Bloomfire: Features, Review, Pricing & Alternatives

Bloomfire

Bloomfire is a secure knowledge engagement platform that empowers teams to find information quickly. It eliminates shoulder taps, frantic Slack requests, and repetitive questions by giving the team the knowledge they need, when and where they need it.

Users can upload content in any format (including Word documents, PDFs, videos, audio recordings, and slide decks) or create new content directly in the cloud-based platform.

Bloomfire deep indexes every word in every file–including words spoken in videos– so that users can quickly find what they’re looking for. Whether users are looking to share knowledge across the entire company or within departments, Bloomfire helps break down silos and make information accessible to everyone who needs it.

Bloomfire is currently powering the knowledge-sharing efforts of leading companies including FedEx, Jackson Hewitt, Delta Faucet, and King’s Hawaiian.

Overview of Bloomfire

Bloomfire is a knowledge-sharing and insights platform that helps leading companies centralize and democratize information from across their organization. Bloomfire helps break down the silos that occur when knowledge is spread out across different platforms– or confined to the minds of a few subject matter experts. Its easy-to-use editor allows team members to create rich media posts directly in the platform or to quickly upload posts from a desktop or shared drive.

The platform supports over 50 different file types so that you can share knowledge in any form it takes. Users can also post questions on the platform so that everyone can see what’s been asked and answered.

Bloomfire’s AI-powered search engine deep indexes the words in all file types, including the words spoken in videos. This lets users find relevant content with a simple keyword search. Companies can also create custom categories and use multiple levels of categorization to organize content in a way that makes sense for their business.

Also, users can discover new information through content recommendations based on their interests.

With Bloomfire’s Google-like search, Amazon-like category filters, and Pinterest-like visual preview cards, the interface is intuitive for end users and requires very little training. Bloomfire’s social features (including buttons to like, share, and comment on posts) encourage users to collaborate and stay engaged in the platform.

And, best of all, it requires minimal IT involvement to deploy, customize, and scale across an organization. This means that companies can get their knowledge-sharing community off the ground quickly.

Bloomfire Solutions

Knowledge Sharing

Bloomfire makes your organization’s information accessible from anywhere so your teams can stay aligned, informed, and engaged. This means fewer headaches and greater job satisfaction, according to 90% of users.

With Bloomfire, users can share and search for any type of content, and crowdsource across teams, departments, or the whole company. It also enables every team member to access all the answers, whether they’re in the office, in the field, or working from home.

  • Democratize Information: Promote self-sufficiency at every level of your company by removing information hierarchies and allowing everyone to access the same knowledge, no matter their department, role, or location.
  • Reduce Time Spent Searching: Spend less time digging through emails and Slack threads or hunting down co-workers. Find the information you need faster so you can spend more time doing meaningful work.
  • Prevent Knowledge Loss: Preserve tacit knowledge and expertise when team members leave the company or move to a new role. Important information is never limited to one person’s head or hard drive.
  • Keep Teams Aligned & Moving: Bloomfire ensures there is never any question about where employees should go to find information. Keep everyone aligned and working towards the same goals, even when teams are distributed across multiple locations.
  • Find Content at the Right Time; Find the content that’s most relevant to you through a personalized feed. Follow posts, authors, tags, search terms, and more to ensure you’re always up to date.
  • Increase Content Confidence: Avoid the confusion caused by outdated or competing versions of documents. Use curation tools to identify duplicate content, schedule content reviews, and flag posts for review.

Customer Insights

Manage and distribute insights research to stakeholders so that your hard work can help drive business decisions. Insights should drive business decisions — but stakeholders must be able to find them first. 95% of Bloomfire’s customers say that they view content more frequently and better understand it since adopting the platform.

Insights allow them to learn more about how using Bloomfire as a research library connects team members with the research and insights they need, right when they need them.

  • Increase Insights ROI: Put your research to work by making it easy for employees to discover it through a simple keyword search. More eyes on your research means better business decisions, higher velocity, and stronger growth.
  • Reduce Redundant Research: Search for research topics and questions to see what data and insights already exist. Insights teams report saving hundreds of thousands of dollars by eliminating duplicate research projects.
  • Search Across Secondary Research & Data: Search across not only your primary research but also the third-party data sources and secondary research providers you have access to, such as Mintel, Euromonitor, and Gartner— all in one place.
  • Streamline Vendor Research Publishing: Rein in your research portals by giving your vendors a single place to submit reports for you to review and publish.
  • Enable Self-Service: Extend the reach of your research. Enable all employees to find the insights they need to make informed decisions, at any time and from anywhere.

Bloomfire’s searchable, cloud-based platform makes it simple for insights and market research teams to share their work. It also allows stakeholders to discover the information they need to better understand the market.

Customer Support

Empower support agents with knowledge so they can be more productive and offer exceptional customer service. Bloomfire also helps speed up the onboarding process and gives support agents a single source of truth that they can access from anywhere.

With it, companies can improve the speed and efficiency of customer communications in today’s always-on world of business.

Reduce Time to Call Resolution: Decrease hold time up to 50% by making it simple for your team to search for the answers to customer questions.

Speed Up Onboarding: Give new support agents an easy way to get up to speed, and set up remote learning opportunities with on-demand access to training materials, playbooks, FAQs, and more.

Unify Internal & External Support: Manage information in one place with internal and customer-facing communities. Reduce support tickets and empower customers with a self-service knowledge base.

Eliminate Risk: Use version control, scheduled review reminders, and more to make sure support agents only access trustworthy, up-to-date content.

Delight Customers at Scale: Scale your knowledge as your customer base grows so that customers enjoy a consistently delightful experience and never feel like just a number.

Bloomfire eliminates the need to search multiple locations for content and ensures all support agents are delivering the most useful information to customers.

Benefits of Using Bloomfire

Centralize knowledge

Employees could spend a substantial amount of time unproductively locating any relevant information. In some serious cases, it takes an employee up to 8 attempts to find the information he/she needs. This suffocates employee productivity and puts the business on its knees.

Fortunately, Bloomfire helps centralize organizational knowledge. The platform empowers you to establish a secure knowledge base for your organization. It removes information hierarchies, allowing all teams to record their work in a single location. Whether it is policies, internal communications, procedures, training materials, customer insights, or how-to guides, Bloomfire centralizes them all, creating a single source of truth.

And the best part is that you can organize information in meaningful categories, but still have it in one location.

By establishing a central repository for organizational knowledge, Bloomfire promotes self-sufficiency. It ensures that users access the most up-to-date knowledge anywhere anytime, regardless of their role or department. Besides, it promotes company-wide alignment, thus enabling teams to work collaboratively towards a common goal.

Share and search knowledge

Bloomfire intelligent search

Knowledge sharing is a critical component of organizational success. So is developing a culture that fosters knowledge sharing can help the organization increment output, fill information gaps, enhance innovation, and stimulate leadership.

Bloomfire enables you to share the most up-to-date and curated information. First, it ensures that all organizational information, tacit knowledge, and expertise are centralized. This way, even when your most trusted lieutenants leave, their knowledge is not lost. Second, the solution avails the information to each person in your organization regardless of their roles and department.

Additionally, the solution provides automatically AI-generated tags to optimize information for search terms. This way, it saves you time since you don’t have to create and apply tags to the content manually. Blend this with features like Q&A tools and rich publishing and you have your information set up for instant retrieval.

On the other hand, the AI-generated tags work in unison with the AI-powered search engine and content recommendations to ensure information is served up fast.

The best thing about Bloomfire intelligent search is that it automatically indexes content and organizes search results logically. As a result, for every search query, the platform serves search results that are not only relevant but also coherent.

Security

When it comes to knowledge sharing, the security of your content is key. You want to be sure that even as you share the content, you’ve closed all the loopholes for malice. Besides, you should have peace of mind knowing that once information is centralized, it will not be lost.

If there is an aspect Bloomfire treats with utmost seriousness, it is security. The platform has put in place top-level security tools to ensure knowledge is safe. For example, Bloomfire has effective procedures for information backup and recovery. Also, the system takes multiple snapshots of data throughout the day and stores them separately from the actual information.

Additionally, Bloomfire allows you to set up Single SignOn (SSO) authentication. With SSO authentication, knowledge seekers don’t have to manage multiple passwords to access information within your systems.

Even better, the solution allows you to stipulate role-based permissions. This way, you can control who accesses what on your platform. Also, with role and permission settings, system administrators find it easy to manage teams in a single place.

Mobile-ready

Like it or not, the world is on the go. Nowadays, employees spend meaningful hours on their phones, even during the workday. They are also no longer confined within the office; always on the go, and hence demand total flexibility.

Fortunately, Bloomfire is designed with the modern workforce in mind. This means the platform provides full mobile access to ease the demands of today’s workforce. It speeds up knowledge sharing through the Bloomfire mobile app and web on mobile. Therefore, employees have access to the information they need anytime, anywhere.

Particularly, the Bloomfire mobile app is a fantastic platform that provides the same features as the web version. Consequently, it ensures that people have the same efficiency on mobile devices as they do on workplace desktops.

This way when a work aid, tutorial, or practical procedures are shared, everyone, regardless of their location and the device they are using, has instant access. 

Simple, clean interface

Bloomfire clean interface

The user interface (UI) is the first point of contact between the knowledge management system and users. UI impacts how employees navigate and utilize your KMS. A well-designed interface allows knowledge seekers to leverage your platform properly.

On the other hand, a complex UI can easily frustrate and even confuse your teams.

Bloomfire has an elegant yet simple user interface. Its UI features the main menu, filters, and the actual knowledge base. The UI is visually appealing, well-organized, and will not in any way intimidate knowledge seekers. The simple, clean, and highly customizable UI is also easy to set up. It is easy to configure the UI as it requires very little HTML knowledge.

On the flip side, the homepage is not fully customizable. In that sense, some of its aspects can be a little bit dull. However, this is not a cause for alarm; it’s something users can live with.

Reporting and analytics

Bloomfire Feedback Loop is the equivalent of a reporting and analytics module. The feature gives in-depth insights into content engagement. It enables you to pinpoint the impactful information, identify content gaps, and improve the content.

Besides, Bloomfire has a reliable customer insights module. Basically, the customer insight module enables you to centralize insights in a cloud-based, searchable research library. The idea is to help you proactively share insights and use them for a competitive advantage. What happens is when your insights and research are centralized, it becomes easy for teams to locate them.

Also, redundant research is reduced and the ROI for insights is increased.

Partner Integrations

Integrations are crucial. They enable users to expand the capability of the knowledge-sharing platform. Ideally, robust knowledge management software should support cloud storage solutions.

Bloomfire is designed to work with some of the tools you work with. For example, the platform integrates seamlessly with cloud storage like OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox. Besides, it supports other performance-critical solutions like Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Tableau.

Areas of Improvement

  • Challenging navigation: Users often find the navigation feature to be quite challenging as the navigation is designed as a one-size-fits-all system and that is not very convenient. It would be much preferable to have a web interface for desktop browsers.
  • Difficult to find an older post: Finding an older article, post, or source becomes much more difficult. There is no proper listing of the articles, be it in chronological order or alphabetical order. Users often feel that having a certain order and being able to find and choose in what order they want to view your articles or posts will offer ease of use to them.
  • Requiring clunky HTML tools: Some of the additional features require you to take the help of some clunky HTML tools to start making use of them. It proves to be quite inconvenient for the developers as well as the users of the platform.
  • Reduced size of the article: With the recent product updates to the user interface, the size of the article is reduced to ⅓ of the page, which makes it difficult to read any tables of embedded documents. A decent screen size for the articles will make it easier to refer to the article while also being able to make sense of any other additional documents attached to it.
  • Not able to share posts from one place: Bloomfire cannot also be able to share posts to different communities from the same spot. Instead, it requires customer support reps to post the same content all over again if they want to share content with different communities, using different categories and tags each time.
  • Not good value for money: Value for money is one of the most important points that a company looks for when they start to use a platform or computer software. The cost model of the platform changed drastically after a point. It changed from unlimited to a limited number of users.

Bloomfire Pricing

As per Bloomfire’s website, the pricing option is based on a user-per-month subscription model. It means that a user needs to pay a monthly fee for using their platform.

Bloomfire offers a variety of packages and options to meet the needs of different organizations, so you can choose the package that best fits your specific needs and budget. Therefore, it’s best to reach out to Bloomfire directly for a customized quote.

To explore more about plans and pricing models, it is advisable to fill out the contact form on their website.
To know more about the pricing of Bloomfire’s plans, you can schedule a call with their experts or the sales team directly.

References

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