Well-engineered knowledge bases are able to successfully support all your stakeholders in a single knowledge base (KB).
Unfortunately, some vendors require you to purchase two or more separate knowledge bases to successfully support your business.
Supporting multiple knowledge bases has several negative consequences that may not be immediately obvious:
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Costs you more money to buy multiple pieces of software. Don’t be fooled by the same software being branded differently for internal and external users.
Takes more of your time and money to learn, implement, integrate and administer multiple systems.
Requires staff to learn 2 different systems and go to two different places to find desired content/answers.
You often end up with
duplicate and inconsistent content and people going to the wrong place to find their desired answer, since much of the same content needs to be available to staff and people external to your organization.
Silos your content: makes useful integration and access across all content difficult. Say that you want to create some KB articles to include different content, depending on who is viewing the particular content. With individual knowledge bases, you can't. With Fuze, you can!
Supporting all your stakeholders from a single knowledge base is what FuzeDigital does.
How? By using these robust yet easy-to-use features:
Access Rights that you define at a very granular level let you specify who can see what KB content. For example:
Maybe you want to include some relevant operational or marketing copy for your staff in a KB article about one of your products or services. Both the consumer and staff person get the answers they need about your product/service and your staff person viewing the article also has immediate access to tips on selling or supporting your product/service. The dynamic nature of our
Placeholder and
Related Content features really shines here, too.
Change Control where you have complete control over who in your organization must review KB content before it is accessible for consumption by your intended audience.
Depending on who is using the content and for what purpose, a KB article may be approved by a single staff person or require up to three different staff in a particular order to ensure it is ready for prime time. The level of editorial controls can be designed by you to match the inherent risk associated with the content’s usage.
More Controls to ensure you don't accidently publish private KB content intended for staff to consumers, members or other external stakeholders:
- Topics (categories) and articles (content) in the Fuze knowledge base can be either Public or Private.
- Public topics and articles can be viewed by anyone internal or external to your organization.
- Private topics and articles can only be viewed by internal users who have logged in to your Fuze site.
- Content about private info, such as Human Resources, when placed in a Private topic can only be made privately available. Since Private topics can only contain Private KB articles, it is impossible to publish a Public KB article in a Private topic. This feature by itself eliminates the vast majority of risk for accidentally making private KB content viewable by people external to your organization.
- We even support something called Limited Public and Limited Private topics and content that allow you to restrict viewing by certain staff and/or external users, like your board members.
- Optional reminder - When a person with publishing authority first publishes KB content as Public, the system can be configured to make them answer affirmatively that they indeed want to make the KB content at hand viewable by people external to your organization.
- Publishing rights - You have total control over which staff you allow to publish KB articles for public consumption.
- Far beyond just ensuring that Private KB content is not published as Public KB content, you can systematically ensure that Public content:
- Is understandable by the intended audience
- Follows any content or marketing guidelines you expect
- As necessary, has gone through a final review by someone in Compliance or Legal to ensure that your organization is properly protected
From the very beginning we engineered our knowledge base to support all your stakeholders.
Over the last 14 years we have only made it better based on real world usage.
You can certainly count on a Fuze knowledge base to successfully support everyone -- external and internal -- when and where it makes sense for your organization.