3 pain points on company knowledge
Launching in 2020, our team of 3 has been circling the wagons, aiming to solve how to access knowledge across your company in an effective manner. Our goal has been how do we help build a direct path between questions and answers to save distributed teams loads of time tracking down information.
Coming from first hand experience, and countless customer conversations, we’ve landed on some recurring themes:
- Tracking down who knows what, is a frustrating ineffective process
- Static content lives in multiple systems, and is organized in a variety of different ways
- The same questions are asked several different times, causing fatigue on the answerer
We’re trying to orient Giraffe for these pressing problems, but much of this stems from the fact that knowledge is left offline and isn’t easily accessible for so many companies. Outside of your immediate team, it is hard for others to know the contribution you bring to the organization and the knowledge you own.
Our solution right now targets the first theme, tracking down who knows what. With Giraffe, companies are bringing their teams’ knowledge online allowing for greater access to this information across the company. Users set up a profile and pick from a list of suggested Knowledge Tags to add to their profile. These suggested Knowledge Tags are dynamic based on the user’s department. With these Tags applied to user profiles we build out a database of company specific knowledge tying it to users. Users can search this collection of knowledge all via Slack, searching for a keyword and being presented with relevant users with the ability to direct message them for help.
GiraffeBot in Slack automates follow-up activities to determine whether the interaction was helpful, ultimately scoring the answerer. This helps unearth subject matter expertise overtime across the company based on who is helping whom, with the ability to quantify these interactions to leadership.
For themes 2 & 3 above, how we as a team are thinking about static content and its organization gets us really excited 🤓! Content lives in different systems, meaning you may look for answers in Google Drive, but the document lives in Notion or was in an email etc. We want Giraffe to play as traffic cop, pointing users to not only helpful teammates, but also to relevant content that may live in various systems. When making a search, think of us as a layer to point you to an answer, where ever that may live. Serving up teammates alongside relevant content presents an awesome opportunity to give users a direct path to finding help. We can collect this information all with GiraffeBot via chat conversation to collect URLs and store this information seamlessly.
Additionally, we want end users to leverage Giraffe as a personal knowledge base. Something where a user would specify the topical areas they own and provide documents/answers to commonly asked questions. Giraffe would store this info and present it to whomever originated the question, drastically improving the productivity of the answerer, not having to repeat answers for commonly asked questions.
All of this, we are very keen to quantify and capture in terms of insights back to our users. With the ability to note search volume, who is helping whom, time saved finding answers with Giraffe, unanswered outcomes, and most helpful documents…we can showcase some very unique insights for users and leadership around how users and navigating to answers across the company. All of this ultimately saving teams material amounts of time and money to dedicate on strategic activities vs tracking down help.
Excited about what is on the horizon and would love to hear your thoughts to better inform this direction! Please feel free to schedule time with our team here to share your thoughts and ideas on how we can make this better.
Until next time 👋🦒
