You can use a knowledge base both internally and externally. An internal knowledge base is a repository of information for your employees to help them collaborate better and be more productive. For customers, an external knowledge base, like FAQ pages, can help them find answers to their queries on their own without wasting any time or bothering your customer support team.

Historically, knowledge bases have been static, which makes it challenging to keep them updated and relevant. However, a modern knowledge base software empowers your organization with an automatically growing information repository that includes all your critical communications.

But, do you really need a knowledge base?

Well, the answer depends on your long and short business goals. If you are looking at building a more productive workforce, an internal knowledge base is a great place to start. In terms of customer experience, if you wish to improve customer service, an external knowledge base is always ready to help customers when they need it.

According to data, 66 percent of customers try self-service before they decide to contact customer support. This number goes up to 89 percent among millennials, a generation that forms the bulk of your buyers. Also, knowledge base content adds to your SEO efforts by improving your site’s searchability by regularly adding well-written and useful content.

However, if you struggle with coming up with good quality content for your knowledge base, then you risk doing damage to your website SEO ranking. In that case, it’s a good practice to take advice from content creation companies like Essay Tigers or from some other high-authority private experts.

But building a knowledge base is not a day’s work. Instead, it is a long term process of putting all your key documents, presentations, and reports together to build a valuable source of information for both your employees and customers.

Below, we have listed four ways to use a knowledge base to boost your team’s productivity:

1. Improved Employee Onboarding

Hiring the right employees in your team is only half the battle won. To ensure that your new hires are adequately trained and acquainted with the company culture is a whole new challenge altogether. Thankfully, having a single source of truth like an up-to-date knowledge base can help employees get up to speed quickly and seamlessly.

By collating all the necessary resources in one place, it becomes easier and faster to create a consistent onboarding process that ensures uniformity of training, too. Besides, a self-help onboarding system enables employees to familiarize themselves with the company’s materials and internal processes. It can even give a boost to getting to know the company culture!

Overall, an internal knowledge base provides a ready reckoner for all the staff and streamlines the onboarding process by allowing the team to focus on the essential pieces of training required. You can make the process more efficient by creating an onboarding checklist that new hires can use to guide themselves through the knowledge base and complete their training in a planned manner.

Besides bringing your employees up to speed quickly, an internal knowledge base also reduces your training costs. With onboarding automation, you no longer need to free-up team members or hire third-party trainers to onboard new employees. Besides, the new hires can get to work sooner, which also increases your ROI.

2. Increased Employee Efficiency

Did you know, office workers in the UK spend more than 1 million hours per week searching for documents?

In 2018, the Definitive Guide to America’s Most Broken Processes quoted a survey reporting that:

• 49% of respondents had trouble locating documents
• 43% of respondents had difficulty with document sharing
• 33% of respondents struggled with the document versioning

An older McKinsey report mentions that employees spend, on average, 9.3 hours per week searching and gathering information. In other words, this means that one-fifth of your employees are busy searching for answers but not contributing any value – which is a big waste!

Thankfully, there’s technology to the rescue in the form of a good internal knowledge base that will help your team find the information swiftly, without ducking their heads in cabinets or bothering teammates with volleys of questions.

Of course, your knowledge base cannot fish invoices or lost bills for you, but it will get you the information you need when you punch in the right keywords, which can significantly boost team productivity.

3. Reduced Pressure on Customer-Facing Staff

An external self-service knowledge base enables your customers to get quick answers to common or straightforward queries. Indeed, users love having a self-service option to save their precious time and also feel a sense of pride in troubleshooting issues on their own.

Enabling self-service for customers also helps your support team by reducing the number of tickets they have to deal with regularly. For example, you can have an AI-based chatbot as the first line of customer service on your digital touchpoints. This will help you automate your support system, as a chatbot can answer up to 80 percent of repetitive queries by redirecting customers to the relevant FAQ pages. Only complicated questions are filtered to live agents, allowing them to focus on critical issues and solve them efficiently in a reduced timeframe. The result? Happier and satisfied customers and a more productive workforce.

4. Improved Collaboration Between Teams

As your business grows, so does the information that goes back and forth between the growing number of employees or teams. Increasing amounts of work also mean that your internal communications are often buried under heaps of work-related emails and go unnoticed. A knowledge base can help improve the team communication, as it helps people navigate through the clutter and collaborate on a common platform for increased productivity.

By using an internal knowledge base as a repository of ideas and information, team members get access to a single source of truth for everything, breaking down the informational silos that often come in the way of productivity. Employees may also be allowed to contribute articles and snippets to build the collection of useful information for everyone.

For example, every team in your company can add a project report with their success, failures, and lessons learned in the knowledge base once they complete any project. This information can be used to avoid past mistakes when starting a new project for the same client or regarding a similar product.

Parting thoughts: Boost Team Productivity With A Knowledge Base

A comprehensive knowledge base tool can help you address a wide range of internal issues such as low productivity, miscommunication, and repetitive workflows. In addition, it also improves customer experience and your site’s searchability, adding to the overall revenue. Of course, a knowledge base is not a silver bullet to turn around your business, but it is definitely the right start to streamline your organization and optimize costs.

The post 4 Ways To Boost Team Productivity With A Knowledge Base appeared first on Fleep Blog.

Here are 10 effective ways to increase productivity using technology. All of which you can implement in your company today.

#1 Have 24/7 Access to Important Information

In a secure way, create a cloud system that allows your employees to gain access to important files to make updates, add files or check on something in your team chat wherever they are in the world.  With a secure system in place, you can have quite an advantage since your employees don’t have to wait until they get to the office to make any changes.

#2 Make It Easier to Work Together

A smooth collaboration between your suppliers, customers, partners and employees is a sure way to boost productivity while reducing costs at the same time. With the right systems in place for effective communication, file management, calendar events management and other similar new technologies help easily collaborate on any project while knowing where everyone stands.

#3 Be Available

Depending on your business, quick response time can determine revenue or the speed of delivering a project. If it’s essential for your business to be available, set up a system for it. Whether it’s a universal networked phone that rings multiple phones or an email system that connects with your entire staff, creating a universal system can ensure inquiries are answered in a timely manner. Just make sure you don’t create unnecessary urgency and stress for your team by also keeping in mind that team chat culture matters.

#4 Be Organized

Countless hours can be wasted on menial tasks such as keeping track of hours on a project, tracking mileage and even tracking business expenses while on the road. Often, all of this often also means wasting time of management who must approve and file the paperwork. Consider investing in cloud-based time tracking systems that allow your employees to easily log in wherever they are and update their information.

#5 Keyboard Shortcuts

Instead of highlighting a piece of text, right clicking the mouse, hitting copy, then moving the mouse yet again to click paste can easily waste 20 seconds. Yes, it doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you’re performing a task that takes 20 seconds and should only take two, and you’re doing this 100 times per day, it can really add up. It may be wise to learn the basic shortcuts for your favorite chat for teams and any other software you use daily, such as Word or Excel to help save quite a bit of time throughout the day.

#6 Monitor Productivity and Goals

Online business intelligence tools allow managers track the progress of any goal as it’s being completed by your team. This, in turn, can help managers offer reinforcement, coaching and help determine where the project currently stands to make sure it gets completed on time. You can also encourage the staff by rewarding their successes with monetary or non-monetary incentives.

#7 Be Automated in Some Areas

Find the tools that may be able to automate a process so that you can use your employees on tasks that matter.  Tasks, such as scheduling, responding to email or even paying the bills, can all be automated with the help of software.

#8 Track Your Time

The best time management tools run securely in the background on your computer and mobile devices and can create a detailed report, tracking the time spent on applications and websites. Depending on the software you do choose, you can set up alerts if a certain amount of time is being spent on an activity or even blocking websites in general.  By cutting getting rid of this wasted time, you can be assured you’re maximizing your work output.

#9 Consider Video Conferencing Tools

If some of your team do remote work, you have to give some thought to effective communication in a remote team. Video conferencing tools like appear.in can be of much help. Instead of flying an employee into town and spending money on food, a hotel room and airline ticket, using the right video conference software will help cut down on your out-of-pocket expenses. Most of the video conferencing great for talking face to face, and even screen sharing, so you can present as if you were in a meeting room in person.

#10 Make Sure You’re Using the Right Technology

Lastly, make sure you’re using the right technology tools as some tools can be a blessing while others can be a curse.  Improving your productivity can be done if the right tools are utilized, and to so, determine where you need a productivity boost in your everyday operations and research a tool to help fill the gap.

In today’s technological world filled with thousands upon thousands of tools, you can definitely increase productivity using technology.

The post 10 Effective Ways to Increase Productivity Using Technology [Updated] appeared first on Fleep Blog.

More and more people are discovering that remote work can be the best way for you to boost productivity. You can create your own hours and get things done from the comfort of your own home.

However, when you’re working in a team, it can be hard to communicate well remotely. When you’re all in different locations or even different time zones, that’s not surprising. Here’s how you can improve communication in a remote team, wherever you are.

Have regular meetings

Thanks to video conferencing, you can all stay in touch no matter where you are. Take the time every so often to check in with each other, using a video conference. Within our team we’ve found that video conferencing can give you the face to face contact you really need to communicate well. We have an integration for video calling in Fleep with appear.in – but you can use any video conferencing software you find convenient for you.

If you’re all in different time zones, make sure you time them carefully. Be fair, too. If one team member needs to get up super early for a conference one time, give them a better afternoon time slot next time.

Use emoji

Emoji may seem like something that should remain in a teenager’s text messages, but emojis can be crucial. Why? Because when you’re communicating via messages, the recipient doesn’t have the benefit of tone or body language. What you could mean to be light hearted can seem quite accusatory to them.

Using emoji sparingly here and there is not just fun, but helps make it clear what you’re thinking. We have built-in support for emoji in Fleep, as well as our own Fleep emoticons to help you out!

Use team chat responsibly

Team chat is a great way to keep in touch with your team throughout the day. When you’re looking for a quick answer to a question, firing off a message can be the best way of getting it. When you use such team communication tools though, you need to make sure you’re using them responsibly.

First of all, remember that team chat culture is key. That is to say, how your team uses the chat for teams, often determines whether or not the tool helps your team get work done. Things like whether people expect immediate responses, whether each team member is in charge of their own attention span – they all matter.

Secondly, grammar matters, even in your team chat and project communication. Bad grammar can cause confusion and irritation with your colleagues and partners. If you feel as if you need help, a writing communities like Paper Fellows or Academized could help you out.

Useful communication tools

With the right tools, you can even further improve communication in a remote team. Here are some of the best online tools that your team can use.

• appear.in: This is one of the best web conferencing, video chat and screen sharing tools around.
• Fleep: This is a team chat tool that can be used on almost any device, and helps your team stay focused on what’s important.
• CloudTalk Phone System: This is a remote-ready communication software that empowers your sales and support teams. CloudTalk has interesting features like automated call distribution, dialer and callback option, IVR, and call center analytics.
• Word Counter: This tool can help your team keep their messages short and to the point when they need to. Enter your text in and you’ll get an accurate word count.
• Do My Assignment: This writing service can help you craft important messages and emails, when you need them the most.
• Write My Essay: This service is excellent when you need to improve your grammar. Work with an expert to see where you need to improve.
• Cite It In: Use this site to get the right citation for your sources, every time.

Better communication with a remote team is based on understanding everyone’s needs. If you take care of each other, you can all perform well.

The post 4 Ways To Improve Communication In A Remote Team appeared first on Fleep Blog.

Undoubtedly, the effectiveness of the company depends on communications, both internal (between CEO and staff) and external (customers, suppliers, public authorities, etc.). And not without reason – information has quite tangible parameters:

1. Speed. This index affects the efficiency of decision-making. For example, the vendor has changed the price, and the company has to change the prices and notify customers. A slight delay – and the business will fold up.
2. Objectivity and completeness. This parameter characterizes the accuracy of goal setting. For example, misunderstanding of a technical task leads to the loss of time and resources.
3. Relevance. You should keep up with times. For instance, you should react immediately to the reduction of prices by competitors. Do it in a week, and you’ll be outperformed. You always have a little time to respond. Meanwhile, the market may become saturated, leaving you behind.

The three reasons above make CEOs think about the information flows and means of communication. As for the information flows, they must match the business processes and interconnect employees, executives, and interested parties.

• For example, clients’ suggestions to change the characteristics of products can be transferred through sales department, which reduces the objectivity and timeliness of information, or go directly to the development department, which makes the company closer to the customer (as the developers will be able to process proposals and make the necessary changes much quicker).

The effectiveness of the company can be greatly increased by creating an effective “horizontal” flow of information between employees, which is especially important when running a collective work, or if the process needs coherence.

Humaneness as the Key to Success

The involvement of staff in internal communications occurs due to awareness of staff of business goals of the company and how they coincide with their personal aspirations. The ultimate goal of any company is to make each and every employee its ambassador, making everything possible to engage the staff in the internal life of the corporation. Finally, whether workers know it or not, they are always ambassadors of the organization, even in private life.

Of course, the way people perceive the brand depends not only on advertising and the policy but also on what the employees say about the company.

Ineffective Communication and Effective Communication in a Team

The development of a program of effective internal communications should start with a general assessment of the management environment. The next goes the examining of the organizational structure and type of existing utilities. To assess the current state of the team and the level of employees’ satisfaction, it is necessary to conduct a small internal study that will determine which forms of communication are the most appropriate and effective for workers. The results will show whether you can introduce new types of communications – like a business messenger or team chat – and will also reveal weak points if the company has ones.

Suggestion boxes and general meetings are the two most common ways of communication between employees and management. But they are ineffective if they get no response. To make a communication channel work at its full, you should consider several points:

• Leaders of high rank need to come to the meetings in advance and communicate with employees to inspire and bring them together.
• The organizers of such meetings must be able to engage the audience in dialogue.
• The participants should prepare questions in advance and submit them in printed form.

It is also important to establish clear criteria for determining information that should be released to the staff. Such information can increase workers’ satisfaction with the company and increase productivity. The awareness of the affairs of the company and the awareness of their role make employees support the company’s goals, and they get more confidence in the leadership. On the contrary, withholding information or silence leads to rumors and destabilizes teamwork.

The communications should occur in several ways, such as:

• Personal conversations with employees.
• Through your collaboration software.
• The use of video and cable television.
• Annual staff report.
• Message boards.
• Official website and blog with competent posts.
• Informal corporate meetings.

Modern workers are not inclined to blindly obey the orders of the leadership. They rather have great independence: without hesitation, they leave the company if something does not suit. Personal needs are very important. Ultimately, these needs define the degree diligent and hardworking. 

Today, most employees want to be sure that their company cares about them. Unfortunately, some managers do not take this into account. Not always attempts to deal with corporate governance problems by small means, the introduction of payment by results, the development of more effective goals, and periodic staff training produce the desired effect. People often lack simple human relations.

But to bring this idea to life is much harder than to recognize it. To do this, you need to have clearly expressed principles and corporate values. By proclaiming them, the company demonstrates the employees how it intends to win their trust.

And one more thing: the development of values ​​should be carried out by the workers themselves, not by a group of managers or a special agency. If the company is not ready to implement the stated values, it’s better not to inspire employees with these changes, wasting money and time.

Further Reading:

• How to Improve Team Communication: The Ultimate Guide
• 14 Team Communication Quotes to Inspire Your Team
• Team Communication Strategies of top CEOs and Leaders

The post How to Build Effective Communication in a Team appeared first on Fleep Blog.

It’s rather advantageous to both a website owner and a guest blogger, as the first takes a break from writing articles while maintaining the schedule while the latter promotes his services, boosts raise search engine rankings and attract new visitors.

Well, it’s not that easy to get such an opportunity, especially if you’re going to contribute to the credible resource while yours is still unknown. Although you have little chance, that’s not impossible in case the blog post is high-quality, relevant, catching, and unique.

In a highly competitive environment, you have to constantly work on your guest blogging skills and techniques. Check the advice below and reach the best blogs, being a real guest post guru.

#1 Relevance of the Idea

The first and the most important guest blogging rule is that the guest post must correspond to the topic of the website. On the one hand, it narrows the number of websites on which you can post; on the other hand; you get the relevant audience that will likely read the piece and become interested in you in case the post is worthy.

Sometimes it’s quite challenging to come up with the topic so that to satisfy the website owner and make the research in-depth and grounded. Well, if you’re in such a crisis, the next ideas are at your service:

• Informational post. Tell readers about a particular term or phenomenon or provide a detailed response to a specific question. You may write a post in encyclopedia style or a freestyle, depending on the specifics of the website.
• Guide. Quite a popular genre, which always attracts a large number of audience. The mission is to provide readers with a step-by-step plan that will help them to achieve this or that result. Well, the alpha and omega here are to provide a consistent and error-free sequence of actions; otherwise, you’ll get reproaches instead of gratitude.
• Classification. Share the varieties of the object and provide concrete and useful information about each one, backed by illustrations and specific examples.
• Review. The best practice is to choose some useful online service, affiliate program, application software package, etc. and analyze it from A to Z. Set yourself a task to provide readers with comprehensive information and get at least questions as possible.
• Comparison.  In fact, you make a parallel review of several programs, services, etc., specifying their general and distinctive features. Don’t make the conclusion in favor of this or that product – that’s the prerogative of readers.
• News. If you have some hot news that must be shared with the world, don’t hesitate to ask the host about it. Of course, the main thing is to publish fresh materials that haven’t been announced yet. If you are the first – the job is done!
• Interview. Let’s not go into details as it’s obvious that success of the interview depends on the chosen questions.
• History. I doubt that the blog owner will allow you to share the personal history of your brand/goods/services (until the post is paid), but you may succeed in posting some instructive and enlightening, warning the readers or explaining to them how to act in a particular situation.
• Rating. Obviously, that’s the most popular YouTube theme. Nowadays, YouTube is full of different charts. The best, the worst, the cheapest, the strongest, the biggest, the most shocking, etc. As a rule, an audience kindly appreciates this kind of posts.
• Pros and Cons. The task is almost the same as in “Comparison” blog post. Try to be fair and objective so not let the reader get the impression that you advertise intrusively or throw mud at someone.
• Methods/Tips/Advice. Here you can share your personal vision of the problem and give some advice on the solution. Lifehacks are welcomed!☺
• Disclosure. In this kind of post, you expose some untrue news, myths and even harmful actions of specific individuals. I must say this genre is very difficult, as you risk amassing competitors and enemies. Don’t embellish or misrepresent facts.
• Personal Experience. Tell about your experiments, both successful and frankly failing. That’s always interesting.

If you already have a loyal audience, be sure to catch their hints for new posts. Continue to study and research, and you will find an infinite number of topics you can take. Dig deeper and write more than insightful posts!

#2 Writing Style and Formatting

Every blogger has an own unique writing style. Don’t be afraid of showing your personal style. Diversity contributes to the perception of the whole blog, as regular readers may get tired of contemplating one and the same style. Nevertheless, stick to the established rules and regulations. Be sure to check the guidelines before you start writing.

To hone your writing style and make the post more appealing, try to:

• Put a quotation at the top.
• Write an intriguing introduction; bring a few fascinating facts or statistics.
• Vary long and short sentences.
• Use bulleted lists and format the paper so that to ease the perception.
• Use spellcheckers and special software to eliminate typos.
• Remove meaningless sentences.
• Put your word aside for a while and then edit it.
• Read the piece aloud.
• Share it with your family and friends to get some tips.

Look at the most popular guest posts on the website and try to stick to the same format and style. Pay attention to the size of paragraphs, headers, and images. Make sure that the images correspond to the content of the paper, have an appropriate width, and are labeled for reuse. Feel free to include screenshots for “how to” articles and guides.

#3 Editing Before Publication

It all depends on the website owner (editors/managers). Be ready that your post will be edited and changed before the approval. Firstly, it can be done to improve the effectiveness of the article – editors may come up with more engaging header or subheaders, highlight certain words and phrases, include images, remove “contentious issues,” etc. So do not be offended if this happens, even if you believe your piece is perfect. ☺

#4 Backlinks

It is clear that the author of the guest post should receive some benefit from the publication. Therefore, as a rule, it’s allowed put 1–3 references to a project that you would like to promote. Make sure that the links add some value to the paper and look relevant. Purely promotional links usually cause irritation and feeling of imposing.

If you want to promote safely, specify that the article is a guest post at the first chapter and add a link to your personal blog.

You can always check LinksManagement, a link-building service to get help with your links.

#5 Avoiding Typical Mistakes

If the whole process – from the request to the publication – runs smoothly, then you get a great chance to become a regular contributor. Well, even if you haven’t counted on it, why to refuse to stay in touch with the audience of the credible website?

Here are some of the common mistake made by both novice and experienced bloggers:

• Non-personal inquiry. It all starts with sending the request. If the message begins with an impersonal greeting, the recipient may consider the letter as spam. Be sure to include the name of the company you’re writing to, and you’ll be treated as a professional.
• Misprints and grammar mistakes. If you can’t write a professional offer, why would the editor of the blog decide the letter will be better? Take time to prepare proposals or hire an editor.
• Topics that were already covered. Suggesting an article on a topic that was previously covered is the shortest way to miss the opportunity to publish. Conduct research before sending your list of themes. If you are looking to post on a particular topic to improve the issuance on keywords, look on the website to see which articles on the selected topic have already been published.
• Underestimating your talent. Use your marketing skills! Show yourself in the best light; point to the main advantages and state the main reasons for considering you as an author for the blog. Sell yourself! If you have a successful blog or you’re popular on social networks, be sure to share this info in the offer.
• Poor bio. Stick to the guide for guest bloggers. As a rule, a bio should include a few sentences that vividly describe the blogger. Treat this info as an elevator pitch.

Be sure to discuss all the terms and conditions, as well as the exact date of publication before sending the post on approval. Well-written guest posts will significantly speed up the indexing of your site and increase trust in the eyes of search engines and visitors.

Further Reading:

• Coworking Spaces: Perfect Offices for Remote Collaboration
• 14 Team Communication Quotes to Inspire Your Team
• Why Expressing Emotion Really Matters in Messaging

The post How to Improve Your Guest Blogging Skills appeared first on Fleep Blog.