What is an internal knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a medium of communication between you and your customers or employees that helps them get the most out of your business by themselves.

There are two types of knowledge bases: internal and external knowledge bases.

The external knowledge base equips people outside your organization such as your vendors and customers for self-service. The articles in an external knowledge base explain your value propositions and how they can be accessed while explaining your pricing plans.

The internal knowledge base content has practical information on how you can run your business profitably. It has details about every role, workflow, company information, and more, continually updated with time by you and your team while making them feel valued.

For smooth operation and sustainable growth of a company, knowledge management is crucial which is facilitated by an internal knowledge base software. Let’s take a look at its benefits.

Why You Should Use an Internal Knowledge Base Software

A company’s knowledge base is a handbook for its employees that keeps it profitable. And here are seven more benefits of having an internal knowledge base:

1. Efficient collaboration: Your employees can collaborate with others better by learning about how various workflows work at your company by themselves and their role in each of them.
2. Fewer distractions: You or your colleagues will spend less time answering common questions enabling you to do more deep work.
3. Improved employee engagement: Will you have a good time at the workplace if you constantly had to wait for others to get your questions answered?
4. Faster onboarding process: Through self-service, your new employees can learn the ropes pretty much without HR assistance.
5. Reduced training time: By creating how-to guides, you can virtually train unlimited team members in a short duration.
6. Serve customers better: When your employees can access all your organizational information through a search bar, they can deliver a better customer experience.
7. Own your knowledge: Both internal and external knowledge bases are your company’s most valuable asset, which will continue to give good returns.

Companies of all sizes can benefit from internal knowledge bases regardless of the industry they serve. Let’s take a look at six internal knowledge base examples of use cases.

6 Internal Knowledge Base Use Cases to Explore

Internal knowledge base solutions are an asset to all departments of an organization which helps in aligning efforts while saving resources. In the six internal knowledge base examples of applications below, we explained the problem and how an effective knowledge base solves it.

1. Human Resources

The human resources (HR) team of your company takes care of your employees—everything from onboarding and training new hires to ensuring all the team members enjoy a good employee experience.

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This usually entails answering a lot of questions as quickly as possible, whether it is letting a candidate know whether they are selected for the next round or helping the interns through their training tutorials.

In many instances, they have to answer trivial questions such as “what is the leave policy” or “how much do I get paid for overtime” etc., which are important for the employees but can be cumbersome for HR teams.

A knowledge base software will take a huge load off of the shoulders of the HR team in this scenario. It will automate a lot of the processes by shifting the control over to the employees which will allow them to handle the critical support tickets.

2. Content Creation Guidelines

Every company is unique in terms of its value proposition and market positioning which is reflected through its content. Brand language, tone, keywords, and preferred content formats are some of the parameters that make your company’s message stand out.

Generally, you will have to explain the entire process of content creation from ideation to publication step-by-step to new team members. The challenge is, this process becomes repetitive whenever new employees join.

As a result, it costs you lots of time and money. Furthermore, if old employees leave during crunch time, it is even more difficult because there will already be too much on your plates. This could compromise your other processes as well.

Knowledge management solves this by letting new content team members learn about their respective processes during onboarding. They can go through your company’s wiki and get their FAQs answered at their own pace.

Another activity that could drain your resources is explaining the legal terms of engagement to your new hires. The next internal knowledge base example of use cases explains just that.

3. Company Legal Policies

The legal policies are the terms and conditions that both you and your employees must agree to before working together. It makes sure that both parties start off with the right expectations in mind and also prevents conflicts when you part ways.

A company’s legal policies also make it easier for them to handle conflicts with customers effectively. Customer support teams can quickly refer to this document to deliver a faster and more appropriate resolution to their grieving customers.

Although it is “boring”, it is mandatory for every company to ensure that their employees, job applicants, and customers are aware of this. As these policies change from time to time, you have to take steps to share the new updates with the invested members.

Here, HR and customer support teams can rely on internal knowledge management tools to make this entire process effortless. You can set up custom automation which will inform everyone whenever the policies are edited.

4. Employee Benefits Information

Employee benefits refer to the value your team gets from your company apart from the paycheck for their services. Usually, it comprises health insurance, retirement funds, and paid time off and has a major impact on employee retention.

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These benefits are generally shared with the employees during the onboarding process. However, as the industry standards change and your company enters a new phase, various changes are made to these benefits and the conditions in which they can be availed.

You can use knowledge base software to share all the relevant details about the perks your employees can avail during their time with you. Apart from answering their questions related to common issues, it will enable them to get the most out of your company, boosting retention.

5. Application Usage Instructions

Do you use your smartphone the same way as your friend?

Of course not.

That holds true for all tools you use to run the various processes in your company. For example, members of your customer support team might know how to use Zendesk, a help desk tool, which you use too. But the way you use it is entirely different from their previous employer.

This is where your knowledge base tool can give them a comprehensive walkthrough of how you use that tool at their preferred pace through self-service. Also, your customer service team can revisit those docs for a quick revision whenever they need help with troubleshooting.

6. Storage of Archived Content

Things get outdated, even the best knowledge base articles. For keeping your knowledge base lean and user-friendly, you have to invest time and effort in “cleaning up”.

However, that doesn’t mean deleting old content.

Archiving is a solution that makes your content inaccessible via the knowledge base search engine. These content pieces are simply “retired” but can be put back to use with the click of a button. A knowledge base solution makes it as easy as A-B-C.

Ariglad is Your All-in-one Internal Knowledge Base

Internal knowledge bases help empower your employees to get the best out of your company and have a great experience. 

Solving employees’ issues, guiding the content team, sharing your legal policies, explaining employee benefits, instructing about the tools in your processes, and archiving outdated content are six crucial functions of an internal knowledge base.

Ariglad’s internal knowledge base solution will allow you to deliver all of the above six values to your employees (and customers) at affordable costs. It will help automate the support process by taking care of common queries, freeing up your schedule so you can focus on strategic initiatives that add to the bottom line.

‍Book a demo to learn how Ariglad can transform your internal knowledge management strategy.