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Do you have a common drive for the business where you guys store all the details that you need while you do your tasks? Do you share your information using emails and Google Documents? Or, do you do that using Dropbox? Seriously, you guys need the knowledge management (to discover) and understand knowledge base benefits.
If you’re a mid-sized company and you’re still not building your own internal knowledge base then you’ve got a big problem.
Table of Contents
Here’s why:
According to McKinsey’s study, the typical contact worker spends about 20% of his working time looking for important internal details or requesting other coworkers to assist with particular problems. The report further suggests that a searchable archive of facts will minimize up to 35% of the time workers spent looking for company-related material!
Let’s rewrite this part as follows: If your employee works 9 hours a day, then he spends at least 1.8 hours searching for the information he needs to get his job done!
That’s 9 HOURS/week per employee!
Let’s say you have 100 employees: 9×100 = 900 HOURS/week.
That’s 3600 HOURS/month!
43200 HOURS/year!
And that is focused solely on the time that a single employee invests when looking for details, the time that other workers would have to communicate with others in need of assistance is not even measured!
So, in fact, this amount of hours invested in such an interaction is doubled or tripled! It’s a lot of time and lots of energy.
Now, the second portion of the dull sentence from McKinsey’s study: research also shows that a centralized repository of facts will minimize the hours that workers waste looking for business-related details by up to 35%!
All you need to do is do this for Google: 35% of 43200. It’s just that fast.
You’re going to get something like this: 15120 HOURS a year. Oh, that’s the time that can (or should) be spared for a business with 100 workers.
– Hey, the workers who pose dumb questions all the time cost us a million dollars a year! Let’s smash them and they don’t query again!
Ok, there’s no reason to condemn staff for posing questions. Really, you’re expected to be grateful that they’re working at all.
Interconnection from problems to solutions is missing. We can also say nobody likes to go to the library but everybody will go to the digital library today.
7 Knowledge Base Benefits
1. Fewer perceptions, more optimism
If we take into consideration that customers usually favor self-service, it is straightforward to determine that workers choose to pursue responses by consulting anyone. So, that may lead to a scenario where a newly qualified employee tends to feel awkward asking so many questions even if his job grants him complete privileges to do so.
Not to forget the number of hypotheses to be made in this job setting where you have to query others all the time over something!
You should of course still have a need to connect with other workers, but this conversation will go beyond the superficial concerns that need to be posed and addressed over and over again.
2. Improved cooperation and communication with agents + increased productivity
We have now addressed how it is daunting to involve the staff and why an internal knowledge base would help enhance this.
It’s pretty simple: Better communication is equivalent to better employee engagement at your company.
There are several reports about how effective contact promotes commitment and many on how employee engagement boosts efficiency. One of the most surprising findings is that just 25% of businesses currently have a specified plan to boost employee engagement.
Effective coordination can improve commitment. So, where to get started?
You possibly still use some sort of tool for your internal contact, like # Slack or Basecamp, so you can get rid of repetitive contact by introducing an internal knowledge base where your senior workers have to recite all the answers over and over again.
3. Effective agent onboarding
Even if you recruit an accomplished person who has a lot of professional knowledge about the job he would perform, you will need to expose them to your business and your goods.
As the recruiting and firing cycle progresses to the extent that a variety of new workers are recruited regularly, it may be even more difficult to proceed by submitting business details by e-mail and reacting to demands for any specific information over and over again than compiling all such data through a knowledge base and delivering only a few links to the current employees. This collectively makes agent onboarding effective and simpler and is again one of the internal knowledge base benefits.
4. Shortened teaching time for employees
In the SaaS environment and every other company where much of the staff works and connects remotely from various areas of the world, preparation for workers always needs to be conducted remotely.
Considering that certain workers who are going to be qualified to do the job properly would not be recruited all at once, but more slowly, it will take a lot of precious time to have different online training sessions via Skype, TeamViewer, or similar instruments.
Instead, much of this teaching phase may be performed through the internal information base. As in every other component, this section will include photos, pictures, and all a new employee wants to know.
This means the cycle of learning will quickly become part of daily tasks if necessary.
5. Better service to customers
On how many occasions were you kept on a customer service call because you were sure the person didn’t actually know the solution so he goes out to question his coworkers about the matter?
Also, the strongest customer service workers with a lot of professional experience would, from time to time need to inquire for any details elsewhere.
The internal knowledge base and applicable technological expertise will do a better number and that may be the only place to stop feeling like a bazaar to the customer service staff. It saves time and resources and increases customer service.
6. Greater satisfaction of customers
Higher staff participation and stronger team coordination naturally build a more productive work climate. In turn, this would translate to improved customer experience and more efficient customer care and the clients will be happier and less prone to churn at the end of the line.
And what is more critical than consumer service for your company?
When you have content customers, you just don’t have to worry too much about the new customer creation. Transform your customers into brand advocates which helps in growing your base without spending on marketing efforts. Also, loyal customers tend to stay longer.
According to research conducted by AmericanExpress, any single satisfied customer has the ability to carry with himself nine more customers based solely on the positive experience he has had with your company.
7. Make an investment for the future
Yeah, we have almost forgotten what a core of knowledge does! Save the information and make it searchable and available, right? If you get it packed, you do possess it!
The only quality you can truly attain in the field of constantly changing industries is experience. Your company will change its name and aim, your business can even quit operating but what counts most is the information you gain throughout the cycle. Today, as never before, intelligence has been the asset of greatest interest.
You may possess the awareness though. You could store it in your company to make it accessible to everyone, and that it can be used and enhanced. Only that is the way to go. So eventually, to achieve so, you’ll need to understand knowledge base benefits and create your own internal knowledge base.
