Companies often need some kind of knowledge management system to automate employee onboarding, learning, and providing services.  They will receive substantial benefits through the adoption of a KB as the system helps these organizations optimize the utilization of various forms of knowledge including texts, audio files, videos, photos, presentations, etc.

A Knowledge Base (KB) is a set of stored and organized information about a company’s products and services - written in such a way that enables both employees and customers to find what they need - which can be accessed quickly and efficiently. It includes a FAQ section, step-by-step guides, troubleshooting tips, tutorial videos, etc. Knowledge base can be used both by your employees and clients. It provides the readers with basic explanatory steps and diagnoses, so that your staff is alleviated from the troubles of having to resolve the same kind of issues all the time. 

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The Essentials of a Good Knowledge Base

KB's purpose is to answer questions and provide solutions in a simple and effective way. Its content should be structured (organized), so that the users can easily access and learn from it. The knowledge bases should contain a mixture of text, charts, videos, and other educational and informative material that enable users to find the exact solution they need.

Now, you might be uncertain about what KB actually contains. Here, the best answer is to examine ongoing trends. It may be time to organize the various textual information you have into a knowledge base article if you are constantly receiving the same set of questions from customers and fellow employees. Similarly, you can also locate the various bottlenecks in the user experience of your website using documentation tools like HotJar, and or create online user polls to see where viewers are experiencing most difficulties. 

You can also utilize tools like Google Analytics to uncover the popularity of individual topics if you already possess some forms of recommended site search capability. You can also find these data through your website’s internal search analytics using the steps below: 

1. Behavior: understanding website visitors’ on-site behavior, connecting with individual users for feedback, and utilizing the insights to optimize the site experience.
2. Site search: understanding what are the visitors looking for, and adjusting the website (products display) properly.
3. Overview: The overview interface will show you the terms that interest people the most. 

Furthermore, you can compare time periods using Google Analytics and categorize these sets of data using ‘Absolute Change’ to see rising trends over a specific period of time.

Discoverability is another crucial element contributing to a substantial and successful KB.  Your KB’s portal should be placed in key sections such as the articles component on your website’s home page. A good search function combined with the KB portal front and center are keys to helping the users locate questions and finding solutions.

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Companies Grow When They Have Knowledge Bases 

One must not underlook the power of supplementary platforms considering that some analyses have called KB the single largest contributor to resolving some 50% of customer problems and concerns.  One of the most visible benefits of having a KB is that you would not need to spend as much time over customer service as in other less optimal scenarios, freeing your team more time and energy on tackling the more important issues. This simple adjustment will help you nurture more informed clients, and greater online presences. As you can see in the following discussion, there exists various other benefits to adopting and utilizing a KB. 

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Better Customer Support

Once implemented, your new KB will be the automated 24/7 virtual help desk of your website; in other words, your clients will no longer be coming to you directly for answers when experiencing bugs or problems. This will substantially enhance the productivity of your customer relations team as they are able to focus more on managing various customer data and in keeping them informed of the latest updates or feature changes. A good KB enables the product team to quickly update relevant encyclopedias to ensure that vital details can be easily retrieved. Simultaneously, your marketing team can send these updates out through outbound messaging, and others in the company, including the sales, customer relations, and support teams, will be able to coordinate hand-in-hand in delivering the latest information to both the clients and leads. Good internal coordination plus happy customers are good things to have. 

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Greater Productivity

No matter the department, KB helps employees in various positions access all the helpful content and information they need in one place. It will save them time, provide them with the necessary information to operate, and assist in answering customer questions. KB will also reduce delays that might occur, for example, when employees need information from ‘knowledge holders,’ otherwise known as individuals who exclusively know or have access to particular materials. KB can also become a central knowledge hub for all your information sources including CMSs, cloud storage, databases, etc.

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Employees Onboarding and Training

Companies don’t expect employees to start work without proper training. Having a centralized KB can speed-up this usually slow and inefficient onboarding process by providing new employees with materials, making them easily accessible and free of hassales. .Whether it be in the office, at home, or at the airport, having a knowledge base ensures that your employees can access the information they need securely and without delays. Bearing in mind the recent pandemic, providing employees with knowledge-sharing resources will hugely benefit and enhance the efficiency of both remote and hybrid workers.

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Extra Features for Better User Experience

Searchability

A good KB is most effective when it is enriched by smart, intuitive search capabilities that allows  users to efficiently find and locate what they need among an overwhelming pool of digital assets. Your search functionality can be provided by an integrated search tool or a premade advanced search API. The benefit of using an advanced API is that it can pull data from a range of sources and centralize all your organization’s information. In an era where data accumulates exponentially on a daily basis, excellent search is most definitely a blessing.

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Integration

Access to relevant information should be flawless, user-friendly, and based on your employees’ daily workflows. You can enable this by integrating your knowledge management with the various apps and programs your employees are using.  You should also double check to make sure that the knowledge management tools in consideration are compatible with your existing workflow and collaboration applications.

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Strengthening The Internal Processes

A good and functional knowledge base improves the process and efficiency in every part of your organization. Different departments can upload information that’s useful or needed by other departments. Departments can communicate and selectively upload needed information to other departments, bringing much needed interdepartmental synergies to the company. While there may be some overlap from time to time, the main benefit is that everyone has access to the information they need, when they need it. What is the outcome? Better team collaboration, less redundancy, and stronger productivity. In the end, everybody wins. Lastly, implementing KB within an organization helps reduce people’s anxiety of not being able to find critical information from a poorly managed cloud database with tens of thousands of files, and thereby, avoiding disasters.

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How to Create a Useful Knowledge Base with Omnisearch?

At Omnisearch, we offer a great opportunity to create your own comprehensive, multilingual, and searchable knowledge base. With helps from our professional partners, we will assist you in launching a customized knowledge base for your organization. Moreover, we will support you in providing access to whoever needs it. Whether it is onboarding, customer training, compliance training or continued education, Omnisearch is the one-stop solution center for your company. 

We will perform a comprehensive content audit and provide you with insights on how to best optimize your existing database (including media files, documents, audio recordings, emails, power-points, etc). This report will allow you to categorize your files seamlessly and will make it easier for you to restructure and re-organize your database with all the in-house knowledge Omnisearch possesses.

Once the transition is completed, all of your files and relevant resources will be stored in one single place - no matter if they are audio recordings or video files, documents or handouts, presentations or plain texts. With Omnisearch, the days of painfully navigating multiple content repositories is a thing of the past!

On top of your new KB - we will add on an AI-powered search functionality developed by Omnisearch. With our advanced features, your employees will be able to search through all your content, no matter the file format.

Omnisearch tools can significantly improve your current knowledge base, and will increase the overall employee and customer satisfaction. With our KB and search tools, the functionality of your current KB will be enhanced, and you will gain positive feedback from your employees. Feel free to contact us for a quick demo on how to improve your knowledge base and data management skills.