Knowledge is Power

Is there anything more exasperating than searching for information you’re sure is out there somewhere but you’re not quite sure where? For employees and customers alike, these data hunts are always frustrating and can add up to a colossal waste of time and money.

Information is every company’s most valuable asset. Organising that information within a knowledge base so that the people who matter most to you – your employees and your customers – can make use of it efficiently, for their own benefit and for the benefit of your company, should be high on your list of priorities. The good news is, if you use Workbooks CRM, the job’s already half-done.

McKinsey research suggests that so-called ‘interaction workers’ (managers, customer service agents, salespeople and anyone else whose jobs involve a lot of interacting with people) spend just 39% of their working time actually doing their job. The rest of the time they’re busy dealing with emails (28%), communicating and collaborating with colleagues (14%), and gathering information (19%). Leaving aside for a moment what this says about our addiction to our inboxes, that’s the best part of a whole day every week just looking for information.

This clearly suggests that a well-organised knowledge base could have a big impact on your company’s productivity. But the benefits of a knowledge base don’t stop at efficiency.It will also encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing, which in turn will make employees feel valued and thus increase satisfaction and engagement.

It will help you retain valuable information when people move on, which is good for the company and makes life easier for those stepping into their shoes.It also helps to keep remote workers connected to the company’s knowledge, whether they’re on the road, at a conference, or visiting a customer.And by using a knowledge base to share information that’s useful for groups within your company, employees are likely to start using email less, freeing up their inboxes for one-to-one communication. And this might chip away at that remarkable 28% of working time spent dealing with emails.

For clients

When your employees are empowered to do their jobs faster and more efficiently, your customers immediately feel the benefit. They’ll also be able to self-serve more efficiently, finding solutions to their own problems rather than making multiple calls to your customer service team on the same issue. This frees up your service teams’ time to concentrate on activities that are worth more to your company and your clients.

Thanks to the ability Workbooks gives you to combine website metrics and CRM data, you’ll be able to track who’s visited your site and automatically connect specific activity to an organisation or person.This enables you to monitor how your knowledge base is being used, pinning down who accessed specific pages in the period leading up to the creation of a customer service case, for example.

That means your agents will know what the customer’s already researched before speaking to them so there’s less wasted time and confusion. It will also help agents tailor their responses to customers’ specific requirements.If you notice you’re getting lots of visits to a particular page but also lots of customer service cases in that area, that might prompt you to revisit the content on that page because it doesn’t seem to be solving your customers’ problems.Or you might find you have pages containing useful answers to issues that frequently come up, but those pages are rarely being visited. In this case, it might be worth changing the way you present the information in your knowledge base.

For you

A strong, user-friendly knowledge base is a sure-fire way to improve the productivity and engagement of employees while simultaneously driving up customer satisfaction. It is the proverbial no-brainer for almost any company.

Your knowledge base will provide invaluable information about which of your products and services are generating the most queries, helping you to allocate resources more effectively and even shape your strategy.

If you’re a Workbooks user who wants to find out more about how to use your CRM solution to create a knowledge base, just get in touch. If knowledge is power, then plugging your employees and customers into a well-organised knowledge base is one of the best ways to light up your company.