The knowledge that your company accumulates is your competitive edge over others. No one can match your experience and insight. That’s a strong reason which establishes this fact that a company’s knowledge base improves every aspect of your business.
What is the purpose of a company knowledge base?
A knowledge base is a centralized depository of a company where all internal information is organized in the form of knowledge articles. It is an ultimate option to store market reports, customer data, details of products, and documents of employees.
It has many advantages such as:
The perfect solution to your online knowledge base is your intranet. It truly is, as long as it aids knowledge management in your company. With intranet software, you have a range of intuitive search indices and collaborative tools. It makes staff more encouraged and focused. As internal information is stored at the same place where the staff gets stuff done i.e. answers to queries, communication with workmates, and announcements by company authority. One platform means more saved and productive time.
If you centralize what your departments require, your customer contentment and retention improve, profits grow and employees become happier, what’s more, they will take the onus in performing their roles. It is simply amazing that you can do a lot with organized information. You can make the search more fruitful and convenient.
Here are twelve important tips to create the best knowledge base for your company.
A robust knowledge base enables your company to take a knowledge-centric approach in every aspect of your business such as customer support, training of employees, and employee onboarding. That’s the reason that the knowledge base should be filled with relevant information and resources that are designed with employees as a central point. Here frequent queries, significant issues and topics, and guides for different teams in your company should be easily accessible. It has an added advantage, it simplifies many other processes that need information sharing by using online collaboration tools.
This knowledge-centric approach is structured to support departments in working more efficiently. This has a host of benefits: customer support representatives can find identical cases they are working on, new employees can find training guides, and the sales team gets access to email templates to handle crucial deals. The strength of the online knowledge base is in the relevance of content and ease of finding it. If you care about the practices you use to capture, organize, utilize, and reuse information; your employees will be grateful to you.
If you wish your knowledge base to be a genuine resource for your people, your content should be simple and intelligible. Give the purpose and audience a priority while preparing your content. For example, if you are writing content for common customer support questions, it may be formulated as a Q&A. other team, like your legal department, might need a more comprehensive document.
It’s not sufficient to throw a bundle of documents into the knowledge base of your company. Furrow through your content well. The knowledge you make available to your workforce should be truly intelligible and helpful in serving their specific needs.
Are the issues faced by team members of different departments identical? Most probably the answer to this question should be affirmative. If it is so, you can provide that insight and expert information in your online knowledge base. This may be in the form of FAQ pages, Cases, or Wikis. Building a knowledge base works best when you provide a solution through a document addressing the common issues and contexts.
If you don’t update your knowledge base with new inputs, your workforce will not get enough value from it. It is essential that it provides new insights and information as soon as it is available such as:
This knowledge should be an asset to your company’s knowledge base. It improves their proficiency, they stay informed about the knowledge base regarding the growth of the company and reduces hurdles in its progress.
Motivate your employees to be a part of your knowledge base, it will make them review the information and provide feedback through social features. If there are lapses, these can be rectified or brought to the attention of the seniors. This optimizes the knowledge base and encourages the employees to work more as a community, and complements the overall progress of the company.
Companies that don’t adapt and evolve can lag behind. That’s the reason for encouraging collaborative endeavor, paying attention to ideas, and keeping your employees well-acquainted and groomed with educational resources relevant to their profile and the work they undertake. The knowledge base of your company can keep these articles stored and accessible across weeks, days, and months. Motivate your employees to like, comment, and share information provided in the knowledge base. This will create a community with an inviting attribute that supports the growth of every member of the organization. 
It is pertinent to make information in the knowledge base searchable. Otherwise, it is of no use. Streamlined navigation will upgrade your user’s experience — this way your employees will easily get, update, and share information.
Your online knowledge base does a lot: it systematizes external communications with possible leads, and presents customers and visitors on your public website, as the information is easily accessible to everyone. Motivate your employees across teams to create articles and blogs with marketing as an objective. This keeps staff educated about customers’ queries and they will satisfy them at once. An article titled FAQs can be published by the customer care support team of the company. The communication team can showcase the potency by creating blogs or posts about industry topics. If you use your erudition to provide the best experiences to customers it shows commitment.
Knowledgebase software motivates your employees to give their expert opinion and contribute to your prospering community. By enabling social features in your knowledge base each one in the organization interacts with the other on a virtual platform. They view and review others’ work and it generates a mutually beneficial situation both for the company as well as the employees.
For instance, a sales representative created an article in the knowledge base about handling challenging situations with potent and prospective customers. A new entrant in the sales department finds it an enriching read and gives this article a thumbs up or a clap. There is yet another seasoned and expert salesperson who has been working for the company for more than a decade; he reads the same article and adds something crucial which was missing. Further, he leaves a comment with the additions made. This establishes how employees compete less among themselves but learn, grow, and engage together more.
It may seem an arduous task to add the company’s branding to the online knowledgebase but it has a deep impact. Customization is indeed one of the top management trends. Incorporating your company’s logo or colors of your company makes content more interesting. It associates your employees with your company more closely. If you take pride in providing tools to your company, they will reciprocate it by creating work with your resources.
Give this visualization a moment: How would your knowledge base look? You might be envisaging documents, the employee handbook, notes, or maybe software. But it ultimately would be a centralized depository of expertise and work contribution of your employees.
A strong directory of employees will create connectivity — an asset for exchanging expert information in an organization. Motivate your faculty to fill out their profile completely. Do give space to their personal interests and past experiences. Using personal activity streams can be beneficial as others will be able to view who is working on what and can have their queries answered.
The intranet is an ideal home for the knowledge base of your company as it simplifies the manner in which a specific job is done. A centralized availability of files and updated documents saves time which otherwise gets drained searching in different locations across distributed platforms. Collaborative work on the same document boosts quality and integrity. The internal growth of the company depends on the good health of your knowledge base. When you equip your staff with effective tools, the work gets streamlined and productivity takes a leap forward.
If you treat your knowledge base as an organism and work for its evolution, it will remain effective and give desirable results. Explore ways to improve it. Communicate with your team and workforce, create rational employee surveys, or schedule micro-team meetings with managers to get feedback. If your company is already brimming with it, have a personalized observation. Be conscious of the viewership of content. You can track member activity by using the knowledge base statistics tool. Understand what content receives the most views and engagement. The growth of your company and knowledge base go hand in hand. Hence, it is important to keep track of it around the year.
Your employees should be at the center stage while creating the knowledge base of your company as it is for them. When information is handy and employees are motivated to contribute due to this evolving knowledge repository, faculty feels endowed and their role becomes their pride. A well-structured knowledge base is both time and cost-efficient. It ensures productivity across a range of business fronts — customer queries, induction programs for employees, and collaboration. An online knowledge base is a cost-efficient platform because it gives customers handy access to information that otherwise would need an arduous effort to call a support agent for help or a personal visit to the company’s office.
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Article ID: 256
Created: October 6, 2020
Last Updated: March 30, 2023
Author: Manoj Dutta [contact@phpkb.com]
Online URL: https://www.phpkb.com/kb/article/12-important-tips-for-the-best-company-knowledge-base-256.html