SaaS products are helping businesses in a lot many ways. Creating a wonderful customer experience is the major goal for almost all businesses. And yet, all SaaS businesses are focusing on giving the best to their customers. Part of having a trustworthy customer service many SaaS companies make an FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) section available for the customers. Another step forward to the FAQ sections comes the need for having a functional knowledge base, which we will explore during this post.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a self-service portal, where it can help customers find their answers to their queries by themselves. A customer knowledge base is a  platform which has set of questions and answers like FAQ, user guides, video materials and documentation that is basically created to solve any queries of the customers that are related to their SaaS product. Therefore, creating a knowledge base is important for all the SaaS businesses.

Importance of knowledge base for SaaS businesses:

As customer service is one of the major goals for any business. Having a self-service portal enables customers to access it anytime and this saves time from both ends. It is important to know that when you create a knowledge base, it can do more than just self-service. With a self-service portal, customers can find the answers to their queries anytime 24/7 and the customer support tickets will get reduced. By creating a self-service knowledge base for SaaS business, you can be sure that it will help you to retain your hard-won customers, grow your sales and remain competitive.

Why SaaS businesses need a knowledge base

A knowledge base for your SaaS business not only helps as a customer support tool, but also helps you in storing valuable information that can help your customers and your organisation. When all the data is stored in a centralised knowledge base, it is easy for your business to organically promote and market your SaaS solution. Here are some important benefits that a knowledge base can do to help your business:

• Knowledge base analytics: The knowledge base analytics is helpful for your business to identify the best performing articles which will again help your customer success team to understand what the frequently searched articles are and improve the same.
• Superior customer experience: As already mentioned, the customer experience is improved to a great extent when there is a real time customer support which is delivered by a knowledge base.
• Reduce your customer support tickets: The major problem faced by any support team is the unlimited number of support ticket that keeps on coming. Using the knowledge base wisely, you can reduce the unlimited number of support tickets and so your customer support team can focus on other important tasks to improve the customer experience.
• Knowledge retention: A knowledge base helps in keeping all the business knowledge and information safe in one place. With this, the knowledge is transferred to all the employees in the organization and there is nothing that can be missed.
• Productivity: One of the major benefits is that a knowledge base improves the overall productivity of the business cutting down the repeated conversations through customer support queries. This adds an increase in the productivity of your team and the business.

Steps to create a knowledge base

Now that, we have seen the importance of knowledge base, let’s discuss the steps that you need to create your knowledge base:

1. Choose the right tool

There are a lot of tools in the market, but it should fit your business needs. Choosing the right knowledge base might be a tricky one, but here is a list than can help you decide to choose the best for your business.

There are a lot of tools like Document360, Zendesk, Proprofs, Guru, Bloomfire, and a lot more. With proper research, choosing the one that covers your business need is very essential.

2. Plan

Planning how to design your knowledge base, what are the areas you are going to focus while delivering content, and the writing process on how you are going to deliver should be well prepared in advance.

• Design: the design in the knowledge base should be appealing and easy to understand
• Writing process: A standard writing process is advised throughout the knowledge base. This helps the customer to understand the flow easily
• Focus the area: The easiest way is to find what are the most asked queries in the customer support call and answer them first. It can also be done by designing and focusing on choosing the bottom of the funnel, middle of the funnel, or the top of the funnel.

This makes your customers understand what you are offering and what to expect soon. This is because your knowledge base is going to be your user’s guide and that should do its job. A profound knowledge base is the one that delivers the content that is frequently asked by the customers and something that puts the best answer. This gives proactive guidance and support to your users.

3. Know your audience and the topics 

Developing a knowledge base starts with knowing who your audience is and understanding them better. Taking reference from the customers on what they exactly need, while developing a knowledge base is a big win even before you get started, as you have stepped on the right path already.

The style of curating your knowledge base should be determined already in a way that it is addressing your customer’s problems and talking to them directly. After all, the only reason for providing solutions to your customer queries is to reduce the support ticket. If your knowledge base doesn’t do the job, then your customers won’t understand what you have addressed in the documentation and raise a customer ticket. This continues like a never-ending loop.

4. Measure

Keep a detailed plan on how often you need to measure the performance and keep track of the analytics of your knowledge base. Though measuring the performance of your knowledge base is not that easy, this lets you know the performance accurately. With proper analytics in the knowledge base, you can find the mostly viewed articles and help you produce further content related to that. Check with the knowledge base analytics about the performance of the articles.

Apart from that it is also important to understand the feedback for each article whether the article was useful to the customer or not. Because the major goal in writing the articles is to address your customers. By asking questions in a form of feedback, you will understand if your customer is happy reading the articles or feeling dissatisfied. This will help you to understand your customer likelihood towards the knowledge base.

5. Optimize 

Once you plan out things on how to execute, and get started, you should also plan to optimize it with search engine optimization (SEO) to optimize your knowledge base articles and rank well in google search. This creates more visibility for your knowledge base as well as marketing your SaaS product.

Apart from SEO, optimize your knowledge base to make it more user-friendly with the customers who visit your knowledge articles. Features like feedback, suggesting related articles, adding comments on every article will help increase the user experience and offer a great service to your customers.

Conclusion:

Building a SaaS knowledge base needs a lot of planning and research before executing. But once done with the execution, it is going to benefit a large customer base, saves time and money. A SaaS knowledge base helps your business in cost reduction, customer happiness and satisfaction to a whole new level, and increase the ROI (Return on Investment) in your business.

Creating a knowledge base or building one can be done in any number of ways, but the goal of any knowledge base is to address the customer’s queries and give them effective solutions to solve their issues. If you haven’t already, start using a knowledge base. Choosing the right knowledge base is more important than getting a knowledge base.