Think about your daily life - when you do not know about something, what do you usually do? You Google it! How about at work? When you have a question, instead of searching for the answer yourself, you often just ask a teammate instead. Why is it the case? Because oftentimes, you think asking a teammate is faster than searching for the answer yourself. However, if this process keeps repeating, you are actually eating up the time of the teammate who has to go over the same information again and again.
Searching for company internal information is so hard because a lot of the time information are not well-organized and easily retrievable like Google. Sometimes it’s not written down, so only certain teammates know it, or it’s hidden inside one of the hundreds of tools that you use every day. Or worse, it’s lost because it’s inside the brain of a left employee. Other than lowering team productivity. This inefficiency in information transfer also explains why it usually takes 8 months to onboard a new hire, and how impactful it is when someone left the team.
So why not start building a Google for your team and build a search-first culture? It’s not as hard as you might think by using Kipwise and in this article we will show you how.
Separate the knowledge base onboarding process for managers and teammates
If you want to speed up the adoption process for your team knowledge base, you need to make it simple for your team to start with. Instead of going through every single feature during the onboarding process, only focus on on the core features to get started.
Because admins and teammates take on a different role when using the team knowledge base, we recommend that you should separate the onboarding process for managers and teammates. And to make it easy for them to get started, just focus on two features for admins - “Answer with Kipwise” and “Save to Kipwise” and one feature for other teammates - “Search”.
Simply teach teammates to “Search” and Kipwise will help close the loop
Teaching teammates how to use Kipwise is simple. 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 you never have to answer the same question twice.
We understand that a habit takes time to build, so even if you have taught teammates to search, there is still a very high chance that they will forget to do it at the beginning. So we have built features to help managers establish a search-first culture that we will outline below.
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, answer it with the existing Kipwise article
A teammate forgot to search the knowledge base and asked a question on something that is on your knowledge base already? 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.
This way, not only can you save time in answering the question, the teammate will also be reminded about the use of Kipwise. It’s just like the Kipwise version of “Let me Google that for you”!
Based on our user feedback, when managers take on the lead to answer questions using the Answer with Kipwise feature, in just 1-2 months, teammates will be more engaged with the team knowledge base and start to develop a search-first culture.
2. When you encounter a new question, always create a new article
How about when someone asked about something that is not on your team knowledge yet? Always create a new Kipwise page and use it to answer your teammate’s question instead of directly answering your teammate. It might take you a bit more time to do this, but trust us, it will save you a whole lot of time down the road.
By answering the question this way, your teammate will also know that they will be able to search for the info on Kipwise next time instead of needing to ask someone again instead.
How managers can use the “Save to Kipwise” feature to keep expanding the knowledge base
What about when you saw a teammate shared something important in Slack that is not on Kipwise yet? You can 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 will know that you helped them to save the info to Kipwise, so that they know they can find the info on Kipwise next time.
Getting started with Kipwise is just this easy. Start building a search-first culture in your team and soon Kipwise will become the Google for your team!
