We are happy to announce that Quandora Questions and Answers, so far only offered to selected beta testers, is now publicly available to anyone wishing to try a ready-to-use, simple and efficient solution for sharing knowledge within teams.
What?
Quandora Questions & Answers helps people within organizations share their experience, insights, customer knowledge, history, know-how, expertise, lessons learned, etc. The direct benefits include:
* easier access to crucial business information;
* learning from past mistakes;
* faster new hires ramp-up;
* saving the business history when people leave;
* centralizing and routing knowledge.
For who?
Virtually any company or organization can benefit of using Quandora Questions and Answers for knowledge sharing, but it is particularly true in some specific cases. Here are some examples:
Consulting teams.
We are talking about highly skilled people, very knowledgeable in their area(s) of expertise, who spend most of their time in missions at their customers site.
The opportunities to discuss with their colleagues, compare experiences, and learn from each other are scarce. It’s not rare that a same mistake is unknowingly repeated over and over again by different people. It’s not rare, either, that one person has a hard time finding some much-needed answers, unaware that one of his colleagues has extensive experience on the topic.
With Quandora Questions and Answers, regardless of where a team member is, he has easy access to the other user’s expertise on the Web or on his mobile phone.
Sales teams.
For a salesperson, solid business knowledge (products, customers, deals, competition, markets, etc) is gold. It’s what makes his pitch compelling, and allows him to identify the right value proposition for each case.
But this knowledge doesn’t exist in a book or a documentation: the only way to acquire it is a combination of going in the field and see for his own, and learning from others. Quandora can help a great deal in the latter.
Geographically spread teams.
It’s stating the obvious, but the less people are working physically together, the more transferring knowledge is a challenge. The remote teams or individuals are often struggling delivering quality work because they lack easy access to up-to-date business knowledge. Even more so when there’s timezone issues, too!
Instead of continuously chasing their busy colleagues by phone or email, hoping to get some answers, it would be a lot more efficient to use Quandora instead. Not only they could reach the team quicker, but also, chances are their answer would be already available because somebody else had asked the same question before!
Fast growing companies.
Small companies (up to 15 people, say) are usually the kind of organizations whose communication and collaboration relies on informal exchanges. Only, small companies grow, sometimes in a fast pace, until they’re not so small any more. In between those two stages, there’s a troubled area where the company has no structured processes yet, but cannot handle everything on a 1:1 basis any more. This is where a lightweight, instant to install and to use Questions and Answers software like Quandora can make all the difference.
Companies confronted to mergers and acquisitions.
When two (or more) business entities become one, they usually have little idea about their synergies. And yet, there’s probably a lot of value to be drawn from constructive exchanges, including cross-referencing customers, lines of business, contracts, etc. Quandora would facilitate reaching each other and focusing on highly concrete business matters.
IT companies.
Those companies’ employees are knowledge workers in its purest form. The human know-how asset is, really, what makes them who they are. An efficient knowledge sharing tool can be no less than a competitive advantage for them!
Why?
OK, so it’s established, your team needs a knowledge sharing solution. Why would Quandora be the one?
It uses the right format, Questions and Answers.
Quandora‘s purpose is simple: facilitate the kind of quick, highly practical exchanges people working together have (or at least seek). Although they are usually informal, they carry tremendous value, helping people to build knowledge and deliver more and more quality in their work.
They usually happen through chats at the cafeteria, discussions over the desk, phone calls, instant messaging chats… (The slightly more advanced option is the mailing lists).
In any case, there’s always something in common: they take the form of questions and answers. How is the main competitor handling a certain feature? How can a particular architecture scale based on previous experiences? What case studies/arguments are best to use for a particular sales opportunity? What kind of agreement should be sent to this potential partner? And so on.
Most companies already have some form of collaboration tools, allowing to share files, documentations, wikis. Those are useful, but in our opinion they serve a different purpose. Files, documentations and wikis are generic, descriptive, topic oriented. Not really useful when looking for a very specific little piece of information needed to accomplish a task, under time pressure. By implementing Questions and Answers, Quandora helps the teams get -fast- the exact information they need.
Precious insights for managers – find out what’s going on in your organization
Quandora can extract extremely valuable intelligence about the organization from its content: “trendy” topics, information that people seek but don’t find, what are the expert matters, what are the knowledge related challenges, etc.
Easy on the users
Quandora is by design extremely simple, natural and functional: everything revolves around the questions and answers, the users basically spend all their time on one or two screens. Intelligent automatic tools help users with tagging questions, finding duplicates, and identifying related questions. To avoid the hassle of creating and managing accounts, we provide authentication using Google, SalesForce, or Yammer for those who use those tools. Also, we give users the option to answer or comment to questions via email, since the email is the main work tool for a lot of people.
Easy on the administrators
A hosted solution, Quandora is activated in about 3 clicks. A Quick Start screen guides the administrator through the (very few) steps required to configure the application. Of course, aspects like availability, speed, updates, security are our job.
Also, thanks to crowdsourcing mechanisms, the knowledge base is maintained by itself – so no need for dedicated people. By voting, tagging, editing, flagging or validating, each user brings a small contribution to the quality and accuracy of the content. It takes no time for one person, but when multiplied by the number of users, the result is substantial.
How?
You can try Quandora by your own, with no fees, no commitment, no credit card information to provide, and no string attached. Use the “Try” button from the upper side of Quandora.com pages to fill in some basic information, and instantly start your trial. Quandora can be used 30 days for free. An exceptional offer is available for the first 200 trials: 6 months for free!!! As per July 4, 2012, this limit is not yet reached, so hurry up and start your trial now!
Another option is available for Google Apps users: Quandora is available in the Google Apps Marketplace.
We are looking forward to seing you try Quandora Questions and Answers 😉
Happy knowledge sharing!
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