Turn Kipwise into the Google for your team - How to build a search-first culture in the team

We recommend teaching one habit, searching first, and having managers model it. When a question is already answered in the knowledge base, reply with the page and a one-line answer. When it is not, write the page first and answer with that. This post shows how to do both with Kipwise’s Slack shortcuts, and why to keep the teaching to one feature for teammates.

In daily life you Google what you do not know. At work you often ask a teammate instead, because asking feels faster than searching. If that keeps repeating, the same teammate goes over the same information again and again. Searching company information is hard because it is often not written down, so only certain teammates know it, or it is hidden in one of the many tools you use, or it left with a former employee.

Separate the knowledge base onboarding process for managers and teammates

To speed up adoption of your team knowledge base, make it simple to start. Instead of going through every single feature during onboarding, focus only on the core features.

Because admins and teammates take on different roles when using the team knowledge base, we recommend separating the onboarding for managers and teammates. Focus on two features for admins, “Answer with Kipwise” and “Save to Kipwise”, and one feature for other teammates, “Search”.

Teach teammates to “Search” and Kipwise will help close the loop

You only need to teach teammates how to search, and our smart features will close the loop and guide your teammates to build up the knowledge base in a collaborative way.

Other than teaching teammates to use the Kipwise search command on Slack, also encourage teammates to install our browser extensions so that they can easily access Kipwise when using any web apps.

If they cannot find the info they need, Kipwise will prompt them to create a question via our Q&A flow. The question and answer will then be saved to Kipwise automatically to grow your knowledge base, so the next person finds the answer instead of asking again.

A habit takes time to build, and teammates will forget to search at the beginning, so the two features below are for managers.

How managers can use the “Answer with Kipwise” feature to remind teammates to search

1. When someone asks a question about something already on the knowledge base, answer it with the existing Kipwise article

A teammate forgot to search the knowledge base and asked about something that is already on it? Use our Answer with Kipwise Slack shortcut to answer the question with just a few clicks.

Kipwise will search automatically using the question text, and you can quickly select a Kipwise Page as the answer. Our bot will then notify the teammate who asked the question.

That saves you time, and it reminds the teammate to use Kipwise. It’s just like the Kipwise version of “Let me Google that for you”, and that joke can sting when it arrives as a bare link. Add one line in the thread with the short answer: the teammate is unblocked at once and still learns where the answer lives.

2. When you encounter a new question, always create a new article

What about a question that is not on your team knowledge base yet? Create a new Kipwise page and use it to answer your teammate’s question instead of answering directly. It takes a bit more time now and saves a lot more later. Your teammate also learns that they can search for the info on Kipwise next time instead of asking someone again.

How managers can use the “Save to Kipwise” feature to keep expanding the knowledge base

What about when you see a teammate share something important in Slack that is not on Kipwise yet? Use the Save to Kipwise feature to save the content to Kipwise with just a few clicks.

We will also add a reply to the original Slack message so that the teammate knows you saved the info to Kipwise and can find it there next time.

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