4 Astounding Ways to Collaborate on a Knowledge Base

Implementing a knowledge base for business purposes is ineffective without the right strategy and approach. Luckily, with a little of organization, utilizing the full potential of a knowledge base is going to significantly increase productivity.

This tool has proven useful for businesses of all sizes. The smaller businesses are going to build a sturdy foundation, as the valuable information will grow as the business does. On the other hand, big businesses will be able to take control over many working processes. Let’s take a look at a couple of great ways in which knowledge base can make collaboration incredibly easy.

Organizing customer support better

Achieving stable business growth requires complete organization of multiple in-house workflow processes. One that makes quite an impact on businesses is customer support. Luckily, utilizing a knowledge base for this business task is easy. There are a few ways in which document collaboration software can help:

• Creation of wikis and FAQ pages – Employees can use the knowledge base to build incredibly detailed customer support wikis and FAQ pages. Collaboration benefits include allowing teams to collectively work on creating huge wiki pages. For example, a single person can work on a set of pages, whereas each of the other team members can simultaneously work on their own. This makes the task of organizing customer support pages much more time-efficient.
• Distribution of customer support tickets – Over time, each of the customer support agents are going to become more adept at particular tasks. Customer support tickets require immediate action, and distributing the right tickets to particular agents can speed up the efforts. This form of collaboration is automated, as setting up which agent is responsible for which types of requests is quite simple.
• Collecting information for future reference – A knowledge base brings people from multiple departments together. The customer support team can more easily collect information about the customer support complaints. Through analyzing this data, another department can create a better product that will lead to less problems in the future. This will increase customer satisfaction and also bring less stress on the whole customer support team.
• Integration for better performance – Customer support can be integrated with other software tools. One particularly useful tool is live chat. Agents can work together on improving their live chat performance, as multiple people can work on a problem together.

These are some ways in which customer support can more easily collaborate internally and with other company departments.

Making the outsourcing process significantly easier

Sooner or later, your company is going to collaborate with other teams, especially if you are running a smaller business. Providing the right documentation to the other company is essential for lowering the chance of any mistakes occurring.

This can be easily managed by creating specific knowledge base pages that would be accessible only by the company you are outsourcing the task to. They would include all the shared project details. Furthermore, the knowledge base can be used as project management software, enabling both companies to function and communicate better, reducing the chance of any problems occurring during the collaboration process.

A specific team focuses on specific projects

As the knowledge base grows, organizing it can become harder. However, with all the accessibility controls, not every member has to have access to all of the data stored there.

Imagine logging in into the knowledge base, only to see over 100  different pages randomly categorized. Luckily, with access control, your managers can easily decide who has the access to particular pages. This makes the whole team more effective, as it lowers the amount of distractions that each employee would experience when visiting the company pages.

This is especially important for long term success. Create well organized pages which are shared with all of the knowledge base users, but keep the project-specific information accessible only to those who are participating in their execution.

Employee education made easier

Utilizing knowledge base for achieving easier work collaboration is not the only option at your disposal. One of the things all employees should have access to are courses or links to other valuable resources that can help them learn new things.

This can be structured in several different ways:

• Employee efforts – If you are looking to build a great company culture, this is a very good method. For example, every week, month or any other specific period of time, an employee or an entire team could work on publishing a course that would help other colleagues or the new people who are just joining the company. To turn this into a habit, it is necessary to incentivize employees by rewarding them for the time and knowledge invested in creating a course.
• Paid courses – Sooner or later, you are going to require a professional’s help, as some things are best explained by people who dedicate their whole careers to teaching. This kind of investment is going to pay off greatly, especially if you are investing in evergreen knowledge. Practice making this kind of step every couple of months, it will help your employees achieve more growth that will turn them in true experts in their field.
• Sharing practical skills – In every company, there are gifted workers who take a special approach to their work. This helps them perform exceptionally well, making them valuable company members. If you like their practices and want all your team members to behave similarly, they could start sharing their practical skills with the rest of their colleagues. As other employees adopt these approaches and skills, you can expect not only better collaboration, but better overall performance of all the team members.

Employee education is an important step for every company, and using a knowledge base is the perfect way of making this process a collaborative, company-wide practice.

These are some of the ways in which using a knowledge base can improve collaboration. It all depends on how creative you or your managers are. The options are endless, as these software tools are feature-rich. Invest enough time in their development, and you will see how effective this software tool is for collaboration.

We wish to thank Robin of ProProfs for his contribution.