Knowledge Sharing Portal: Educate Your Customers, Teams, and Partners

Remember the days when you are not able to decide what to eat or where to eat? Well, we all have those days and what do we do? We directly go online and search for good nearby restaurants or if we are in the mood to explore, we search for must-try cuisines available in local restaurants.

Today, because of the internet, everyone can access any information easily. And we make so many decisions based on the available information, reviews and feedback.

Deciding about the restaurant was just a small example.

Almost all our decisions like purchasing clothes, gadgets, booking hotels, tickets, etc. are based on the information, reviews, feedback, etc. available online.

Our decisions are largely affected by what we see on social media or the Internet as a whole.

Because of these changes in customer behavior landscape and excessive amount of data generation, it has become mandatory for companies to share right knowledge with their customers, partners and employees directly. What knowledge you have to share with whom might vary but the means remain the same.

“Knowledge Sharing Portals”

First, let’s explore what a knowledge portal is.

According to IGI Global:

“A knowledge portal is an Internet-based computer program that constitutes a single point of access to organizational knowledge, integrating knowledge repositories, expert directories, collaboration tools, and other knowledge-intensive applications”.

In simple terms: Knowledge sharing portals works as a gateway between you and your customers, employees or any other parties you interact with. It is a perfect medium to share organizational knowledge, product knowledge, technical knowledge, etc.

Now let’s see what’s the importance of knowledge sharing and knowledge portal that makes a must-have for every company.

Currently, millennials are the biggest target group for any tech company if not for any company and according to a research done by Salesforce, 89% of millennials are using search engines to search for answers to their customer service questions. Additionally, 84% use self-service portals to find answers to their queries.

Pre-portal, it is possible that your employees were facing issues in handling customer requests, sharing documents, user manuals, handbooks, guides, etc. And to answer a single customer query, they had to go through the long email trails to provide the right support.

Additionally, being in touch with the customers through multiple channels like calls, emails, messages, etc. can be straining for employees as well as your customers.

And this is where a knowledge portal plays a vital role by providing your customers with a unified space to explore everything about your organization. It also automates the process of sharing data, information, etc. with your clients, partners, teams and any other people who need to have the knowledge of your organization. These people can login to portals and get the information as and when they need.

Not only this, but they can access user manuals, handbooks easily to find the solution to their technical queries.

We can easily say that with the help of portals, knowledge sharing is just a few taps away.

These are not the only benefits of knowledge sharing or knowledge sharing portal. Let’s look at some more:

• Easy document sharing

This is one of the key features of knowledge sharing portals. They make sharing documents with your customers, partners and teams effortless and efficient. This is one of the most secure ways to share important documents like invoices, contracts, NDAs, user manuals, product updates, analysis reports, etc.

Now, they can access these documents easily from anywhere at any time in a secured manner. Additionally, it also maintains the logs for the documents uploaded, shared, edited, etc.

• Marketing campaigns

Knowledge portals lets you send the marketing content directly to customers and portal users. This allows you to successfully run marketing campaigns and understand your customer base. You can even send notifications about new product launches or any new updates in product features.

• Sharing case studies

It becomes easy for your customers to know about your work through case studies on knowledge portal. Your employees can upload case studies, FAQs, etc. in the knowledge portals making it easier for them to understand your products and services.

Apart from all these benefits, knowledge portals also lessen ticket generation. As you will be providing almost all the necessary information about your products and services, your customers won’t need to contact you as much.
But before you go on investing in a knowledge portal, here are a few knowledge sharing practices you need to follow.

• Go for custom knowledge portal development

Every company has a different way of operating and business logic. Of course, you can purchase a knowledge portal online. But, we would recommend you to reach out to companies that can create custom knowledge portal for you. This will save you those extra resources otherwise spent on customizing the original portal. Having custom portals give you the freedom over the features, workflow and logic of the solution too.

• Add accessibility rules

With a custom portal, you can decide who should have what level of access. You can make your knowledge portal public or login mandatory. Not only this but you can even add extra security measures like two step authentication if needed.

• Add pre-sales queries

Nowadays, customers want to have in-depth knowledge of the product before purchasing it and so it becomes very obvious that they’ll do detailed research. And while doing so, they will have lots of queries.

In such scenarios, the pre-sales queries section comes to your rescue. Here, you can add all the answers to frequently asked pre purchasing queries making it easy for your customers to make a decision. This will also help in building confidence and trust among your customers.

• Integrate it with CRM

Integration of knowledge portal with your CRM makes it easy for you to know more about your customers and business partners. Additionally, if any query raises, you can see it in the CRM and assign it a sales person to resolve. This integration streamlines your operations. So, make sure to integrate your knowledge portal with CRM.

Wrapping it up:

Knowledge and data are the new oil that can take your organization to the next level. And sharing the right pieces of information with your customers can help build the rapport with them giving you an upper hand of your competitors.

About Us:

CRMJetty is a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions. Our tools ensure that you can render enhanced interactions at each stage of your customer lifecycle. So, if you are searching for a portal development company, we are here to help you in building the right customized portal. Something that your customers will love to engage with. We have served in this industry for a decade and have built many custom portals like knowledge sharing portal, self-service portal, web development portals, etc. Get in touch with us to create customized portals and we’ll help you kickstart your journey towards growing with portals.