How much of your business knowledge is still stored in someone’s head?
An engineer phones the office to ask how you want a particular job documented. Someone else wants to know the process for dealing with a complaint. A new starter needs to find your checklist for a boiler service.
The answers probably exist somewhere. But are they easy to find when somebody actually needs them?
One of the less flashy (but potentially really useful) changes in ServiceM8 15 is the improvement to Knowledge.
You can now organise your Knowledge articles into Sections and choose which staff security roles can view or edit the content in each one.
So, for example, you could have:
- Engineers: how to complete your service reports, take handover photos or record extra work.
- Office: how to book different types of jobs, manage complaints or follow up quotes.
- Management: internal procedures that aren’t relevant to everyone else.
It doesn’t need to become a huge project. I’d start with the three questions your team asks most often, then turn the answers into short Knowledge articles.
Here’s where to start:
- Make sure the Knowledge add-on is enabled under Settings > ServiceM8 Add-ons.
- In the Online Dashboard, go to Settings > Knowledge Articles.
- Open More actions (…) > Manage Sections, then Add Section.
- Give your Section a name and set each security role to No Access, Read-only or Full Access.
- Assign your Knowledge articles to the appropriate Section.
One important point: new Sections give every role Full Access by default, so don’t forget to check the permissions, particularly for management information. And Section permissions aren’t a way to recall content that’s already synced to somebody’s device.
Another important point: You’ll need to be on the Premium plan to use Knowledge. If you’re on the Growing plan, try Premium for just £2 extra per day for a month and see how many interruptions are removed from your month.
The goal isn’t to write a company handbook nobody reads. It’s to stop the same questions interrupting the same people, over and over again.
What question does your team ask you repeatedly that you could answer once in ServiceM8 Knowledge?
Tell or show me your examples!
~ Hazel
