubleshooting knowledge. The organization is now exploring how AI could mine those conversations and make the answers reusable.
That’s an important distinction.
Documentation captures what should happen. Real interactions often reveal what actually works.
"Phone a friend" isn't necessarily a failure
Service Council research showed that 65% of technicians call or text a colleague when they get stuck. Compare that with 52% who consult a knowledge source.
It would be easy to see that as a problem to cut.
The group didn’t.
One former FSE said that technicians spend much of their time working independently. Talking through a difficult problem with a colleague gets them to a quick solution. But it also provides valuable human connection.
A lot of times the only time that you get to interact with your colleagues is when you can discuss a problem.
That interaction has value.
The problem is that when the call ends, what was learned often disappears with it.
How do we preserve those interactions? How do we make the knowledge available to people beyond the two on the call?
Stop asking experts to become technical writers
That question led to one of the clearest themes of the discussion.
The people with the most valuable knowledge are often the people with the least time to document it.
Research showed that paperwork and data capture consistently rank among technicians’ least-liked activities. The most experienced technicians disliked them most.
Even when experts do document what they know, there’s another problem. Expertise becomes instinctive.
Ask someone to explain a process they’ve performed hundreds of times. They may leave out an important step because they no longer consciously think about it.
That suggests a different approach: Capture more expertise while the work is happening.
One participant described it simply:
Instead of asking our technicians... to dump your knowledge, just share your experiences while you're experiencing it.
This changes how we think about video in service.
Why only create videos for technicians to watch? Why not capture people performing procedures, troubleshooting problems and working through unusual situations?
That way, the work itself becomes the source material.
Capture is only useful if it becomes knowledge
Of course, recording everything isn’t the answer either.
Raw video still needs structure, context and governance. Security and connectivity can also be significant obstacles in customer environments.
One service leader cautioned:
“I really think we underestimate the security and access required to use some of this technology in our customer environments.”
Knowledge has to stay current. A procedure captured today could be wrong three years from now. That’s where AI potentially changes the equation.
Instead of replacing experts, AI can turn what experts do into something the organization can reuse.
How do we capture this knowledge without asking the experts to become technical writers? Because they don't want to, it's not their job.
Every solve should make the organization smarter
Traditional knowledge management separates doing the work from documenting it.
Someone solves a problem. Later, someone writes it down. Someone reviews it. Someone organizes it. Eventually, another technician hopefully finds it.
Every step creates another opportunity for useful knowledge to disappear.
The more interesting model discussed during the IdeaShare is much simpler:
Solve the problem. Capture what happened. Turn what was learned into trusted knowledge. Make it available the next time.
That doesn’t mean eliminating service manuals, experts or conversations between colleagues. It means recognizing that some of the organization’s most valuable knowledge is being created during those interactions every day.
The goal isn’t to stop technicians from calling the person who knows the answer.
It’s to make sure the answer doesn’t disappear when they hang up.