To completely reap PHPKB benefits, businesses can use a knowledge base system in two specific ways - internal and external. When created for internal employees, it works towards enhancing the productivity of your team members, building collaboration among them, increasing employee engagement, and streamlining your business processes. As an external knowledge base, PHPKB knowledge base software serves as a self-help platform for your customers to resolve queries as and when they arise.
Apart from public documentation, PHPKB can be used to create an enterprise-grade internal knowledge base for your employees with secured access for them to gain the necessary information through a private login. With features like Internal Collaboration, your employees can collaborate with colleagues by providing suggestions and feedback to the articles to make them better.
Organizing and managing internal knowledge is easy with PHPKB Knowledge Base Software. Companies can create a password protected knowledge base, which can be accessed by only authorized employees from anywhere at anytime, making the process of sharing organizational knowledge seamless and secure.
What is an internal knowledge base?
An internal knowledge base is set up by companies strictly for internal use. Internal knowledge bases will often require a login from a company email or from an email given express access to the knowledge base. Knowledge is any company’s biggest asset which is unique to each organization and is gathered through experience, and most importantly, it provides you an edge over your competitors. However, just only acquiring huge knowledge can't be beneficial for a company, a company needs a platform to share its knowledge among employees and an internal knowledge base plays a pivotal role in managing and flow of information from one department or employee to another.
An internal knowledge base is defined as a central repository for managing and distributing all company knowledge and information. Internal knowledge base is a place where all your workforce can store and find internal documentation about company policies, processes, how-to guides, projects or products they are building, common workflows, shared logins, procedure checklists, FAQs, troubleshooting guides, etc. The data in your internal knowledge base can come from various departments of your organization. Your accounting team, HR department, sales representatives, and marketers can all get all required information to make everything run smoothly.
It is a 24/7 instant self-help knowledge base that employees can access whenever they want, from wherever they are to search whatever information they need. Create an online internal knowledge base using PHPKB and enable your employees to find information they need from anywhere and anytime they want.
Internal Knowledge Base Features
- A secure online resource center where employees can easily find and share information.
- Protect your company's knowledge to make it visible to only internal users/team members. Only authorized users will have access to the documentation.
- Capture the tacit knowledge that your employees have by integrating the knowledge base with your existing tools.
- Your employees can ask and answer questions, suggest and comment on knowledge articles, file and solve problems, all on a common platform.
- Track the performance of your internal knowledge base and know what your employees are searching for.
Application Areas of PHPKB Internal Knowledge Base
Internal knowledge management is indeed the need of the hour. PHPKB internal knowledge base software can be used by companies in different ways depending upon the industry they serve. Some most common ways an internal knowledge base can be useful for your business are:
- Product Documentation: Products and services documentation (such as how-to guides, training and onboarding documents, etc.) for your employees to serve the customers in a better way. The product guides makes right information available to employees at right time so they can provide uniform information to customers.
- Traning Materials: Publishing traning materials for your new staff that have joined recently. Knowledge base documents can help polish their skills and cultivate their ability to become great at their job.
- Customer Service FAQ: Storing knowledge about customer FAQs and troubleshooting guides to help customers promptly.
- Legal Questions: The knowledge base can be used to store information about contracts, legal policies, approval guidelines, etc.
- HR Inquiries: Knowledge sharing of company policies, company hierarchy, vacation policies, company culture, etc with employees will considerably reduce the HR inquiries.
- Collaboration Platform: Your teams can use an internal knowledge base to collaborate, find and organise their resources( such as design best practices, recommended color-schemes etc. ), brainstorm ideas, and develop their projects.
- Policies and Guidelines: Definition the policies and procedures (such as sales strategies, PR Guideline, etc.) of different departments at centralised location, so that everyone has access to information.
How an internal knowledge base is beneficial for you?
Whether you have a small or large business, a knowledge base is an incredible resource to centralize company process and standards. An internal knowledge base can be used as a great retention tool because it can give your team the information they need to keep clients happy. As your company develops in this digital world, you often find yourself in a sea of information, data, and procedures that your employees need to know and follow. It thus becomes imperative to have systems in place to better store, manage, and share organizational knowledge with employees, clients, and partners as quickly and accurately as possible. A knowledge base is another word for an internal FAQ, which your team can use to build and refine its institutional knowledge, empowering everyone to access the information they need when they need it. There are several reasons it is crucial to deploying an internal knowledge base:
Decrease Training Costs
Training new employees require resources, time, and money. This can greatly reduce with an internal knowledge base in place. Give your employees access to the knowledge base and help them self-train on their roles and responsibilities.
Foster Collaboration Among Teams
Collaboration can become a challenge if your teams are spread across different locations. With an internal knowledge base, you can bring your employees together on a single platform. They can contribute knowledge, make corrections to an already-written piece, and collectively work to build and maintain your knowledge base.
Better Customer Service
The support staff can't remember whole of the information, searching the knowledge from written papers or unorganised documents is tedious and slows down the response time of agent. For instance, support agent is searching for information while the customer is on call. In such scenario, a centralised place with efficient serach engine such as PHPKB knowledge base software, can reduce the long waiting time for customers and help yout staff members find information easily.
Increased Productivity
Employees waste their own and other team members time in searching for information or shoulder tapping other employees for help. They waste the crucial time they could have spent working employee productivity decreases when your company lacks an internal knowledge base to refer to. However, when companies use an PHPKB internal knowledge base to store company knowledge and information, employee wouldn't waste time in collecting the relevant information and can concentrate on their work resulting in increased productivity.
Information Retention
The more common scenario in an organization is that you do not look into what knowledge an employee holds until it reaches a point they are leaving the organization. Suddenly you request them to document everything. It’s natural when someone left, their affinity towards the organization will be at the lowest level and you are going to only get the basic. It’s better to build a culture where processes and procedures are continuously documented and available to everyone. An internal knowledge base ensures that if an employee goes on sick leave or joins another company, your company can still keep and use their knowledge when it is recorded in the database.
How to build an internal knowledge base with PHPKB?
All you need is the right knowledge base software to build an interesting online knowledge repository for your employees. A powerful tool provides you everything you need to create an internal knowledge base, right from authoring and publishing features to collaboration and customization options. There are several ways you can set internal knowledge base with PHPKB knowledge base software. Few ways are listed below:
Restricted Access Mode
With a single click, you can convert your entire knowledge base into a complete private knowledge base making it secure. To access the content, your internal employees need to login to the knowledge base first.
This mode means no access for unregistered users. The secured enterprise knowledge base accessible from any part of the world by registered users (staff / teams / partners) with no access for ordinary visitors. The internal knowledge of your company like policies, technical instructions, training materials, guidelines and procedures with your staff by enabling the restricted access mode of knowledge base from "General Settings".
User Groups
PHPKB knowledge base software has the capability to be used as internal and external knowledge base simultaneously for staff and visitors with the help of user groups. You can create groups for knowledge-base users and associate them with private categories so that they can access the knowledge content assigned to their user-group. This way the internal knowledge is visible only to your team, using which they can use to provide better support assistance to customers. Company of the corporate level in which each department has its own section under control greatly benefits from implementation of user-group & private categories to define department-wise access to the knowledge domain for all members.
