By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
Knowledge is power. This is a saying that you’ve most likely heard at some point in your life. The reason it rings true is because knowledge allows you to maneuver through the different obstacles life throws your way. Knowing how to overcome a particular challenge allows you to keep moving toward your goal. Since we have a finite lifespan, there is only so much knowledge we can individually obtain within that time. One of the reasons we’ve been able to progress as a society has been because of collaboration and sharing knowledge with others. Instead of having to start from scratch each time, we are able to build off of what has been established by our predecessors. All of the advancements in civilization and technology would not be possible if we didn’t share our knowledge and experiences with each other and continue to build from there. The same can be said in the business setting.
Shared knowledge empowers your employees to do things above their individual capabilities. Whether their role is in sales, marketing, or customer service, having the answers they need at their fingertips makes them more efficient internally. When customer facing, having the right answers allows you to establish trust quickly and increase ease of use to do business with your clients. A big challenge for most organizations when hiring a new employee is getting them up to speed as quickly possible. Having a knowledge base available to them can help accelerate this process so they can become a valuable resource sooner than later. This also helps strengthen business continuity and allows your employees to build off of the lessons of their colleagues and predecessors.
There are many ways to go about implementing a knowledge base system within your organization but it can seem a little daunting to start. Like all data, it has very little use unless you know where to find it (stored location), how to pull the information you need from within it (search/query), and a way to properly manage it (governance/updating). It was only logical that Microsoft incorporated a knowledge base system into their Dynamics CRM platform that addresses all of these needs. The same customer relationship management (CRM) system your sales, marketing, and services team uses each day has a customized library where they can store product white sheets, industry specific articles, marketing materials, frequently asked questions (FAQ), or any other information regarding customers, partners, and/or competitors.
Creating new articles for the knowledge base and finding them when you need them has been made easy as well. Colleagues within your organization can collaborate on creating these documents and submit them to a manager for review and approval. If approved, they can then be published by the manager or sent back for revision. Once an article has been published it can then be searched by the individuals or departments within the organization with the proper permissions. Searching for what you’re looking for is very flexible as well. You can find an article by keyword, title, text from within the document or the article number if you happen to know it. Having this many options to find the answer you are looking for improves resolution time and customer engagement.
As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
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