That has a knock-on benefit for your bottom-line. PwC found that businesses offering a great customer experience see a 16% premium on their products and services. So, a well-rounded knowledge base can be a competitive differentiator. It also eases pressure on your support team. Companies that make knowledge available to employees and customers, reduce the time taken to resolve a problem by 20 to 80%.

Of course, the first step in achieving this is to make knowledge accessible to everyone. That includes your customers. Read on to learn why this step is so important for your customer success, and how it helps your customers to help themselves.

Meeting a growing desire

In our always-on, connected world, people are increasingly seeking answers online. The demand for phone support is dwindling. More people prefer Google over call centre staff. Millennials and Generation Z are quickly moving up the ladder in organisations and starting to make B2B buying decisions. As digital natives, they’re more likely to self-serve when encountering problems. Indeed 85% of all customer service interactions are predicted to take place without human intervention by 2020. By offering a knowledge base, you can meet this rising demand.

Quick resolutions needed

Modern customers also expect instant solutions to their issues. Especially if they’re a time-poor senior executive. These people tend to be the main B2B decision makers in their organisations. So you’ll want to make sure that all their needs are met. They want quick answers when something goes wrong or they are unsure about a feature. Instead of spending hours talking to a support team. Therefore, they’ll feel more satisfied when solutions are rapidly given through a knowledge base.

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Lessening the need for company involvement

Having a knowledge base available for common problems and questions relieves pressure on your customer support team – whilst offering an improved experience for customers. If self-service tools fail to provide a solution, then the case can be escalated to a customer service rep. Decreasing the pressure on your team to field every enquiry and problem.

With an internal knowledge base, your reps will also be better informed. Everyone in your organisation will have access to the same information about your product. Meaning everyone is on the same page when it comes to best practice and solutions. With a knowledge base providing frontline assistance, reps will have more time to focus on challenging issues. That’ll likely boost job satisfaction as they’ll be constantly stimulated. Instead of bogged down with mundane, re-occurring requests.

Reduced costs

Decreasing the dependence on your team will reduce your costs. Investing in a knowledge base now will pay-off in the long run. Making customers self-sufficient reduces demands on your team – so your staffing costs will decrease. It costs more to run a contact centre than to upload content to a knowledge base.

Furthermore, phone use has been in steady decline for the past six years. Forrester predicts that it will continue to fall as more digital channels are adopted. Whilst switching your phone lines off completely is probably a hasty move, your customers won’t miss a fully manned phone centre.

Gathering customer feedback

An added bonus is provided through customer feedback. Knowledge management works best when it’s a two-way street. Give customers a way to provide feedback about your solutions and the help tool itself. That way, your solutions and knowledge base can constantly improve. Even a simple ‘thumbs up’ at the end of a help article can provide a wealth of insights.

Canva’s knowledge management guides people through the basics of getting started and troubleshoots when problems occur. Uniquely, however, they also allow customers to suggest new features and feedback on the usefulness of the tool. Giving the company something to develop and improve on.

Improving customer use

Knowledge bases can do more than troubleshoot problems. They give customers a strong grounding in your product. Providing the same baseline understanding ensures that everyone uses your product as intended. So, they’ll get the most out of your tool because they’re using it in the right way.

Basic guides can help new users and as your knowledge base develops, you can add advanced how-tos. Your customers will get a better experience. They’ll constantly improve in their product use. Their results will be better and they’ll be more satisfied as a result.

Increased upsell opportunities

A better customer experience and higher satisfaction increases upsell opportunities. You’ll build a strong customer relationship. Which gives your sales team a stronger platform for further selling.

If your customers are using one product well and getting great results through it, they’ll be open to other products. It’ll be easier for them to justify buying more tools. If senior management sees good return-on-investment (ROI) on one product, they’ll be happy to sign-off on your other ones. Better understanding of your products will naturally create greater innovation and collaboration. Instead of actively selling to them, your customers may approach you first.

Finally, less demand on your customer support team means they can focus on higher-level tasks. Like optimising a customer’s use of a tool and building trust. Again, this has a knock-on effect on their likelihood to purchase future products.

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Scalability

Many organisations now operate globally – or aspire to. A knowledge base helps you scale your support without much additional resource. That means your customers will get the same information and support. Regardless of where they are in the world. They’ll be able to use a cloud-based knowledge platform whenever they need to. Without waiting for a support centre to open. This is far more effective than having a customer service rep on-call 24/7.

How to help your customers help themselves?

As you can tell, there are many reasons to invest in self-service customer support. However, it can be a big undertaking. There are several steps to do so that you can fully benefit from knowledge management.

Collect all your knowledge

First, you must collect all your company knowledge into one cohesive resource. That might include early versions of a knowledge base or customer FAQ. Consult with your customers, marketing, sales, customer service, tech and operations to ensure all bases are covered for your customers.

Make it useable

The next step is to make it user-friendly and ensure your customers know about it. Direct all support requests and enquiries through the knowledge base to build awareness. This will also help customers get used to the new support process. Soon, your knowledge base will be the first port of call for all their questions.

It’s worth launching your knowledge base with an internal and external comms plan. That way, every employee and customer will understand that they should turn to it first.

Make it searchable

Today’s customers have short attention spans and limited time. They don’t want to scroll through endless pages searching for a solution. A senior B2B buyer won’t have the patience to read your 50-page technical help document. So, you’ll want to offer a quick and user-friendly way to find what they need.

Provide solutions almost instantly. This’ll help your customers get on with their work day. Similarly, you should keep help articles relatively short and sweet. If they are on the long-side, consider shortening them and turning them into a series of steps.

Evernote masters this with its search function front-and-centre on its help page. It also promotes popular help pieces. And clearly marks ways for customers to get further help if needed.

Develop it over time

Self-service knowledge bases must always evolve to meet customer needs. That means you can forever improve and tweak it. What might start as a handful of help articles can develop, over time, into a library of assets.

As more customers use your knowledge base, you can learn what content is popular. Customer feedback can provide more inspiration for improvements. Collaborating with your customer support team and other colleagues can also provide food-for-thought.

Don’t fully replace your team

A note of caution: your self-service platform is not a full replacement for an amazing support team. There are some occasions that need a human touch. Always remember that a knowledge base is one tool in your customer support toolbox. It works best when used in tandem with other support, such as customer service reps and chatbots.

Putting customers in the centre

The best customer support always places the customer in the centre. The same applies to building your knowledge management. Because it has applications internally, it’s easy to overlook your customers. But the best knowledge management considers the needs of everyone.

Placing more information in your customers’ hands will be a long term investment. Not only will it develop a stronger relationship, but it’ll improve the use of your product. Knowledge bases give everyone a better experience. Your customer service team will thank you. The wider organisation will be grateful. But, most importantly, your customers will be happier as well.

The post Why Knowledge Management is key to helping your customers help themselves appeared first on Document360.

Poor knowledge-sharing practices cost Fortune 500 companies $31.5 billion every year. This sum consists of lost productivity, duplicating work, and people leaving the company.

Knowledge management benefits 

Silos, in a knowledge economy, are not your best friend. Duplicating work that already exists wastes time and resources. However, because of silos, different teams might not know that the work they’re doing already exists. Consolidating knowledge on one platform increases the visibility of work – and it’s quality. You can then amplify the best work across your organisation. Generating greater ROI and performance.

There’s also the unwritten knowledge stored with each experienced employee. You don’t want to lose this when someone leaves or retires. Knowledge management means you have a tangible record store forever. This becomes all the more important considering the increasing digital skills gap. By documenting rare and in-demand knowledge, you lessen the impact of skills shortages.

Those are just some of the perks from effective knowledge management. There are many more across every department and individual. It doesn’t only improve your internal operations but also the lives of your customers. Which has a knock-on impact on retention and loyalty. Read on to discover why you should be prioritising your knowledge management this year.

Operational efficiencies

Creating a one-stop-shop means employees and customers don’t spend hours searching for answers. A search function within the knowledge base speeds this process up even more. Reducing time searching increases productivity as employees can focus on the task at hand. It also leads to happier customers as they can find answers and solutions at the click of a button.

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Better document management

With everything in one place, it’s much easier to update documents when needed. When files are stored on different systems, you may not notice when they are out-of-date. For legal knowledge management and HR documents, in particular, that could cause huge issues later on. But it’s also vital to regularly update your sales and customer support documents, to keep them effective. This process becomes less time-intense when employees can rapidly access and review files. Plus, it ensures a consistent brand identity. You can see mismatched branding instantly when documents are side-by-side.

Business continuity

Making knowledge accessible prevents knowledge gaps appearing when employees leave or go on holiday. There’s better continuity of service for customers too. As every employee is well-informed and there isn’t one person who holds all the knowledge about a product or customer.

Continuous improvement

Having information in one place allows for iterative improvements to operations, customer service, products and knowledge. Knowledge bases help employees update documents with new releases, troubleshooting tips and best practice. Plus, the collaborative nature of knowledge bases lends itself to continuous tweaking. A sales team member, for example, may spot some improvements to marketing copy. It’s easier to spot information gaps too. Such as a particular problem that’s often encountered by the customer support team.

Admin costs decrease

You’ll spend less time sorting and sifting through information. So, your admin costs will decrease and productivity goes up. Even more so when a knowledge base enables a degree of automation. Replacing a time-consuming (and insecure) paper filing system. Meaning employees can quickly upload and categorise documents online.

Using a cloud-based system enables access on any device, anywhere (with relevant permissions, of course). Remote and flexible working becomes more possible. With an associated decrease in fixed office costs. It enables greater efficiencies, with employees able to access key documents on-the-go. Whether that’s in a client meeting or on the commute.

Standardising processes

When you use a knowledge base, you ensure that everyone sings from the same song-sheet. You can spread important information company-wide. So everyone has the same foundations in a product. Everyone understands the company’s best practice and approved procedures. It also gives a more consistent experience to customers.

Improving customer experiences

Good knowledge management practices improve the service offered to customers. For instance, customer support will have key product information readily accessible. Thus, can help customers more effectively. This includes insights from every department, like documentation, case notes and customer details. All available at their fingertips.

Sharing knowledge outside the company is also possible. A knowledge base or help center will improve your customers’ use of your product or service. It can even grow into a community where loyal customers and employees swap tips and solutions.

Self-service support

It also offers customers an option beyond calling your support center for help. 72% of online consumers prefer to search the Internet for answers, instead of phoning or emailing. Part of this might be because customers are often time-poor (especially in B2B). So, they need a quick self-serve solution that doesn’t involve the support team. This has an added bonus for your bottom-line. Troubleshooting common problems and questions via a knowledge base reduces pressure on your customer service team.

Knowledge management in action

ISC (a developer of three open source Internet networking software packages) uses a knowledge base platform to provide 24/7 coverage of its critical systems. Before this, the company struggled to track and update all its documentation. Employees didn’t have full visibility of all information available. It was unable to link software versions to documents. Plus, it didn’t understand how its customers used technical documentation (or what they needed). After it launched its knowledge base, the time spent searching for answers significantly decreased. There is greater visibility. Both employees and customers can search for solutions self-sufficiently.

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Faster decision-making

A knowledge base contains a vast array of information. On customers, products, company policies, operational data, sales, finances and previous projects. Using this, managers can make well-informed decisions based on past experiences and practical lessons learnt. It also prevents the same mistake from re-occurring. This has applications for project management too. Allowing for more accurate timeline and cost estimation and risk assessments.

Reproducing work

Why reinvent the wheel when a perfectly functional one already exists? With knowledge management, you can replicate proven strategies in different teams. Optimising efficiency and returns. Similarly, useful documents with future uses can be stored. Ensuring people don’t waste time recreating something that already exists. Indeed, knowledge workers only spend around 10% of their time creating new knowledge. The rest is spent re-purposing existing information or looking for it. Reproducing processes and documents helps to save time and resources. It accelerates progress and prevents reoccurring problems.

Making expertise widely available

Through knowledge management, employees with in-demand skills can provide information to colleagues. To upskill them and combat information gaps. Like software developers answering questions from customer support via an internal community forum. You can record presentations and webinars and store them for future reference. Plus, some resources will be useful for your customers.

Driving innovation

As your team becomes better informed, the chances for innovation increase. Collaboration usually produces an ‘Aha!’ moment or two… It empowers your employees and customers to find new ways of getting the most out of a product. It should come as little surprise that Salesforce ranks amongst the world’s most innovative companies. Its ‘Trailblazer’ forum gives access (for both employees and customers) to best practice, new uses and troubleshooting.

Knowledge management: a must-have for all leaders

In the information age, where knowledge has value, you cannot afford to waste yours. That’s why knowledge management is a worthwhile investment. Failing to prioritise your knowledge management will ultimately stifle your innovation and growth. The first step to effective management is having robust infrastructure. In the form of processes and technology to facilitate it. You need a system that’s intuitive, accessible and easy to update. By putting this in place now, you’ll experience the benefits for years to come. If you want to become a market leader, it’s not a nice-to-have. It’s a must.

The post The power of Knowledge Management: Why you need to document and organise your product insight appeared first on Document360.

First, you need a steady stream of articles to keep educating and helping your customers. When creating a knowledge base from scratch, you’ll have to develop a lot of articles in a short time frame. Maintaining your knowledge base will need posting regular content and refreshing existing articles. Coming up with knowledge base article ideas, therefore, is practically a full-time job. Luckily, there is plenty of inspiration available. Ideas for new articles can come from many different corners.

Talk to your customer support

To begin with, it’s worth considering what objectives you want your knowledge base to achieve. Most business leaders would agree that they want their knowledge base to educate and help customers. Whilst also taking the strain off of their customer support teams.

That means that customer support should be your first port of call. As discussed in our guide to knowledge base articles, customer support can offer a wealth of information and insights for your knowledge base. For example, they can tell you what questions crop up time and time again. Creating knowledge base articles to answer these questions can free up a lot of your customer support team’s time to help customers in other ways.

You should also look through any other customer communications to see what’s bothering users the most. Frustrated customers may post about their issues on social media, for instance. Incorporate these insights into a new article. Or feed them back to your product team for iterative improvements.

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Look at your clicks

Google Analytics (and similar web analytics software) can identify popular areas of your website. For existing knowledge bases, it will tell you what articles your customers are engaging with the most. Expand these popular articles and turn them into a series for your knowledge base.

Alternatively, if you have an FAQ section on your existing website then analytics from those pages could give inspiration for future articles.

Competitor knowledge bases

Competitors’ knowledge bases can be helpful to visit too. Or you can visit similar companies in your industry. These may provide a springboard for new topic ideas. You might come across other features that you think will work well for your own knowledge base. There might even be some areas of improvement that will make your articles better than the competition.

Easy readability of articles and tone of voice are crucial to the success of a knowledge base. Your competitors’ knowledge bases may have some useful pointers for your own writing. Even your competitors’ visual assets (such as video) can be a source of ideas.

Your customer feedback

You want your customers to be well-served by your knowledge base. So it goes without saying that you should consult them about its development. Ask them what they want to see on it and the pain-points that they want addressed. The only way to really understand what stuff is working and what’s failing is through customer feedback. With both your product and your knowledge base.

That’s why Document360 automatically incorporates feedback in its knowledge base software. That way, you’re always up-to-date on how your articles are performing. You can use this for future article development and reviews.

But what if you don’t have an existing knowledge base? Then you can rely on general product feedback. Collect this through in-store surveys (if applicable), email newsletters, social media and other marketing channels. You’ll find that most customers are keen to offer feedback. However, if you want to encourage more participation then you can always offer a discount or exclusive offer.

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Your wider team

Ideas don’t have to flow from only your knowledge base creators and customer support. Employees throughout your organisation may see customer pain-points that you haven’t yet identified. Your social media manager, for instance, may see many requests for help using a particular plug-in. Therefore, it’s worth double-checking that no stone has been left unturned by your knowledge base.

Conversely, it’s also a good idea to get any technical content reviewed by the technical people in your company (like your developers or IT team). These employees may have a very similar knowledge level to your customers, so can provide another sense-check for your content. To make this easier, Document360 offers an inbuilt collaboration function. This will help you connect with other people in your organisation to provide feedback on your knowledge base articles.

Also Read: What is Knowledge Centered Service (KCS): Complete Guide

Emerging developments

Emerging developments in your industry may change the way that customers use your product. Also, any new product development will require knowledge base articles to support it.

Advances in smartphone technology, for instance, have led a lot of people to browse the Internet on their mobiles. A similar change may occur with your products, where people suddenly begin using their tablets, phones, or an app a lot more. This new use case will require an article or two to help people make the most of it and to troubleshoot potential issues.

Best Practices for Updating Your Knowledge Base

Coming up with knowledge base article ideas is one thing, but there are some best practices that you must also bear in mind when producing content. These change over time, so remaining updated is another task that you must do when searching for ideas.

Industry blogs and websites

For knowledge-base-specific content, there are plenty of blogs that offer handy tips on length, imagery, video and tone. Knowledge base software companies like Document360 will often help customers keep up with best practice through blogs and newsletters.

You might also want more general writing advice, especially because knowledge base articles can be tricky to write. They have to bridge the best of two worlds: technical writing and blog creation. The best knowledge base articles are educational and technical enough to help customers… but also engaging and SEO friendly.

So, getting some blog writing tips is a good idea. A guide to designing clear blogs using the right headings and sub-headings is incredibly useful for knowledge base creators. Knowledge bases can be dry if you don’t break them up with the right headings.

Tone of voice is also important. MailChimp has published its own style guide as a tool for business owners looking for a fun tone of voice that’s also educational. Of course, it is geared towards internal use at MailChimp, but many of its tips (such as writing technical content and the different types of content needed) can be used as a starting point by other businesses.

SEO tips and tricks

SEO can be very complex, so we’ve covered it in greater detail in another article. However, when coming up with new knowledge base ideas, it’s worth checking for any changes to how the major search engines rank web pages. This is because any algorithm changes will impact the words you use in your articles, your headings and even the way you describe your images and videos.

Keeping updated can be easily done by reading SEO-specific blogs and publications such as Search Engine Land and Moz. Any major changes will likely be reported here first.

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Making the right templates

Templates can vastly speed-up your knowledge base content creation and make it more consistent. Depending on what you need, template ideas can be found for short (blog-style) knowledge base articles, through to heavy technical and legal documents. Certain tools such as RoboHelp may also provide templates to help you create articles.

If you plan to produce a lot of imagery, then pre-designed templates will come in handy. Canva provides some great free and paid-for templates that allow you to create infographics (and other images) without hiring a designer. Or if you have the luxury of a dedicated graphic designer, point them in the direction of Creative Bloq and Information is Beautiful for more advanced infographic food-for-thought. Remember, adding images and video to your articles can stop them becoming dry and assist people who learn visually.

Always come up with new ideas

Your knowledge base is always a work-in-progress. So, you always have a chance to refine, improve and expand your articles. Coming up with knowledge base article ideas is a critical task that is never finished.But you don’t have to do it alone. Ideas can come thick and fast from many different places. Such as from within your own organisation, from the wider industry, via your customers and even from competitors. Never stop searching for your next knowledge base idea, because you never know when it will help someone at the exact moment they need it.Even when you think you’ve exhausted all angles, there will be a new idea somewhere. You just have to look around to find it.

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In large organisations, there is more at stake. Unlike small business owners who may regularly interact with their customers face-to-face, leaders in large organisations may not see their clients as often. Usually, a customer will engage with a customer success or account management team. This makes customer feedback even more important as it offers insights that may otherwise be lost to the business. You can swiftly identify annoyances or niggling issues and report them to the relevant department. Likewise, you can use positive feedback in a recognition programme, to improve morale and for marketing.

To assist you in gathering feedback, there are many tools on the market. Yet, they are not all equal. To help you pick the right tool for your needs, we’ve created a list of our top 5 customer feedback tools and weighed up their pros and cons.

GetFeedback

GetFeedback is a visually appealing tool that has a large focus on user experience. This is helpful, because if your customers find the tool difficult to use, they are unlikely to complete your survey. Even if they give you feedback this time, if they didn’t enjoy the experience they are unlikely to offer more in the future.

Pros:

The tool is more conversational than traditional surveys. This works well if your brand’s usual tone-of-voice is casual and informal. GetFeedback is accessible on multiple devices, enabling respondents to choose when – and how – to answer your questions. It also allows you to connect with your customers at key stages in their purchase journey, at point-of-sale, for example. You can customise the platform with your company logo and colours. So, you can keep a consistent brand identity across all customer touchpoints. It also integrates with Salesforce, keeping all your customer data in one place. Finally, there is a free trial so you can give it a spin before fully committing.

Cons:

That said, if you use any other CRM system other than Salesforce, you may not be able to integrate GetFeedback with it. The pricing is also tiered, starting at $50 a month for a single user. If you want to add more users or functionality (such as the Salesforce integration) then it’ll cost extra. That might soon add up to a hefty monthly bill if you’re not careful.

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SurveyMonkey

This is a popular tool that many people have interacted with before. It has a relatively simple user interface and guides respondents through questions in an intuitive way. SurveyMonkey offers an easy way to send a quick survey to customers.

Pros:

You’ll have it up-and-running within a few minutes and can send to customers via a URL. It operates on a freemium model, with the free version offering a questionnaire of up to 10 questions and 100 responses. If you need a quick and easy tool to shoot a few questions to a small group of customers, then SurveyMonkey is a good option.

Cons:

However, that’s all it does. SurveyMonkey doesn’t give detailed analytics, so you will have to export the data and do this yourself in another tool. Plus, it is limited in customisation, so you cannot make it completely on-brand. There are apps that will plug into SurveyMonkey, like HootSuite, Marketo and Slack. So, you can incorporate it into existing processes with a bit of legwork. There’s also a paid version that starts at $20 a month and increases as you need more users or functionality.

Qualaroo

Qualaroo takes precise targeting of survey respondents for gathering actionable customer feedback to a whole new level. Qualaroo is a unique customer feedback software that holds a lot of tools in its arsenal. Leading the pack is their Sentiment Analysis feature, powered by IBM Watson’s Artificial Intelligence. The other ranks carry features like advanced targeting, and more than 20 integrations with other major platforms like Mailchimp, Salesforce, Google Suite (Tag Manager, Analytics), Optimizely, Fullstory, Segment, and Slack among others.

Pros:

There is no-code installation – no coding experience required at all. Also, there are straightforward templates for all platforms – in-app, desktop web browser, mobile-optimized website, linked, emails, etc. that let you set up the same ‘NudgeTM’ on multiple customer feedback channels. There is also the aforementioned AI-enabled Sentiment Analysis for extracting insights from free-form text answers to open-ended questions.

Cons:

Getting into the nitty-gritty of the software may prove tough to master for novices, especially if you want to leverage the highly advanced

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Reevoo

Pros:

If you’re concerned about the legitimacy of feedback, Reevoo is for you. It goes to lengths to ensure that customers who feedback via the tool are genuine through purchase validation. This offers greater credibility to any feedback that you receive. Plus it gives more weight to customer reviews if you choose to publish them. For further validation, the platform is used by some big brand names including LV and Hyundai.

According to Reevoo, over half of the questions posed are answered within 24 hours. Therefore, once a survey is published, you know that you’ll probably get swift feedback that you can then act on. Reevoo’s data offers insights for sales, marketing and product development.

Cons:

One downside to Reevoo is that it’s a content and retail-focused platform. It may not be suited to non-retail companies as most functionality is designed for the sector. The content and insights that it gathers are tailored to user-generated-content and customer reviews. Things that a retailer’s marketing department can repurpose. Pricing is also on request.

UserReport

Pros:

If you cannot decide between creating a feedback forum or using customer surveys, consider UserReport. This tool offers feedback forum and survey functionality in one handy system. Therefore, you can benefit from the strengths of both. Some customers will respond better to forums and others to surveys, depending on their unique preferences and the stage of their purchase journey. By offering both feedback mechanisms, you cover all your bases.

UserReport integrates with a website or app via an HTML code snippet. It can also link to Google Analytics to offer detailed visitor insights. The survey and forum tools are free to use. With it, you can obtain your Net Promoter Score and get product/service improvement suggestions. In the forum, users can vote on their favourite ideas and the most popular posts will rise to the top. UserReport supports over 60 languages, which is useful for international businesses. Finally, there are customisation options so you can reflect your company branding.

Cons:

Overall, this is a pretty versatile tool that will suit most companies. The most obvious downside to the tool is the need for HTML knowledge to integrate it with your app or website. Other than this, most functions are free, but there is a premium version designed for publishers to monetise their audience. The only other negative is that it cannot integrate with email or social media.

Giving you a competitive edge

Adding customer feedback tools to your company will transform your customer service overnight. You’ll immediately have access to useful information on your customer support, marketing, sales and product.

In today’s competitive market, it’s essential to stand out from the crowd. Gathering customer feedback will help you achieve this. Overlook your customer feedback and you’ll be ignoring your customers – who will then go to your competitors. Always stay informed, by equipping yourself with the best customer feedback tools. The rest is up to you.

The post Top 5 Customer Feedback Tools Compared appeared first on Document360.

Collecting customer feedback is a great way to gain qualitative and quantitative information on your products, customer service and generally how well your business is fulfilling customer needs. It tells you what you’re doing right and wrong – right from the horse’s mouth.

Feedback is critical for large businesses

Customer feedback is especially vital for medium-to-large organisations. Smaller businesses have the benefit of more face-to-face contact with their customers on a regular basis. But larger organisations don’t always have this relationship with their customers. More effort is needed, therefore, to connect with customers and gather feedback.

Large organisations also have more to lose if they aren’t satisfying customer needs. Gathering feedback is an effective way to stop disgruntled customers heading for the door.

The benefits of gathering feedback

Collecting feedback from your customers offers many benefits. Positive feedback can be a boost for employees and can be used in recognition schemes. It can be used in case studies, to enter awards and to provide customer testimonials. Feedback can inform future campaigns or product development (through replicating what works and improving what didn’t).

Negative feedback will identify any problems that your customers may not have mentioned. Often, slight niggles will frustrate customers and tempt them to go elsewhere. Resolving these issues will potentially stop them from leaving in the future.

The insights obtained through collecting feedback can improve every aspect of your business. From product development to sales strategy, marketing activities and customer service.

Though customers may be invested in businesses that they are engaged with, they sometimes need a little convincing to spend time giving you feedback. A study by SurveyMonkey found that consumers typically respond to requests for three reasons: they want to be helpful, they enjoy the topic or there’s some kind of incentive for them.

So, what’s an effective way to gather customer feedback? Here are five ways to encourage your customers to provide feedback.

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1. Make it easy

When inviting a customer to offer feedback, make it as easy as possible for them. A great opportunity to gather feedback is when a customer is already engaging with your business. They have already received a service, information or purchased from you. So, they may feel more open to giving back to your business through a review and rating.

This could be as simple as a few post-purchase questions on an order confirmation page, to a thumbs-up or down on a knowledge base article. Live chat on a website is another potential medium, along with a dedicated email address (feedback@blog.com, for example).

Customers usually interact with businesses in many different ways. Having a range of feedback channels, such as email, in-store and on social media, can encourage more interaction. People can choose how and when they feedback to you. However, make sure you have enough resources to monitor all of your feedback channels – nobody wants to feel ignored!

Skype’s post-call survey is a good example of a simple feedback gathering tool. It launches as soon as a call finishes, with just one question for customers to answer. In rating the quality of the call, Skype gets vital information on its product’s performance and can infer how satisfied its customers are.

Skype’s survey highlights another key tactic used by leading companies to gather feedback: putting questions where customers are likely to be. If your customer spends a lot of their time on social media, use a quick Twitter or Facebook poll. If they often communicate via email, then request feedback there. For businesses with a physical premise, having a survey on a tablet or card machine can obtain customer information as they browse or purchase in-store.

Avoid any mediums that your customers don’t use or like. Millennials are well-known for hating phone calls, with 75% of adults stating that they never answer phone calls on their smartphones.

It’s also worth telling people how much time they’ll spend filling out a survey. If it’s a quick 5-minute form that they can fill out on their phone or during their lunch break, they’ll be more likely to complete it.

2. Incentivise

Offering a perk for completing a survey is a tried-and-tested technique. Responses increase by 10-15% when an incentive is offered. Of course, the benefit should be something that your customers would appreciate. For some, that will be a prize draw for the latest piece of tech. Others may respond for a free month’s subscription to your product or service. Discounts or exclusive deals also work well. Or, for a charitable spin, offer a donation to a charity of their choice. Whatever tactic you use, make sure it invokes that FOMO (fear of missing out) to encourage people to take part.

You should also consider your employees. How can they convince people to give feedback? Incentives can encourage them to gather feedback. Cashiers could collect information at point-of-sale, for example, or an account manager could request feedback at a weekly client meeting. Have a ‘Feedback Champion of the Month’ award and offer a sweet treat, gift cards, experience days or extra days off for the employee who collects the most responses.

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3. Make it personal

Tying in closely with this is personalising your requests. Where appropriate, reach out directly. If you have a customer success or account team who deals regularly with a client, get them to request feedback on a call or via email. For higher-value customers, they could even meet in-person for an informal chat over lunch or coffee. However, there is a thin line to tread between being personal and putting someone on-the-spot.

Personalised emails and social media messages can also work. Amazon often does this, personalising the request with details of what they ordered.

4. Build in processes

The most effective feedback programmes are planned. This rings especially true for SaaS products which are used recurrently. Have a clear feedback process that your customers are informed about. That way, they can report any issues or bugs whenever they occur. They will also anticipate regular feedback requests.

You can set your feedback schedule to collect information every quarter, annually or at the end of milestones (such as customer on-boarding). Just make sure you pick a time and stick to it.

Most SaaS companies can also see when a customer suddenly stops using their product. If this happens, a customer feedback request could help uncover why.

Former VP of Customer Experience for HP Maurice Fitzgerald recommends setting your feedback request frequency based on what you hope to achieve from it. When aiming to improve a product, he suggests contacting customers at two different times: when they have unboxed your product and 6 months into using it. He adds, “If yours is a technology product, I suggest sending the survey request or phoning the customer within 48 hours of delivery.”

For relationship and brand surveys, Fitzgerald states that, “Twice a year is a good frequency for your most important customer relationships and may work best for your brand surveys.”

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5. Show your customers that you’ve listened

Telling your customers how previous feedback has been used is a good way to encourage participation. It will show how much you valued their time and feedback. Also include how their feedback will be used. Amazon does this well by tailoring feedback to its products, marketplace offerings and packaging. It divvys up different parts of its operations into small, quick surveys to make it more likely that people will respond. Telling them how their contribution helps the company adds another reason.

Hilton Hotels regularly shares the results of customer feedback. Some customers even receive a phone call follow-up from the manager of the hotel that they stayed in. Real-time data is fed back directly to each hotel manager. They can compare the day’s performance with the day or weeks before. By telling its customers how their input has been valued, Hilton’s response rate has grown by 30%. Its survey abandonment rate has dropped by 6%.

Key takeaways

When developing your feedback scheme, remember that one size doesn’t fit all. What might suit one company and its customers, may not work for you. Constantly test and refine your approach to boost your feedback rates.

Acting on any feedback gathered is essential. You cannot gain value from it if isn’t acted on. Promote positive feedback through social media, case studies and awards. Act on any negative feedback to improve your products and service.

Finally, any interaction with your customers has to make them feel important. Make sure this shines through in your customer feedback approach. Show you care and your customers will flock to your feedback forms.

The post 5 Effective Ways To Get Your Customer To Provide Feedback appeared first on Document360.

Dominating the market are a few major players: Adobe RoboHelp, Madcap Flare and HelpNDoc. These solutions are proprietary. They come with an up-front or recurring cost. Open source help authoring tools don’t have an obvious price tag. This makes them a tempting proposition for some organisations.

What are open source help authoring tools?

With open source tools, you get a free application and the ability to customise its source code. Sandcastle and MediaWiki are two such examples of open source help authoring tools. Additionally, some proprietary solutions (such as HelpnDoc) offer free versions for personal use. Although this isn’t strictly open source as you cannot alter its source code.

There are many pros and cons of using open source software. The following piece will discuss some of these to help you choose the right kind of tool for your business.

The pros and cons of open source help authoring tools

Deploying:

You can easily download open source software and install it on a local system. This gives you free access to customise its source code. Letting you build a help authoring tool that will better meet your organisation’s needs. Open source is worth considering when you have very complex requirements. For example, you need to integrate it with specific live chat software.

Yet, implementing an open source tool can be time-consuming. It also requires a fair amount of expertise. If you need a plug-and-play solution then proprietary and cloud-based software are more suitable. Similarly, if you don’t have the IT resources or experts in-house then open source isn’t for you.

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Costs:

One major temptation to use open source lies in the fact that it’s free to download. However, in some ways, you get what you pay for and open source software requires a lot of work before it’s useable. You will incur costs when implementing and customising it. Especially because it requires expert staff who may be expensive to hire.

Budgets can quickly over-run if you’re not used to customising open source software. Same if you cannot accurately determine (or stick to) a project timeline. In this way, proprietary and cloud-based software provide clearer costs – wrapped up in a monthly, annual or initial fee. Plus, they are generally more user-friendly right from the start.

Compatibility:

Open source tools are often compatible with a limited number of operating systems. To use them on different systems and devices, you’ll need to customise them. This adds to the amount of initial work your team will have to do to get it functional at the start.

One factor that influences your choice will be who uses your help authoring software. If they are in one location and tech-savvy then open source could be suitable. But if they live across the globe and use a lot of different devices, then a proprietary or cloud solution is better. The same applies if they need a lot of technical support.

Because cloud-based tools are deployed via the cloud, they are compatible with a lot more devices and operating systems. With proprietary tools, it all depends on the vendor. However, most, (such as RoboHelp) will run on Windows.

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Data back-up:

Cloud-based tools come with data backed up automatically. Meanwhile, proprietary and open source tools will require you to do this yourself. With open source help authoring tools, your IT team will have to create data infrastructure that will secure, manage and back-up any information on the tool. Again, this requires expert knowledge and investment in your data management processes and solutions.

Security:

Open source code is freely available to anyone who downloads it, making it potentially insecure. Your IT team will need to closely monitor the security of your tool to ensure it isn’t hacked and its data lost. Initial work will have to be done to patch up any potential weaknesses. With other solutions, security is the responsibility of the vendor.

Upgrading and updating the tool:

If you expect to regularly upgrade and update your help authoring tool (perhaps in response to a changing operating system or end-user feedback) then open source can be pricey. Cloud-based help authoring software will often update automatically. Meanwhile, proprietary updates can be done for an additional fee.

However, with open source tools, all responsibility for updating and responding to end-user feedback falls on you. Additionally, any upgrades need to consider the previous work done to customise your open source tool. This needs specialist technical knowledge and proper documentation of any changes to the original source code.

Customisations and integrations:

A major perk to using open source help authoring tools is the freedom to completely customise it. It provides the foundations to a help authoring tool, so your team can build in any integrations or features that your business needs. This is useful when your company requires a lot of integrations (with CRM or live chat software, for instance) or complex customisations.

But this can be overkill if you can get by with the features and integrations of cloud and proprietary tools. Plus, features can be limited with open source software. Microsoft’s HTML Help Workshop, for example, will only turn HTML pages into a compiled help (.chm) format. To gain full functionality, you may need to combine several solutions.

User support:

By now, you’ve probably realised that you’re on your own with open source software. There is little-to-no support available, save a few online forums. Sandcastle, for example, has a section where you can report issues or ask questions from the community. Therefore, your IT team (and the users of your help authoring tool) will need enough expertise to be self-sufficient.

Proprietary and cloud tools don’t necessarily come with full support either (although ones like Document360 do!). Usually, the support provided is at the vendor’s discretion, but it’s more than what’s provided with open source. It’s also more user-friendly, with training or documentation aimed towards multiple knowledge levels.

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Open source works for some

For some companies, open source is the perfect solution. These are usually organisations with an expert team and who require highly specific features.

It’s true that open source offers the most flexibility when it comes to customisations and integrations. However, it needs a lot more work to get up-and-running compared to proprietary and cloud tools.

Proprietary and cloud tools are more suited to organisations with a specific budget because there are clear costs. For a one-off, annual or monthly fee, you know what features and support are available. Most vendors will offer a free trial so you can understand if their tool suits your organisation.

Whatever you decide on, make sure it’s the best solution for your ongoing business needs, budget and the team working on it. Take your time when choosing a tool, because it underpins the success of your customer service.

Document360 for a cloud-based solution

Considering a cloud-based option? Document360 offers a great solution for creating, managing and publishing help documentation software. Collaboration is built into the tool with multiple version control, article commenting, auto-save, code blocks and Markdown support. It also integrates with major third-party solutions including Intercom, Google Analytics, and Disqus. With three pricing tiers, you can find the version that best suits your business and budget.

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For knowledge base articles, it’s crucial that they appear in search results when customers are looking for help. You’ve likely spent a lot of time getting your knowledge base right. Time that will go to waste if your articles cannot be discovered – and 93% of all web traffic comes via a search engine. Therefore, SEO is as important to your knowledge base’s success as the content itself.

Paid advertising is one option for companies looking to jump to the top of search results. But it still isn’t as effective as improving organic search rankings through SEO. Almost 80% of searchers say they completely ignore paid search ads.

There are many search engines, such as Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. But the mammoth in the industry is (obviously) Google. Therefore, most SEO strategies are geared for Google because over 63% of online search occurs on this platform. But if you improve your knowledge base SEO on Google, it will likely get a boost on the other search engines as well.

What’s included:

• Technical versus content SEO
• Technical SEO tips and tricks
• How to optimise your knowledge base content
• A work in progress

Technical versus content SEO

SEO is broken down into two main areas known as technical SEO and content SEO. You can think of technical SEO as the activities that underpin the rest of your knowledge base. Without a strong foundation laid through technical SEO, any efforts made with content SEO will be stifled. You need to start strong.

Technical SEO tips and tricks

Technical SEO lays the groundwork for the rest of your knowledge base SEO, so it’s incredibly important. It requires a certain level of coding knowledge and tech savviness, meaning you’ll probably have to consult an expert who really understands the intricacies of technical SEO.

Put your mobile first

Probably the largest change in technical SEO in recent years came when Google implemented an algorithm change that only ranked mobile responsive websites in mobile search results. Dubbed mobilegeddon, the change means that if your knowledge base isn’t responsive it won’t appear at all for smartphone users. The vast majority of people now search for things via their phones, so this is a significant part of your user base who could be missing out.

If you’re not sure if your existing knowledge base is mobile-friendly, then Google has created a free online tool that will tell you if it’s set up for mobile.

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Speedy knowledge

For SEO, your website speed is everything. Ideally, your knowledge base should load within 3 seconds, which can be tough considering the amount of content, video, and image files that many knowledge bases contain. Web pages that take a long time to load are penalised by Google and experience a higher bounce rate (which negatively impacts SEO).

There are a few simple ways to improve the speed of your knowledge base.

• Use compressed images, HTML and CSS files to reduce the size of files that have to be loaded on your web page.
• Enable browser caching (to temporarily store data on a user’s computer).
• Reduce your server response time to under 200ms.

Audit regularly

After mastering your technical SEO, it’s vital that you don’t rest on your laurels. Do a regular audit of your knowledge base to check that it’s working effectively and not affected by any new algorithm changes. It should also be adapted to new technical specifications that arise. The rise of voice search through Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, for instance, is heralding a new mobilegeddon for SEO.

To help, the collaboration tool in Document360 helps you communicate with everyone involved in creating your knowledge base, including the SEO whizz who will be reviewing your code and content.

Use structured data to improve your ranking

Applying structured data means you use the markup from Schema.org in your knowledge base content. It’s a way of adding tags to your pages that tell search engines what type of information they contain. This works for all the major search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo!.

Make your knowledge base easily searchable on the internet

Markup is simply how you format the text to convey a more human-like understanding of the content contained within, to search engine robots.
<itemtype> Specifying a particular item type (eg LocalBusiness)
<service> Specifying the type of service a business provides

Because this is a knowledge base, you are probably not interested in the markup for things like reviews or event listings (common markups for businesses). Instead, you want to mark up things like:

• Date content was published – Shows currency for your help content
• Software source code – highlights specific sections of content as software code
• Author – shows who has written or published the content
• Breadcrumbs – shows the folder structure of your content
• Sitelinks Search Box feature – allows users to make use of your knowledge base search right in the SERPs
• Site navigation markup – to uncover the structure of your site in the SERPs
  Video – for video tutorials

Your knowledge base software should allow you to add custom code to your site. Talk to your developers about adding Schema markup to make your knowledge base portal more visible to search engines. You can also use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool to automatically add markup to your content.

Use sitemap and robots.txt files

An XML sitemap is used by Google to find and index your web pages. Much like a real map, without it your knowledge base may not be discovered quickly by Google’s crawlers (bits of code that analyze your website) and may be indexed incorrectly.

After creating an XML sitemap, it should be submitted to Google’s search console. This tells the search engine to send its crawlers to visit your website. For good measure, you should repeat this whenever you’ve created a new knowledge base article or a new section of your knowledge base.

HTML sitemap

You can also use an HTML sitemap to improve the UX of your site (more on this later), which should be placed in the footer. This is written for humans and helps users to reorient themselves if they get lost.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is another file that will tell search engines what it should (and, in this case, should not) index within your internal knowledge base. You can use it to exclude parts of your site that you don’t want to show up, such as your images, duplicate pages or internal search results pages.

If you don’t have one (check by typing your site URL in the browser followed by /robots.txt) you will have to create one manually. You can create a robots.txt file in any text editor, following Google’s instructions. Ask your developers to help you with this.

Technical structure

A lot of the SEO we’ve covered so far has been fairly technical, but there’s even more fine-tuning you can do to make sure your knowledge base is being indexed properly.

Alternative hreflang attribute

The alternative hreflang attribute indicates to Google that your page content refers to different language versions of the same page. Every language has its code – for example, “es-es” for Spanish or “en-us” for US English. Like this:
<link rel=”alternate” href=”example.com” hreflang=”es-es” />
It means that customers searching in a particular language will be shown in the corresponding page version. Use it in the on-page markup, HTTP header, or sitemap.

Duplicate content

Sometimes you may have pages in your knowledge base that contain the same content, which can damage the ranking for both pages. Duplicate content can be dealt with in many ways.

Try using a canonical link on each duplicate page inside the header to indicate to crawlers which is the original URL to index.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://yourcompany.com/page”>
You can also use a 301 redirect on the duplicate page which forwards to the original content page. It means that any inbound links going to duplicate pages are sent to one page, and will address any ranking issues.

301 redirects are done normally on the server side. How you implement a 301 redirect will differ depending on which platform you’re using for your knowledge base. If you’re using a SaaS solution, it should offer this capability in its settings.

Check out How to Maximize Your Document Article Visibility with SEO in Document360:

How to optimize your knowledge base content?

The other side of the SEO coin comes in the shape of content SEO. This is an ongoing process that needs to be incorporated in every knowledge-based article that you write. Because knowledge bases are content-heavy, this type of SEO offers a great opportunity for them.

Pick your keywords carefully

To begin with, you need to pick the keywords that will appear regularly in your articles. There are several ways to do this:

1. Look at what terms your competitors are using (SpyFu is a good tool for this).
2. Type search terms into Google and look at suggested related searches at the bottom of the page and in the automatic search term list that pops up under the search bar.
3. Use Google Adwords to find the rankings for different search terms.

There are different kinds of keywords known as short and long tail. Long tail keywords are usually over 3-4 words long, and can include phrases such as “self-service knowledge base software”. Meanwhile, short tail keywords are only one or two words in length (for example “knowledge base”). Often, using a mix works best.

Pick a primary keyword and a few secondary ones to use throughout your knowledge base article. These can change from article to article, but there should always be a handful that you use consistently to rank highly for those terms. “Knowledge base” and “knowledge base software” are two examples used by Document360.

It can also be a good idea to have your company name as a keyword too. This builds your brand and if you use it for paid advertising too, it’ll help prevent competitors from buying the keyword and using your name against you.

Make sure that any chosen keywords are organically incorporated into your knowledge base articles. Google is becoming smarter at recognizing when someone has specifically written a keyword-stuffed article that delivers no value to the reader. It downgrades your ranking if it detects this.

Keywords must be included in any video and image descriptions. Google doesn’t have eyes (yet!) so those descriptions tell it exactly what’s in an image or video.

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Make it readable

The readability of your articles needs to be good, not just to help your customers learn and solve problems but from an SEO perspective too. Knowledge base articles should be detailed enough to help customers, but simple and easy to read at the same time.

Hemingway is a good online tool that can tell you if your readability is good and suggest improvements. Generally speaking, quick ways to improve readability include:

• Use headings and subheadings to break up large bodies of text.
• Using shorter words and avoiding jargon.
• Avoiding passive voice.
• Keep your sentences short.
• Using bulleted lists.

Include a meta-data for better ranking

This is the on-page SEO that search engines like Google will be using to display results in the SERPs. It’s also how Google chooses what to display. Their importance has declined over the years, but they are still a core foundation of your site’s SEO.

This is your prime opportunity to try to rank for a desired keyword or keyword phrase. We’ll now go through where you should be using your keywords.

On-page Meta Data Elements

• Titles – this is the <h1> tag of your web page and will show up as the main title in the SERPs. It’s usually just the main title field in your KB software. This is indexed by search engines.
• Slug – this is the permanent URL of your page which should contain minimal words, ideally just your keyword or keyword phrase. It’s indexed by search engines. You should be able to edit it in your knowledge base software.
• Meta Description – This is the short piece of text that you see in your results when you search for something. If you don’t set a meta-description then one will be automatically created from the first part of your article. This isn’t always ideal because often it will be cut off mid-sentence and may not be appealing to searchers. Customizing your meta-description will attract more readers and allow you to put relevant keywords in it.

Document360 provides an easy way to do this through its platform, along with setting an SEO title and tags.

• Images – a much-overlooked opportunity for SEO optimization. If you use any images in your content, include the keyword you’ve chosen in your ‘alt text’ which should be customizable. They will show up in the image results when someone searches for that query.
• Body – include the actual keyword or keyword phrase you’ve chosen in the main text of your article. Try to just pick one keyword for each piece of content. Try to include it a few times, and use alternative versions if you can and it feels natural.

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Link juice

Link juice is a term used to describe the links between your website and others in the industry, as well as links within your website linking to other parts of your site. Links are important to help Google understand more about your website and where it sits within the industry. If it is linked to reputable websites with good rankings, then it will also get an SEO boost because Google will perceive it as more useful and valuable.

Internal links also improve SEO, again because it gives Google more context about your website. However, don’t be tempted to put loads of external and internal links in your articles as this may downgrade your SEO. Instead, stick to 2-3 per 1000 words and ideally avoid any links in your first paragraph. Document360 lets you easily hyperlink to external pages or internally with just a few clicks.

Images boost SEO

Always include some images in your knowledge base article. At the very least this should include a featured picture. Imagery helps to keep knowledge-based articles from being too lengthy and dry. A simple screenshot can help users a lot more than a long description.

Any images (and video) that appear on your page must be tagged with relevant keywords and include a description. As already mentioned, Google doesn’t have the full ability to ‘see’ an image or video, so it relies on tags and descriptions for context. This may change in the future as image recognition advances.

Yoast is a good all-rounder SEO tool that can be freely installed via WordPress. For images, it provides reminders to use, tag, and describe them. It will also tell you if your article ranks well for SEO against a certain keyword, if you’ve used a keyword too much or if you have too many links.

Does length matter?

The jury is out on what length of articles makes a difference when optimizing SEO because Google often changes the requirement for this. Digital marketing guru Neil Patel recommends posts of 400-500 words long but this is likely to change (and change again) shortly.

Your best bet is to stick to a mix of different lengths to try to cover all bases. Plus, if you only stick to one length your articles may miss out key sections that add value.

What’s in a URL?

A long time ago, there was a recommendation to include keywords in main headings and URLs. This isn’t so much the case anymore. Neil Patel suggests it might even negatively impact your ranking.

However, it’s worth ensuring that your URLs are relevant and logical. This helps your users as well as Google. They also shouldn’t be duplicated elsewhere (or if they are, use something called a canonical URL to tell Google of the duplicate).

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Give articles a refresh

Updating your articles means they remain useful to your customers, with no broken links and up-to-date advice. It also encourages Google’s crawlers to return and potentially boost your SEO.

Make articles part of your wider marketing

No knowledge base article should be an island – they must be linked to and shared as part of a wider marketing plan. Posting new articles on social media improves their trustworthiness in Google’s eyes. Plus, having an active social media presence adds further SEO brownie points.

Web traffic is another indicator of a good web page, so prompting customers to visit your knowledge base regularly by sharing it via email can improve SEO. Paid advertising is another option, but remember it isn’t as effective as organic search rankings. You also need to have your SEO foundations laid first, to stop yourself from paying through the nose for keywords.

Try to get included in the Google Knowledge Graph

One key part of optimizing your knowledge base SEO is making sure you claim as much real estate in the SERPs (search engine results page) as you possibly can. This is decided by Google based on the way you mark up your content.

The Google Knowledge Graph is how Google connects users with richer information right on the results page, without them having to click through a link to find what they need. Information is presented as a Knowledge Graph Card and is constantly being developed to provide better results.

Take the example of searching for a particular company. This now comes up on the right-hand side with all of the company information listed right in the SERPs.

Here is the result for 20th Century Fox:

As well as making the result richer, the Knowledge Graph also helps you discover information that is related to your original search.

So how does this apply to your knowledge base? When people are searching for queries related to your product, your site can come up in the featured snippet of the Knowledge Graph. Just take searching for ‘create filters in Gmail’.

Google’s very own knowledge base comes up as the main result. Users can interact with this content right there in the SERPs, or click through to the knowledge base if they want to learn more.
There is no certain way to get Google to include your site in the Knowledge Graph. However, it helps to present your content in bullet points and numbered lists because these are often used in the snippet (see the Gmail example above).

A constant work in progress

SEO best practice often changes, because search engines don’t want people to trick the system. Therefore it’s worth checking sites such as Search Engine Land for new updates. Mobilegeddon is one such development that may have caught some people unaware. Checking for updates every few months will mean you’re not caught out.

In this day and age SEO isn’t something you can afford to ignore. Especially when you consider the amount of effort and resources that have already gone into building your knowledge base – so give it the best shot by optimizing your SEO. Don’t sell yourself short by failing to SEO your knowledge base articles.

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If you search by product category (such as Knowledge Management or Customer Support) on the review sites such as Capterra or GetApp, then these products are often mixed together in the same category. 

Software classification is a little organic in that there is a lot of overlap between the different products. So why might you need to know the difference between help desk and knowledge base software?

There’s a risk of ending up with software that doesn’t actually do what you need it to do. You might waste your time, or invest in something that it’s very costly or impossible to back out of. 

It’s better to get it right from the beginning. One of the main reasons why people get these two categories mixed up is because help desks often come bundled with knowledge base software (take Zendesk Guide or Intercom Articles). 

Also, standalone knowledge base software is a relatively new – but important – category. It’s merged with wiki software and internal collaboration tools like Atlassian’s Confluence or Microsoft Sharepoint, but it’s really in a league of its own. 

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What is Helpdesk Software?

First, it helps to understand that help desk software is a customer ticketing system. According to Finances Online: 

“Helpdesk software allows businesses to resolve customer queries and concerns by managing tickets from receipt all the way to resolution. It also provides agents with a wide array of support and tools that promote collaboration.”

Help desk software has a number of core features: 

• Points of contact
• Ticketing management system
• Team chat
• Reporting
• Omnichannel support (email, phone, social)
• FAQs or knowledge base
• Search and filters

Some major help desk software solutions include: 

• Help Scout
• Zendesk
• Freshdesk
• LiveAgent
• Desk

You can distinguish between ticketing systems for smaller companies and enterprise solutions. Many of these help desk solutions come with knowledge bases included – but they tend to be rather basic and intended to supplement the core product. 

If you settle for the add-on knowledge base that comes with your help desk, you often end up with little more than some FAQs for your customers. Real knowledge base software is far more sophisticated and complex. 

Difference Between Helpdesk and Knowledge Base Software

Both types of software are a subset of customer support. They are often listed together on the major review sites, and yet they fulfil distinct functions. 

As we’ve explained, a help desk is a ticketing system to help teams collaboratively resolve customer queries. You use help desk software to interact with your customers, whereas a knowledge base is read-only by your customers. 

A knowledge base is a self-service portal that helps customers help themselves, like our own knowledge base software Document360. We explain features of knowledge base software in detail for you to get understand.

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While both are intended for customer support, one is intended to be used by your support agents, and the other is a read-only portal for your customers (or perhaps internal audiences). 

As we mentioned before, some help desk software comes with knowledge base software included. Nevertheless, it’s usually worth investing in standalone knowledge base software. 

The Benefits of Helpdesk and Knowledge Base Software

Each type of software has its own benefits. We’ll go into their benefits now.

Helpdesk Software Benefits

Help desk software can help you resolve your customer support tickets more quickly by helping you keep track of customer conversations, record updates, and keep all your tickets in one system.

It promotes collaboration as multiple team members can use the same system. Tickets can be escalated or labelled according to priority. The tickets you resolve in your help desk software can usually also be turned into knowledge base content. 

As a result, you can help large numbers of customers with just a small team. 

Although very useful, help desks typically have limited knowledge base capabilities because the software vendor gives more focus on their core product – the help desk. The knowledge base is more like a lead magnet or added benefit which is given as a free add-on along with the core product. 

We wrote a whole post on the topic of add-on knowledge bases. 

Knowledge Base Software Benefits

Knowledge base software completely focused on providing a self-service portal for your customers. This software has all the features you need to launch or enhance your successful self-service strategy. 

Knowledge bases mean many customer queries never have the chance to turn into tickets because your customers can self-serve. As soon as a problem arises, they can turn to your content for help. It serves your customers 24/7, even when your agents are asleep or busy. 

It’s much more costly to employ support agents than it is to have an up-to-date knowledge base. Knowledge bases also free up your existing agents’ time so they can handle more complex queries. 

We wrote a whole post on the benefits of knowledge base software.

When Would You Use Knowledge Base Software

All companies can benefit from having a self-service knowledge base, as well as an internal knowledge base for staff. The same knowledge base software can often be used for both purposes. 

70% of customers expect companies to have a self-service knowledge base. Knowledge-based software helps you save time by drastically reducing repetitive queries coming from a large customer base. It also shows your customers that you care about them. 

A standalone knowledge base has more features and a dedicated product roadmap. It means you’re serious about self-service. These features include: 

• Editorial workflows
• Permission-based authoring
• Tagging articles
• Sophisticated search engine
• Hierarchical organisation
• Domain mapping

And much, much more. If desirable features are missing from the software (such as a particular integration), you can request these from the development team and they could be added to the roadmap. This is unlikely to happen with a knowledge base appended to help desk software.

Also Read: Knowledge mapping within Knowledge management

Document360

Document360 is our own sophisticated knowledge base software aimed at internal or external audiences. It can be used by development-focused teams to integrate with their current tooling to make producing documentation a dream. 

Document360 excels at helping teams to rapidly produce documentation in line with product development using our WYSIWYG editor that also supports Markdown. 

Other top knowledge base solutions include HelpDocs, Proprofs and KnowledgeOwl. 

Conclusion

Most companies will use a combination of help desk software and standalone knowledge base software. 

No single software solution can do it all, and investing in your one-to-one customer support as well as self-service support is worthwhile. Help desks are good for helping your support agents to personally serve a finite number of customers, while a knowledge base can serve a potentially unlimited audience. 

Your help desk may come with an adequate knowledge base, but standalone software can take your self-service support to the next level. 

Find out more about our own dedicated knowledge base software, Document360.

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A knowledge base is critical for enhancing information-sharing across the company and helping your teams to achieve their goals. Some benefits can include fewer tickets to your support team, fewer churned customers, or an improved employee experience.

So companies want to know where they should invest their resources when it comes to choosing knowledge base software. Open source software can represent significant advantages but it’s not all a bed of roses when it comes to installing, using, and maintaining this software.

For that reason, you might want to consider a SaaS solution. In this post, we’ll consider the benefits and drawbacks of open source and the situations when you might want to opt for SaaS.

What is An Open Source Knowledge Base?

First, let’s look at the definition of a knowledge base. So knowledge base software is any software that facilitates the creation of a knowledge base, which stores all of the relevant information relating to a particular topic. It comes with the front-end architecture of the knowledge base website, and the back-end content management system that users use to create content.

Now, we’ll explore just what we mean by open-source software. Let’s look at a definition from Opensource.com:

Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.

So with open source knowledge base software, you have access to the source code which means you can alter how it works or add new features. In contrast to closed-source or SaaS knowledge base solutions, you have full control over the code and the ability to host it on your own servers.

Benefits of Open Source Knowledge Base

Self-Hosting Options

As we’ve mentioned, you can host your open-source knowledge base software on your own servers, which means you can be responsible for security and uptime. In contrast, SaaS knowledge bases are hosted by the software provider, so open source is a good choice if you want the reliability of your own servers.

It is Often Free or Cheaper

Many open-source solutions are free for companies to use as they see fit, as long as it falls within the terms of the open-source license. Even if there is a charge, open source is usually cheaper than their SaaS counterparts. While SaaS solutions often require an ongoing subscription fee, open-source software is usually a one-time payment if you’re a corporate user.

Flexibility to Modify Code, Innovate and Integrate

Even if your open-source solution isn’t exactly suitable for your needs, you have the flexibility to modify the code and adjust the software to your own description. Frequently, if you modify the code then the open-source license requires you to make the source code publicly available. Instead of having to build a solution from scratch, you have a working version of a knowledge base that you can integrate with your other systems.

Excess Freedom for the Users

With SaaS software, you are beholden to the decisions of the provider. In the case of open source, you can build a completely customized platform that is suited to your needs, and that works exactly as you want it to. You can also contribute to the original source code and help the project move in a direction that you want to see.

Cons of Open Source Knowledge Base

Need to Invest Substantial Internal Resources for Set-up and Development

When you opt for a SaaS solution, you’re ready to go from the minute you sign up. It doesn’t quite work that way with open source. Your development team needs to commit substantial resources to the set-up and development of your open-source knowledge base software, not to mention the ongoing maintenance of your program. SaaS software teams have their own engineering resources that are responsible for delivering the application, which you miss out on when you go for open source.

Your Software Version May Cease to Function

When you’re using an open-source software solution for your knowledge, the version you are using may cease to function if the project maintainers lapse. Since open source requires the contributions of volunteers, many projects become stagnant if the contributors become too busy to maintain them.

No Dedicated Support

With open-source software, there is a reason that it’s free. There’s a lack of a dedicated support function for open source, unlike SaaS solutions which have helped support teams to cater to your every need. If something goes wrong with your open-source product, you’ll need to rely on your own developers or hire external contractors to help you fix any problems.

Limited Visibility on New Features

When it comes to open-source solutions, you’re unlikely to have visibility into the product roadmap so you won’t know when the project maintainers are going to develop new features. You could end up crossing wires with the open-source community and developing a new feature yourself that is already under production.

Need to Pay License Fee to Project Maintainers

It has to be said that open-source software solutions are not necessarily free of charge. Some versions may be free for access to the basic features, but large companies will almost certainly need to pay a license fee. Since you’re also hosting the software on your own servers and paying for the development resources to maintain your solution, open source ends up not actually being free.

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Top Open Source Knowledge Base Software

eXo

eXo functions as an internal knowledge management solution aimed specifically at the enterprise for large teams who want to collaborate digitally. This solution has a community edition that is available for free, while their enterprise edition costs $5 per user per month.

eXo actually comes with a lot of features that focus on improving the employee experience including modern employee communication tools, private workspaces, and an employee engagement suite.

Features:

• Store and organize organizational information in numerous ways – documents, wikis, rich articles, and discussions.
• Take advantage of powerful, permission-based, full-text search across the whole platform that gives you access to relevant knowledge whenever you need it.
• Collaboratively edit documents, co-write wiki notes, and capture tacit knowledge through discussions and hashtags.

Documize

Documize is a robust solution for information-rich teams which combines a product engineering hub with knowledge management capabilities. Documize is self-hosted and available for your organization for just $9 per user per year, which makes this a very cost-effective option for growing teams. It’s suitable for both technical and non-technical users and they offer technical support for their customers.

Features:

• Organize documentation enterprise-wide with zero folders.
• Assign labels to group similar topics and create spaces to hold related content.
• Put in place reusable templates and snippets catalog to establish your best practices library.

phpMyFAQ

phpMyFAQ is a free open-source solution that offers support through community message boards and documentation. It’s completely free for all users and is available through Mozilla Public License Version 2.0.

phpMyFAQ is a mobile-responsive, multilingual, database-driven FAQ software that is capable of delivering single FAQ sites up to enterprise-ready integrations. It supports PHP 7.4+ and PHP 8, as well as MySQL.

Features:

• An FAQ content management system that allows you to administrate your users, groups, and categories.
• User and group-based permissions that restrict who can view, edit or create content.
• A powerful search that enables your users to find answers to questions with a search in all languages.

OpenKM

OpenKM is a very popular open-source knowledge base software that’s billed as a Document Management System. It can store, manage, and track electronic documents and images of paper-based information captured using a document scanner or other methods, facilitating good record-keeping across the organization.

OpenKM offers a free Community Edition without technical support, as well as a more advanced Professional Edition with consulting services.

Features:

• OpenKM users can search, update, and edit information gathered from various sources within an available application.
• You can integrate any application with OpenKM through their API, with OpenKM acting as the producer or consumer of knowledge.
• Teams can enrich shared documents by holding text discussions, editing any file type, and attaching all supporting materials to a final report.

CloudTutorial

CloudTutorial is marketed as the simplest knowledge base software, which has been designed to create customer-facing documentation that helps you reduce your support tickets. Not only that, but it’s also suitable for building a corporate wiki, or an internal knowledge base. CloudTutorial costs $19 per team per month, starting in their cheapest plan.

Features:

• Fully customizable to help you produce a tailor-made FAQs page or SOP using HTML and CSS.
• The ability to create categories and subcategories to help users explore your information.
• Team members can be added to the platform with specific rights so you can control who can create and edit your content.

 

Open Source vs SaaS Knowledge Base: Which One is Better?

Whether you choose an open source or SaaS knowledge base really depends on the unique needs of your organization. If you want to focus on knowledge management and documentation, without the fuss of installing and maintaining your own solution, then SaaS is a good choice.

You can benefit from dedicated technical support and a clear product roadmap so you always know you’re getting value for money. If anything goes wrong, you can be assured that the experts will be on hand to deal with any problems so your business can focus on content creation.

With the wide variety of choices in SaaS knowledge base software available, you’re very likely to be able to find a solution that meets your needs. While it is possible to customize an open-source platform with features that you want, this will take time and effort and divert development resources away from other projects.

 

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Why Choose Document360?

If you’re in the market for a SaaS knowledge base solution, you should definitely consider Document360. Document360 is powerful knowledge base software that allows you to create high-quality content for the end users of your help site. It’s suitable for both an internal company knowledge base and public-facing customer manuals or FAQs.

Advantages of Document360:

• It comes at a very reasonable price, starting at $149 per project per month.
• You’ll benefit from our thorough onboarding process which gets you up and running with a knowledge base in a matter of minutes.
• In the event that anything goes wrong, you’ll benefit from our helpful support team which is always on standby.
• Document360 offers out-of-the-box integrations with many popular software including Olark Intercom, Slack, and more
• Document360 also offers multilingual support, so you can create the article in English and translate and publish it in 40 different languages
• In-built analytics allow you to understand and track the performance of your content so you can improve it
• If your enterprise is looking for more security, Document360 also offers private hosting to mitigate the security risks
• Choosing Document360 means you are assured to have a great user experience with the product. You don’t have to worry about bugs or updates as this is all taken care of for you.

Wrapping Up

Open-source knowledge base software can be a good choice for companies that want to download and modify the source code. They have the relevant resources available in-house and have the time to devote to technical configurations and setup. On the downside, most of these open-source solutions aren’t actually free of charge as their providers are operating a for-profit business model.

Another downside is that most of the open-source platforms in this article are aimed at internal knowledge management, with very few coming with the capabilities for customer-facing documentation. It all depends on what you want to use your knowledge base for.

If you want to create a knowledge base, consider Document360 as your solution. Schedule a free demo today.

An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

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The post Open Source Knowledge Base: What’s it, Benefits & Top Tools appeared first on Document360.

It’s been shown to reduce customer churn. Indeed, 51% of customers state that they’ll stop using a company after just one bad customer experience. For long-term success, SAAS companies cannot allow this to happen. After all, it costs five times more to attract a new customer compared to retaining an existing one.

Customer support doesn’t just help your customers resolve problems, but can also help them make the most of your product. That makes it more likely to be a success for them, increasing their loyalty to your company and the chance that they will refer others.

Investing in strong customer support makes basic business sense.

10 Customer Support Best Practices for SaaS Companies to Follow

But what does good customer support look like? There are ten customer support best practices that all SAAS company leaders should be aware of to make their customer experience stand out.

1. Be Accessible

First, your customer support needs to be easy to find. Different customers are likely to seek help in different places, so you need to consider a range of contact options including social media, on your website, or via email. Make sure those details are displayed clearly. Also, consider what devices your customers are likely to use to contact your support team. Some might prefer to use a desktop and others may use a smartphone.

As Amir Farhi, vice president of strategic alliances & business development at WalkMe explains, “The ubiquity of instant communication channels has meant that people want to get the support they want, whenever they want and through whatever method is most convenient.”

Customer support should be available either 24/7 or during office hours – clearly, state the times when the team are online so your customers know when to get help. Don’t keep your customers waiting. Often, they’ll be frustrated and leaving them on hold will only make the situation worse. Timely support is best and it can pay to have live chat on your website or alternatively, offer an option for them to send a message when out-of-hours.

Salesforce has contact options at the header and footer of its website, along with a pop-up and dedicated ‘Trailblazer’ community forum to offer help.

2. Predict Any Recurring Questions

Sometimes customers don’t want to talk to someone – they just want a quick solution or answer to their question. That’s where a help centre will prove useful. Consult your customer support team to find out what questions they are always asked and then put these in a dedicated section on your website. Make sure that you help centre is responsive, meaning customers can access and view it on any device. It should also be easy to navigate – and can include images and video as well as text.

Document360 makes all of this easy, by enabling you to create a knowledge base in just a few clicks.

Questions around compatibility, number of users, billing and upgrades are usually common for SAAS companies. You could also set up a community forum where fellow users can answer queries.

Don’t answer the same question again and again. Create knowledge base articles for the repeated questions.

Also, A Knowledge-Centered Service model will assist your support agent find the latest solution for the customer query documented by the last assisted support agent

3. Understand What’s Behind Support Queries

Tying into the second point, when you sit down with your customer support team to identify common questions you may discover a recurring bug, difficulty or missing feature. Feed this information back to your development team to fix and you may even halve your support tickets overnight.

4. Hire The Right Team

Your customer support team need to represent your company well, especially when dealing with stressed customers. SAAS products can be extremely complex, so your team needs to have the technical know-how to deal with any issues (or who to pass it on to). Of course, they also need good communication and relationship building skills.

But it doesn’t all hinge on your customer support team. The rest of your organisation needs to be prepped with customer support training so that, should the need occur, they can handle enquiries. This is vital because 73% of customers are likely to leave a company if they find that their customer experience isn’t consistent across departments.

Of course, you also need to treat your team well. There’s little point in spending resources on training your team if your employee retention rate is in the pits. If your employees are happy working for you, they’re more likely to provide exceptional service.

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5. Have A Central Place

Putting all customer support enquiries in one place will make your customer support team’s job much easier. Even if your customers are contacting you through social media, your website and live chat, your support team should be able to access it all on one system. It saves time for your employees as they won’t have to log into lots of different platforms. Plus, everyone can remain up-to-speed with cases and how the support team is performing. Customers with enquiries that haven’t been resolved can be flagged and escalated. Having all customer support data in one place also helps with analytics.

6. Don’t Treat Every Platform The Same

A customer is going to communicate differently through an app compared with email. You cannot treat every communication method the same. Plus, some of your team might be better at talking through an app, and others might prefer live chat. Work to your team’s strengths.

Even a help centre needs to consider whether a customer is on their desktop or mobile. Handily, Document360 automatically scales its help centre solution to tablets, mobiles and computers.

DocuSign offers a range of support options for customers and shows a clear difference in its messaging on Twitter, compared to its support centre.

7. Measure And Feedback To Your Team

Measuring the performance of your customer support is key in improving and optimising it. Gather data on how many support queries are received and how long they take to be solved, customer satisfaction and feedback on the team.

It can also provide motivation for your team and help with innovation. You could trial a new chatbot, for example, and measure how it impacts customer satisfaction and resolution. Alternatively, the data collected can be used in gamification or reward programmes for your team – to further incentivise them to provide exceptional service.

Document360 includes customer feedback options within its help centre solution, making it easy for your customers to tell you how they feel.

8. Manage Your Customers’ Expectations

Obviously, you want to go over and above to please your customers, but managing their expectations plays a large part in providing good customer service. Don’t make promises that your business cannot keep because it’ll eventually backfire. Tell your customers exactly what to expect and then exceed those expectations when the opportunity arises.

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9. Automate Routine Functions

Certain activities such as information gathering or identifying problems can be automated to improve efficiency. It frees up your support team to focus on helping customers, whilst keeping your back-end systems and data collection running effectively. Read our article on 5 ways your customer support team can save time for more tips!

10. Consider Visual Communication

Sometimes talking through a solution just doesn’t work. It can take ages just to explain, assess and resolve a problem, so to speed things up consider using a video call to visually communicate with customers.

Intuit uses video technology to resolve complex technical issues in real-time with a representative. It enables them to see a customer’s computer screen and provide more hands-on support than a phone call or live chat. Contact resolution improved by 12% since implementing the tool.

Customer Support Underpins Any Good Saas Company

All successful SAAS companies will show these ten customer support best practices in some form. Customers use SAAS products that they trust and having the right support is integral to this. Whilst a great product might attract a customer through the door, stellar customer support will keep them in the room.

That means putting customer support right where (and when) they need it – whether that’s 24/7 online support, self-service support or a dedicated helpline. Then you need to equip your employees with the right technical knowledge and skills to help customers.

Finally, you should always innovate and improve your customer support function. There will always be new tools or techniques to try – the rise in video technology is one good example. Live chat and social media is another.

Customer support must constantly evolve to meet your customers’ needs and expectations. Gathering information and feedback will help refine your support and tell you if it is meeting (or below) expectations.

Technology can help you provide great customer support, but the foundations are laid in practice. Lay the groundwork with this customer support best practices and your support will be off to a strong start.

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