At the heart of the AnswerBook is a knowledge base. A knowledge base is a central place where you can digitally store information for easy retrieval at a later time.  Your AnswerBook's knowledge base contains questions and answers and topics and articles.  This knowledge base is comprised of public knowledge items for external access and private knowledge items for internal, or staff,  consumption.  Utilizing user-friendly tools, information is easily added to the knowledge base by your member-facing staff after going through the editorial process you define.  The knowledge base grows naturally as member and staff questions not found in the knowledge base are answered and then added to the knowledge base. 

AnswerBook specifically gets and keeps your staff up to speed on all your products and services so that they consistently and accurately answer questions every time:

• Because your knowledge base automatically keeps track of the most frequently reviewed knowledge items, staff can quickly get up to speed on your products, services and procedures by reviewing the knowledge items most frequently used by others.  Learning from the experiences of others is invaluable.     

• Regardless of whether your staff gets a question on the phone, in person or over the web, your knowledge base is just a browser away to ensure that their answers are consistent and accurate and that they are not wasting their own time or the time of others to find an answer that has been previously resolved several times before.

• Answers that are not found in your knowledge base are automatically routed to your support staff, who can call upon subject matter experts anywhere in your company to help answer the question.  The support staff can then nominate the question and answer for approval and posting into your knowledge base, causing your knowledge base to naturally and quickly grow with pertinent information.

• Public knowledge items can be easily related to private knowledge items, and the link to the private knowledge items are only viewable by staff.  For example, this feature allows you to relate private knowledge items -- about internal procedures, marketing messaging or troubleshooting procedures -- to related public knowledge items about products and services, and only your staff see the related links to the private items.  Information is never repeated and your staff and members stay on the same page by utilizing a single knowledge base.

• Your staff can set alerts on individual knowledge items and groups of knowledge items, automatically being notified via email whenever new information is added or changed within your knowledge base.  The hierarchical category structure of your knowledge base ( as an example: a parent category such as "loans" with child sub-categories such as "auto", "mortgage", "home equity", etc.) allows your users to define their alerts very selectively (for individual knowledge items or for a category of knowledge items) so that they are only notified of information that they are interested in.  Users will receive only a single alert each day via email so they are not disrupted by multiple alert notifications.  Just think of it, procedure and product changes are automatically communicated to all relevant staff, and a sensitive or particularly tough question from one member can be leveraged by all your member-facing staff.  Finally, everyone can be "singing off of the same song sheet"!

The AnswerBook helps you protect your critical investment in people by allowing you to easily capture, reuse and disseminate their knowledge throughout your organization.  With each staff transfer or termination, don't let the knowledge of your employees that you paid so much to develop walk out the door with them!  Capture and share this knowledge with the AnswerBook.