Customers churning has been an issue since the time when brick and mortar stores were popular. However, with the rise of completely digitized, online businesses, calculating and reducing customer churn has gained even greater importance.

If you owned a brick and mortar store earlier in the days, it was easier to create a special relationship with your clients. After all, customers would walk into your store, you could talk to them, get to know them better, and give them advice tailored to their needs. And because of the physical proximity, i.e: seeing the person face-to-face, it was easier for customers to place trust in you.

It was also harder for them to break that relationship because going to another store that sells the same products could have meant driving to the other side of the city.

Nowadays, walking away from an online store is one of the easiest things a customer can do. It’s literally one click away. Think about it, that takes less than 1 second!

So, what are the strategies to retain the customers?

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What is Customer Churn?

Customer churn, also known as customer turnover, or defection, is one of the biggest enemies of any company. In a nutshell, customer churn is the number or percentage of customers that stop paying for your subscription, product, or service during a certain period of time.

Customer attrition is one of the most important key performance indicators for a company because this metric can be a signal of your customer engagement and overall brand loyalty amidst other company elements which we will talk about further in this article. If you can understand and predict what’s causing your customers to churn, this metric can become a valuable asset for your business.

And if you want your business to stay afloat in the long run, especially if your company is established on top of the SaaS business model, it is essential that you pay attention to customer churn.

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Why Customer Churn Matters

It might be sad to see your customers go, but that is not the only reason why customer attrition matters. The metric has deeper implications for the short-run and long-run performance and longevity of the company.

The cost of retaining a customer is much lower than acquiring a new one.

Existing customers have already had a feel for your product, and since they subscribed for it in the first place, that means they found some value in it. New customers, however, might have never even heard of your product, let alone used it.

This is why lead generation in customer acquisition is so much more time and money-consuming than simply continuing to cater to the same consumer. Because of this, it is important to invest attention into decreasing customer churn.

Customer churn leads to a direct loss of returning revenue (especially in the case of SaaS driven companies).

Your customers, through their sales, are your most important source for funding your ongoing SaaS business. When you lose customers, you lose returning revenue and direct cash inflows to your business.

SaaS companies are susceptible to suffering the pains of customer churn because software services are most of the time subscription-based where the customer pays monthly or annually.

Customer attrition inhibits company growth.

Company growth refers to a certain business increasing in financial value or market share. This can be achieved in many ways, primarily as the number of the company’s user base or site visitors increases.

If consumers stop using the company’s product or service, this impacts the company’s brand reputation and therefore slows down the overall growth of the business.

Customer churn, therefore, gains massive importance for companies in the following industries:

• Subscriber-based service model services (such as most SaaS companies)
• Banking services
• Mobile telecommunication
• Pay TV operators

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How to Calculate Consumer Churn

There are two essential ways to measure and calculate your company’s customer churn. It can be expressed either in terms of customers or in terms of revenue

Of course, the most straightforward way to measure customer churn is by calculating the number of customers that have decided to unsubscribe or stop using your product over a specific period of time.

However, assuming you are providing a SaaS-based service or product, thus on a monthly recurring revenue-centric monetization model, you could use the following ways to calculate customer churn rate as percentages.

Subscription Churn Rate

Subscription churn is shown through a percentage. Essentially, it represents the ratio (translated into a percentage) of the total number of customers that chose to stop subscribing to your product or service over the total number of subscribers at the beginning of the period.

Subscription churn is logically tied to overall customer satisfaction about a certain product or service and is an important metric to evaluate the health of your company.

Revenue Churn Rate

Revenue churn is also demonstrated through a percentage but is a more accurate indicator of the revenue loss that comes from consumer churn. Since you can use both gross and net revenue to evaluate your business’ income, we have presented below both formulas for your convenience.

The difference between gross revenue churn and net revenue churn is that the latter also takes into account upsells during that period.

The very well-known company, Netflix, maintains very cautious of their churn rate. The online streaming service aims to keep its customer churn rate as low as possible by keeping their viewers engaged and watching as much as possible.

Causes of Customer Churn

Before we discuss actionable tips and strategies, we should focus on the root causes of customer churn. Here are four:

Poor Customer Service

In today’s highly competitive business environment, customers demand instant and exceptional customer service. Many companies forget to regard customer support as one of the most important aspects of their augmented product.

Customer service is a large contributor to user satisfaction and is regarded as the main reason companies lose their customers.78 percent of millennial customers have moved their business somewhere else after one single poor customer service experience. The emphasis on customer service creates large implications for your company.

This is why poor or mediocre customer service leads to consumers abandoning the product or service. In some cases, they will also leave bad reviews before or after they depart, which could also affect the actions of your other customers or prospective customers.

Poor Onboarding Process

There are two key moments in the onboarding process. The first one is when your consumer signs up for the product or service and the second one is when the consumer achieves its first success with the product or service.

Most of the customer churn happens between these two key moments, i.e. when the consumer has signed up for the product or service but fails to see the value or advantage within a certain period of time.

This often happens due to the difficulty of the customer onboarding process, which is where consumers first start having a direct relationship with your brand.

Lack of Ongoing Customer Success

Customer success has to do with the continuous efforts of a company to deliver value to their customers. Each product or service should add value to a customer’s life, which is the reason why he/she is purchasing or subscribing to it.

If your company fails to deliver on the promises that come with purchasing a product or service, the customer lifetime value will drop down. Additionally, it will also contribute to a decrease in overall customer satisfaction, which will ultimately lead to customer churn.

If you want to learn more on how to achieve customer success, check out our Ultimate Guide to SaaS Customer Success Best Practices

Lack of Brand Loyalty

When consumers develop brand loyalty towards your company, they are much more likely to spend more money or refer their friends to do the same. Referred customers cost far less and require less effort to acquire than regular customers.

Brand loyalty is usually only instilled after the second key moment, i.e. after the customer has reached his/her first success with the product or service. Before this point, the potential costs for switching to another product or service provider are very low, thus making it easier for them to churn. This again emphasizes the importance of good onboarding and ongoing customer support.

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9 Strategies to Reduce Customer Churn

Now that you know all about the causes of customer churn and how to anticipate it, you can consider different strategic options when it comes to reducing it. We list nine of them that you can start using today.

1. Prevent Customer Churn

Here are some things to look out for to anticipate potential customer churns:

• Cancellation of automatic subscription renewals.
• Negative interaction or experience with members of customer service.
• Shrinking of web-based activity.
• A decrease in mobile-based activity, including mobile payments.
• Falling of social media shares and overall social media activity.
• Bad reviews in social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Reddit etc.

By keeping an open eye and an open mind towards these patterns, you can anticipate individual or groups of customers from churning and take appropriate measures to address them.

2. Analyze Churn Factors

To get a better sense of why your customers are leaving, you can try getting that information from the source: simply by asking them.

You can directly call your customers for feedback and ask them what their motivation for leaving was, in order to analyze the reasons for customer churn. You can also survey them at the point of churn or send them a follow-up email.

Understanding and analyzing customer churn factors is the first step of the diagnostics of the problem. This will then be the basis for constructing a proper strategy with solutions that address the churn factors for your business.

3. Target the “Right” Customers

Identifying the correct target audience for your business is crucial to its success and customer satisfaction. If the needs of your consumer do not match the needs your product is trying to solve, you will inevitably have a high customer churn rate.

Avoid using words like “cheap” or “free forever ” when offering free trials or subscriptions since the attracted customers are likely to leave quickly (or right after the trial period expires).

Customer churn rate will be especially high when you use such keywords in marketing communications because they might convert customers that are not purchasing the product with the right intent, and who do not appreciate the value that product offers.

4. Build Customer Loyalty

Aside from striving to have a superior product and offering, there are some small things you can do to make sure your customers stay loyal. As the old saying goes “The devil is in the details”.

Here are three ways which can help you create a personal relationship with your customers:

Improve Customer Service

As we have already established, customer service is a dealbreaker in terms of both customer loyalty and low customer churn rates. Average just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Here are just some of the best customer support practices for delivering superior service:

• Make sure to always have customer service representatives available and ready to communicate with customers.
• Be as helpful as possible and don’t try to “dodge” their problems or complaints.
• Train your customer service representatives in communication and make sure they have a good understanding of the company’s knowledge base content so that they can direct users to the right destination for their specific problem.
• Nowadays it’s more efficient to also have a self-service knowledge base for users to read on their own. This way they can find information almost instantly, without having to contact customer support.

Engage with Your Customers on a Daily Basis

People love to feel special. This is why continuous engagement with your customer base is essential to establishing a relationship between your business and them.

You should aim to make your product a part of their daily life. Use social media, your company’s website, daily/weekly email or newsletter, or even face to face communication to stay in touch with your customers.

Implement Customer Retention Activities

Attracting customers comes with an expensive price tag, which makes many customer relationships unprofitable during in the early stages. Only in later on, when their total customer lifetime value supersedes the cost of acquiring their business and keeping them loyal, do relationships generate big returns. Keeping them loyal is the key part of that equation.

Always go the extra mile for your customer by offering them:

• different pricing deals
• seasonal discounts
• coupons
• referral programs.

The most successful case of referral programs in recent business news is Dropbox. The company grew 3900% in ten years, going from 100K registered users to 500 million just because of their smart and easy referral program.

Customers look for companies that make them feel appreciated and this way you can make sure you are increasing your brand loyalty and decreasing your customer churn in the process.

5. Improve Customer Service

As we have already established, customer service is a dealbreaker in terms of both customer loyalty and low customer churn rates. Average just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Here are just some of the best customer support practices for delivering superior service:

• Make sure to always have customer service representatives available and ready to communicate with customers.
• Be as helpful as possible and don’t try to “dodge” their problems or complaints.
• Train your customer service representatives in communication and make sure they have a good understanding of the company’s knowledge base content so that they can direct users to the right destination for their specific problem.
• Nowadays it’s more efficient to also have a self-service knowledge base for users to read on their own. This way they can find information almost instantly, without having to contact customer support.

6. Engage with Your Customers on a Daily Basis

People love to feel special. This is why continuous engagement with your customer base is essential to establishing a relationship between your business and them.

You should aim to make your product a part of their daily life. Use social media, your company’s website, daily/weekly email or newsletter, or even face to face communication to stay in touch with your customers.

7. Implement Customer Retention Activities

Attracting customers comes with an expensive price tag, which makes many customer relationships unprofitable during the early stages. Only in later on, when their total customer lifetime value supersedes the cost of acquiring their business and keeping them loyal, do relationships generate big returns. Keeping them loyal is the key part of that equation.

Always go the extra mile for your customer by offering them:

• different pricing deals
• seasonal discounts
• coupons
• referral programs.

The most successful case of referral programs in recent business news is Dropbox. The company grew 3900% in ten years, going from 100K registered users to 500 million just because of their smart and easy referral program.

Customers look for companies that make them feel appreciated and this way you can make sure you are increasing your brand loyalty and decreasing your customer churn in the process.

8. Educate your customer

Offering your customer an amazing knowledge base covering issues and components of your products or services is a great way of educating your customers.

You can also use elements of the knowledge base to educate your customer by:

• Hosting different seminars or webinars
• Offering tutorials
• Presenting different guides and how-tos on your website.
• Having a Q&A or FAQ section and/or utilize community forums to increase not only customer engagement but also their overall knowledge base.

These methods, when used appropriately, allow your customer to get the most out of the product or service they are utilizing and paying for.

9. Create obstacles for customer churn

Another straightforward way of decreasing customer churn is by putting up some “barriers” to prevent it from happening. Although this does not necessarily end up creating added value for your business, it’s an effective way of producing results.

You can make it more difficult for your customers to churn using three different ways

• Value-added services.
• Contractual binding periods. By locking in your customers in your contract, the customer churn rate will decrease. This means, for example, providing a discount for yearly subscriptions instead of monthly ones to make sure the customer will not switch or ditch the product or service.
• Loyalty programs. Loyalty programs are rewards programs for customers which incentivize spending more money and purchasing more, usually through loyalty cards or badges.

Conclusion

As we covered throughout the post, customer churn – the rate at which your customers are unsubscribing or abandoning your product or services – is one of the key performance indicators of any company.

One of the primary causes of customer dissatisfaction, which ultimately leads to churn, is an unpleasant account with customer service representatives. This is why it is important that your company puts in place exceptional customer service at all times and constantly strives to educate its employees and customers.

The utilization of a knowledge base is essential in achieving this goal, whether it is for your customer service team to use when helping customers or for your customers to refer to independently.

Creating and maintaining a knowledge base, however, can turn out to consume a lot of time and resource. That’s why several companies have started utilizing knowledge base software to help them maintain a top-notch knowledge base.

The best example of knowledge base software which can help you massively increase your customer’s satisfaction is Document360.

Document360 is knowledge base software that helps your team create, collaborate, and publish a self-service knowledge base for your software with ease. If you are looking for an easy way to keep your customers happy and prevent them from churning, you can give Document360 a try. It’s free for 14 days, with no credit card required.

Did you find this article and the different strategies for reducing customer churn helpful? Is there anything you think we didn’t include on customer churn, its causes, computations, and ways to deal with it?

The post What is Customer Churn and 9 Proven Ways to Reduce It appeared first on Document360.

Now, with the emergence of SaaS, the term knowledge base has taken a more different meaning.

By definition, a knowledge base is a self-service repository or library used to store easily retrievable information about your product, service, or topic.

Essentially, it’s a collection of your company’s internal or external knowledge, structured in such a way that it can help employees or customers find answers to their questions or doubts.

Nowadays, knowledge bases have become an integral part of any knowledge management system. As such, they appear in different formats and with different uses.

Throughout this post, we will cover:

• What is a Knowledge Base?
• Benefits of Having a Knowledge Base
• What to Include in Your Knowledge Base
• Examples of Top-Notch Knowledge Bases
• Knowledge Base Software & Tools
• Conclusion

What is a Knowledge Base?

As we mentioned above, a knowledge base is simply a repository of data that works as a self-service helpdesk for your customers and your employees. It contains information about your service, product, or about a specific topic.

Such examples can be FAQs, how-to articles, troubleshooting guides, or anything that your customers might want to know related to the services you offer.

A good knowledge base is the perfect solution for providing an excellent customer service while scaling your customer support program.

At the same time, it can also help your employees carry out their job more effectively by allowing them to focus on their tasks and on what is really important.

As such knowledge bases can be differentiated according to their functionality.

There are internal knowledge bases, used to serve the employees of the company.

And then there are external knowledge bases which serve the customers of the product or service.

Internal Knowledge Base

An internal knowledge base serves only the employees of the company. Meaning it does not provide access to the users of the platform.

When creating an internal knowledge base, you can include anything that is meant for internal use. To name a few:

• Best coding practices for developers
• Onboarding material for new employees
• Content creation guidelines for content writers
• Company policies
• And literally any piece of information that needs to be shared internally

An example of an internal knowledge base can be even a Google Drive folder that is shared only within the employees of the company, or within a specific department.

External Knowledge Base

An external knowledge base aims at serving directly your customers. It is usually public to everyone and can be easily found online.

If you browse through the Help and Documentation section of any software, that’s their external knowledge base.

For example, below you can see Revolut’s Help Center.

Revolut is a digital bank and as such, it’s external knowledge base provides information regarding getting started with the app, transaction and card issues, profile related information, and so on.

All of it concerns directly the customers.

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Benefits of Having a Knowledge Base

Having a knowledge base nowadays is absolutely essential for any business. Especially when it comes to Software as a Service.

If you really want your SaaS business to be successful, you will need to start building a knowledge base from day one. Why?

To begin with, SaaS companies have a monetization model that focuses on their Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).

Essentially, that means you have to not only convert new customers to use your product but also to keep existing customers happy, so they don’t leave you for your competitor.

One of the main reasons why customers stop using a product is because they find it too hard to use or they don’t receive the right support. And to top that off, customers nowadays expect immediate self-service support.

Heck, they don’t just expect it, they demand it!

Nowadays, if your customer can find a solution to his or her issue without having to wait or communicate with someone they will adore your product. That’s why having a good and well-optimized knowledge base can reduce your customer churn and put you ahead of your competition.

Asides from this, a knowledge base can greatly benefit your company in various other ways.

Internal Knowledge Base Benefits

Increased productivity

Having a structured source of internal information can increase your company’s overall productivity and efficiency.

Imagine one of your employees has a question regarding some company policy, some specific guideline, or about best practices and is not sure what to do. If he asks one of his/her coworkers, he will most likely get an answer to his question.

However, those employees will have to diverge their attention from whatever task they are accomplishing to answering their coworker’s question.

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If you have ever worked in an office where such things happen continuously, you probably have noticed that it takes a lot of time for you to focus back on the initial task. In fact, it takes about 15 to 30 minutes for an employee to get back to the same level of concentration once he or she gets distracted.

That’s not a problem, however, if your employee can find an answer simply by browsing your internal knowledge base.

Reduce Onboarding Costs

It’s common for onboarding processes to be time-consuming and costly. Employees need to go through a series of steps and most of the time this process is semi-automated using workflow software.

However, even when using workflow software to automate the process, employees still need to communicate with other employees and supervisors in order to gain the necessary knowledge for them to start working.

All of this can be automated if that knowledge can be found somewhere – that place being within your company’s internal knowledge base.

Imagine this scenario;  two new content writers get hired in your company and they complete their onboarding process. All the necessary accounts are created for them and they are given a short intro on the content writing guidelines that they must follow.

They sit on their desk, the initial onboarding excitement wears off and they need to actually start working. This is the point they realize they have forgotten most of the guidelines.

Instead of panicking, trying to remember, or wasting other employee’s time by asking for a second explanation, they can log-in to the company’s knowledge base repository and search for the content creation guidelines.

Not only does this reduce onboarding time and costs but it also contributes to the overall company productivity.

Take a look at how Document360 simplified VIEW’s new customer onboarding:

Improve Communication and Cooperation

As your company grows, you will notice that most of your departments and teams will start getting more and more intertwined. After all, the company works like an engine which is made of several parts, and if they don’t work together, you can’t move forward.

Employees from different teams and departments will have to start collaborating more. And sometimes, communication between them can be hard to maintain.

That’s where your centralized repository of internal knowledge steps in.

Employees can store and share any needed information with each other, thus reducing confusion and allowing them to work independently without the need for constant supervision.

This greatly lowers management overhead and improves team synergy.

Store Company Knowledge and Improve Company Valuation

Can you believe that most companies don’t have their knowledge or business processes documented?

What happens if their employees leave?

The frequency at which employees leave their companies is on a rise. It is well known that Millennials and Generation Z, switch workplaces almost every two years.

And with them leaving, their knowledge is also lost. This, inevitably, hardens the work of those who’re left to pick up the pieces.

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Aside from the above, having documented knowledge is extremely important for SaaS startups. If at any point in time you decide to sell your company or try to get additional investment, having your company knowledge documented turns knowledge, an intangible asset, into a valuable and transferable asset.

External Knowledge Base Benefits

Reduce Customer Support Costs

Whether you are a startup or a well-developed company, you don’t want to dump a lot of cash on customer support if it’s not an effective use of your budget.

Certainly, providing the best experience for your customers is your number one priority. However, with the help of an external knowledge base, you can provide a superb experience while cutting down on cost.

Having a good knowledge base lowers the number of support tickets your support staff has to handle. As a startup, minimizing costs in every possible area is very important.

The same can be said for bigger companies. Having an external knowledge base can reduce employee overhead. Meaning your staff will be able to focus only on critical issues and tickets of high importance.

Higher customer satisfaction

Remember the Social Media Today statistics we mentioned above? It is true – people would prefer to answer their questions by themselves rather than asking for someone’s aid.

People genuinely don’t like it when they’re in need of something or when they’re not knowledgeable on a certain topic and have to ask someone. By providing them with this information right at their fingertips, customer retention will increase without sacrificing your company’s customer service.

Reduce Customer Wait Times

We all know that irritating feeling when we’re waiting for customer service while being put on hold for more than 10 minutes.

With a proper knowledge base – one that is organized well and explicitly – your customers won’t be put on hold. There will be no transferring between support agents, no “we’ll call you back in a bit”, etc. All their questions will be answered with one button click. How cool is that?

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What to Include in Your Knowledge Base

If you have read thus far, then without a doubt you are convinced on the benefits that having a knowledge base can bring.

However, now you might be wondering what to include in your knowledge base.

To begin with, as cheesy as it may sound, the most important things is to listen to your customers. Look for trends, focus on what people want to know and on what they need to know. And then write knowledge base content that matches those needs.

Secondly, the knowledge base should be easy to navigate. Thus a lot of effort needs to be put in optimizing your help desk’s UX and information architecture. Think about it this way. When a user lands on your help desk, they should instinctively understand which section they need to click on so that they can find what they are looking for.

Thirdly, you should optimize content on your knowledge base for search according to best SEO practices as to improve discoverability.

We won’t go into much detail regarding SEO and UX design for your knowledge base since we have already dedicated an individual post to each topic.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the different components that can make up a knowledge base.

Frequently Asked Questions

F.A.Q. pages explain topics that don’t require too much depth or technical support. They cover topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 paragraphs.

These are answers to questions that have been either asked on a regular basis or that you expect your users to ask at some point.

To give you an example of how useful FAQs are, we don’t have to look any further than Transferwise. They started as a money transferring service and then expanded to offering a borderless online bank account for their customers.

Since the concept of borderless accounts is fairly new, they decided to create an extensive FAQ section for it (35+ FAQs). And guess what? It worked wonders for them.

This way, their support staff didn’t have to answer the same questions over and over again. Instead, they could redirect inquiries to their respective FAQ page.

Tutorials & How-to Guides

Most of the time, issues can’t be resolved through FAQs due to their brevity and conciseness. That’s where how-to guides and tutorials step in.

How-to guides are generally short tutorials that explain in detail a single step or action. Essentially, they help your new users get acquainted with basic processes of your software.

Tutorials, on the other hand, are longer, more in depth, and can cover a wider range of processes within the same post.

Both how-to guides and tutorials are generally supported with screenshots, visual representations or even short step-by-step videos.

One of the best examples of knowledge bases containing several useful tutorials is Slack. They have tutorials on almost anything. And they are amazingly easy to follow since they have clear step-by-step instructions backed by images, screenshots, diagrams, GIF-s, and even videos.

What makes Slack tutorials great is that they show you what you will be able to build from the beginning.

Then they make sure that you fulfill all prerequisites before getting started, so you don’t end up getting frustrated after completing the tutorial, wondering what went wrong.

Community Section

When dealing with software documentation, troubleshooting problems and so on, the community is always an essential part of any software.

Especially in the open source community, designers, engineers, programmers rely heavily on each other’s support for fixing issues with their code or design. A good knowledge base provides a separate space for the community to interact and help each other.

After all, in today’s age, a comment section for discussing issues and questions is not enough anymore.

DigitalOcean sports a very active community and a great chunk of their knowledge base content is created by the community itself. They write tutorials, discuss issues and solutions together, and then whenever it’s needed, moderators from Digital Ocean step in to give more detailed answers.

It is especially useful for your company to establish an active community. Firstly, you get content generated by other users thus reducing your content creation team’s overhead.

Secondly, users help each other out, reducing the amount of work needed from your support team. And last but not least, an active community around your product helps your promote your knowledge base and your product.

There are several reasons why Digital Ocean fosters such an active community. One thing is for sure though, they really care about their community. So much that they actively promote their top contributors, or as they like to call them, “Community DO-ers”.

News and Updates Section

Most knowledge bases nowadays provide a separate section for news and updates. This section can include community announcements, product updates, new version releases, known issues with the platform, and so on.

If your company is offering a SaaS, then you are probably rolling out updates on a regular basis.

Some companies, like Asana, prefer to divide their updates and news based on their target reader.

They have a single section for new releases called “Release notes”. Instead of having updates, changes, and bug fixes documented in different places (which can be difficult to organize and find), they update the same section on a regular basis. This section is mainly for users to read.

And they keep a separate “News” page which is targeted at developers mainly. This is where they release latest Asana API Updates.

Reference Documentation

These docs target a more technical audience such as software developers. They are extremely useful if your software has an API that developers or customers can use to extend their application or to create custom integrations with their existing software.

However, reference docs are not restricted to a software’s API. They can also include information regarding Command-line interfaces (CLIs), drivers and specifications, file formats, and so on.

To give you a simple example, you can take a look at Docker’s reference documentation.

In today’s age, most SaaS companies are trying to develop APIs that can be understood and used by non-tech-savvy people.

Zapier’s reference documentation, for example, uses terminology that can easily be understood by non-developers. That’s why almost every SaaS startup nowadays is integrating Zapier into their process from day one.

Examples of Top-Notch Knowledge Bases

After explicitly covering what a knowledge base is, its uses and benefits, and what to include in it, perhaps it will be most effective to go through some examples of knowledge base excellency.

Spotify

We all know the internationally renowned music app Spotify. To what do you believe it owes its tremendous success? As stated above, the idea itself isn’t enough. Spotify knew that. And this is why they created their excellent knowledge base.

When it comes to a design-wise knowledge base, Spotify has our vote. Their help center is not only extremely helpful, user-friendly, and simple, but it is also neatly organized.

Each common issue is carefully segmented with its own subcategories. Their knowledge base is composed of thoroughly explained information (FAQs, how-to guides) backed by amazing visuals.

Spotify’s knowledge base also has an amazing autocomplete system which suggests and tries to predict possible questions that you may have. Its ranking is most likely based on the number of times such questions have been asked before.

 Finally, Spotify offers a feature for users to evaluate the effectiveness of their knowledge base through a binary feedback from, or in simpler words by answering a Yes/No question. This requires little effort from the user itself and only indicates that Spotify values customer feedback and that they are always striving to improve.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs support one of the best knowledge bases available out there when it comes to SEO and marketing tools. It is very easy to navigate. Their helpdesk is categorized based on the actions that you are trying to perform and the elements of the application that you want to use.

What gives Ahrefs’ knowledge base our vote is the fact that their content is heavily backed by media content. They have a myriad of screenshots that help you follow through a process step-by-step.

And if that wasn’t enough, they also provide explanatory videos to guide you.

Differently to our previous example, they don’t gather feedback using a binary form. Instead, they use smiley faces to allow users to indicate their level of satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with the content.

This allows them to prioritize changes that need to be made to their knowledge base content based on the three levels of user satisfaction.

Stripe

Stripe’s knowledge base is our one time favorite. In fact, their knowledge base is so good it has been one of the key factors in their growth.

If we were to attribute their knowledge base’s success to one thing, it would probably be their focus on how users interact with their products. Instead of using technical jargon, they categorize information according to their purpose.

Additionally, they use language that can be understood by any user. This means that you don’t need to be familiar with Stripe’s terminology to understand and use its documentation.

The best thing about Stripe’s documentation is the fact that they give you the opportunity to test their API instantly, directly from their docs page.

What better way to create trust on your product than allowing people to use it literally within a few seconds of accessing the documentation?

If you want to get more insights on Stripe’s growth, you can check out our full tear down of Stripe’s knowledge base.

Dropbox

The modern workspace designed to reduce busywork is another example of a knowledge base done right. The clarity of their words accompanied with their visuals makes their help center a truly remarkable place to search answers.

Through the right combination of wording and visuals, they easily comfort their customers – an indication of their friendly attitude. The most common issues are listed in the form of “Featured articles”, which means that they analyze their search data and give the most relevant information to their clients.

Additionally, their help center is really simplified, which guarantees a high success rate and definitely improves their customer retention rate.

Same as in the case with Spotify, Dropbox has an autocomplete search system which is set to help people find what they need in a timely manner.

Canva

Last but not least, it is time to show Canva’s knowledge base – the designers’ best friend! Their categorization and structure is top-notch.

Through the right implementation of visual graphics, Canva provides a unique customer value and experience for those who need help with their questions. This makes their knowledge base extremely smart, professional, and intuitive.

The quality of content is also mind-blowing, as it shows a great symbiosis between written expression and visual support. Their articles are professionally done, while their design is truly helpful.

Finally, Canva also has an autocomplete search function, which predicts customer’s searches based on previous historical data.

Knowledge Base Software & Tools

Let’s face it. Almost any company nowadays (especially SaaS companies) has a knowledge base, be it internal, external, or both.

Creating and managing it yourself can be quite costly and time-consuming. You need to hire additional developers or if you are a startup and can’t afford to, your existing developers will have to spend some of their valuable time on developing a knowledge base alongside your product instead of working on the next new features.

And you probably don’t want that to happen because what’s the point of having a knowledge base if you don’t have a product?

That’s why there is a variety of knowledge base tools and software available. The hard thing, however, is choosing the right one.

There are certainly a variety of content management systems (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal that can be used. There are several plugins that allow you to use WordPress to create your own knowledge base for free.

However, the downside with this type of solution is that it lacks flexibility, scalability, and enough tools for you to create an optimal customer experience.

For this exact reason, dedicated knowledge base software exists. In the end, it boils down to choosing the one that best fits your organizational needs.

Criteria for Choosing a Knowledge Base Software

• The knowledge base software should scale alongside your product.
• How much does it cost per project/per month?
• Does it offer different plans? If you are a small startup, you are probably not looking for enterprise level solutions.
• It should offer analytics and reporting since this is your best way of gathering direct feedback from users.
• Can you create different versions of your documentation? Software development goes through different stages and versions, and so does your documentation.
• Ability to backup and restore older versions.
• A good knowledge base software should integrate with most of the software you already use or plan to use.
• It should allow you to brand your docs (adding your logo to them, custom javascript, and so on).
• Non-technical/technical writers and support agents should be able to use the KB software too. Thus it should be intuitive, just like the knowledge base itself.

So in the end, choosing a knowledge base software is the same as choosing any software for growing your startup. You need to weight out the advantages and disadvantages, and ultimately select the one that best fits your needs.

If you are looking for knowledge base software that fulfills all of the criteria mentioned above and comes at a competitive price (per project on a monthly basis), then you should give Document360 a try. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial, with no credit card required.

Conclusion

Building a knowledge base is difficult but essential. Any customer nowadays demands and deserves immediate support for software or tool that they are using. That is why having a dynamic, up-to-date, and customer-centric knowledge base reduces customer churn and boosts your ROI in terms of customer success.

Additionally, it helps build a community around your product which helps you increase brand awareness, overall customer satisfaction and the feeling of being included in something bigger.

Ultimately, having a good knowledge base is about empowering your customers and your employees.

All of this can be accelerated and improved using knowledge base software.

How did a knowledge base help you grow your company? Did you use knowledge base software to create your knowledge base, or did you create it from scratch? What worked best? We would be glad to hear about your experience in the comments section below.

The post What Is a Knowledge Base and Why Do I Need One? appeared first on Document360.

Once your customer base starts growing, it becomes difficult to provide qualitative support to all of them. And if you are a startup, you probably can’t afford to hire many support agents.

That’s why companies have started relying on their knowledge base to help customers with things like onboarding on the essential features of the product, troubleshooting problems, or even guiding them through advanced practices.

Unfortunately, simply having a well-built knowledge base is not enough. You could have amazing how-to guides, simple step-by-step tutorials, and all the other useful resources that a customer needs, but if they don’t know where to find them, that will all go to naught.

Or worse, imagine if they are not even aware that such resources exist in the first place.

That would truly be a waste!

Many companies have figured out how to build a comprehensive knowledge base for their product, but they are still having trouble driving traffic to it.

That’s what this guide is for. Keep reading if you want to learn more about:

• Benefits of educating your customers on the existence of your knowledge base
• 5 easy steps for driving traffic to your knowledge base

So, before we dive deep into the actionable tips, let’s outline the different advantages that your company can benefit by using knowledge base as a marketing tool.

Why Should You Educate your Customers on the Existence of your Knowledge Base?

There are several reasons why you should use your knowledge base as a marketing tool to promote. In order to discuss the advantages of using knowledge base as a marketing tool, we are going to assume that you have already created a good knowledge base for your product.

As such, the first advantage becomes quite obvious. You have already invested resources and time into crafting your knowledge base. By marketing it, you are simply increasing the return on your initial investment.

Other less obvious (but still important) benefits using your knowledge base as a marketing tool to your customers include:

Reduced Employee Overhead

If your customers know of the existence of your knowledge base, they will be able to use it as a self-service support tool.

The number of support tickets is bound to decrease. Especially in this age, where users would prefer to solve their issues with minimal social contact.

As a result, you can afford to maintain a smaller team of support people. For a startup or a mid-sized business, it is important to focus your resources on development and research.

Reduce Customer Churn

Almost 70% of the identifiable reasons why customers left typical companies had nothing to do with the product. The prevailing reason for switching was the poor quality of service.

A lower number of tickets also means that customers are happier. Essentially, they can take advantage of the self-service support to find a solution to their problem or question much faster than if they called or emailed support.

The days in which customers would call customer support and wait on line for 10 or more minutes for them to answer are long gone. Nowadays, people expect instant support to be offered to them. They have questions and they demand answers, now.

Additionally, customers now prefer self-service over the human touch. So, if they can find what they are looking for in an instant, without it involving any social interaction,  that’s just perfect.

Enabling your users to get instantaneous self-service will keep them happy. And by doing so, you can greatly reduce customer churn while still being able to focus on attracting new customers.

Keeping your customers happy is a promise, we help you to keep it up with the help of a smart knowledge base.

Signup Now!

Which brings us to the next advantage:

Ability to Scale Your Business

Let’s consider the two advantages mentioned above. By driving traffic to your knowledge base, you can automate your self-service support and keep your existing customers happy at the same time.

In turn, that means you can keep your customer support costs as low as possible (small customer support team). Additionally, the retained customers generate a steady stream of revenue which you can re-invest to improve products under development.

Creating a Community

When using your knowledge base as a marketing tool it also helps in building up a strong community around your product.

Good, well-promoted documentation brings in more readers to your knowledge base. If these readers find useful information on your knowledge base, they will engage more with your product.

Satisfied users are more likely to share the content in social media and other social news websites like hacker news. It’s a great loop for your business to have.

A strong example of that is Digital Ocean, a cloud infrastructure provider. Their knowledge base is made up of different kinds of content. Starting from beginner level how-to-do-X-and-Y tutorials to advanced optimization guides.

However, despite Digital Ocean has one of the most comprehensive knowledge bases, sometimes users can’t find exactly what they are looking for. That’s where their strong community steps in.

“Connect, share and learn…”

By creating top-notch content and using their knowledge base as a marketing tool, Digital Ocean managed to create a community around their services and products.

And if you check their issue threads and questions, most answers are generated by users themselves. Thus saving the support team a great hassle.

However, if your users have no idea of the existence of your knowledge base, creating a supportive community around it would be almost impossible.

So, these are a few reasons as to why companies have to educate their customers and use their knowledge base as a marketing tool to promote.

Without further ado, let’s jump right into the actionable tips.

5 Steps to Use Your Knowledge Base as Marketing Tool

There are several ways to educate your customers about the existence of your knowledge base. However, it can be confusing where to start from.

In most cases, your knowledge base should be treated with the same care you would treat the Blog of your website. And each separate documentation component should be treated as a stand-alone potential landing page. Of course, the content itself and the structure would be different.

If you ask most copywriters, content creators, people who document software, and so on, they will probably tell you to start by providing quality content.

Step #1 – Provide Quality Content

This is not a direct way of using knowledge base as a marketing tool. However, if you don’t fulfil this step, using your knowledge base as a marketing tool will become an almost impossible task.

Providing good content is what you should be focusing on most of the time. Make sure that your knowledge base has the most valuable and optimized content there is.

After all, good content promotes itself, it’s that simple.

If a troubleshooting guide proves to be useful to several people, they will start sharing it within the community, include it in the comment section of several posts, and maybe even link to it on some Quora questions.

Once content from your knowledge base helps customers, answers their questions, concerns, or problems, the customers themselves will start cross-sharing links on multiple platforms.

A great example of this would Stripe’s developer knowledge base.

Stripe has crafted a knowledge base that is easy to follow and navigate by both users and developers. Instead of using keywords, buzzwords, and technical jargon, they explain every concept clearly and in a simplified manner.

What’s the result?

Developers love their knowledge base content so much, that they share links to it, or even tweet about how awesome their documentation is.

Some even go the extra mile and post pictures of their Stripe merchandise.

Well, it’s probably clear by now. You need good content that users would love to share.

So, what does providing good content means? While there are plenty of comprehensive guides out there on writing kickass knowledge base articles, we have put together a concise and clear list of points to keep in mind…

Key Points for Writing Good Content

1. Keep in mind your target audience at all times. Don’t write in a highly technical manner if the article is going to be mainly read by new users. Try to make it as easy to follow and as clear as possible for them.
2. Use a descriptive title. The reader/user should know what to expect from the post just by reading the title.
3. Be straight to the point. Knowledge base content doesn’t need long and artistic introductions. Instead, be concise, provide enough information for them to understand the concepts you will explain and get straight to the point since paragraph one.
4. Maintain a logical flow. Nobody likes to read a step-by-step guide that jumps from one thing to the other. That’s just going to confuse your readers more.
   Instead, keep your sentences simple and make sure to include good transitions when jumping from one section to another.
5. Include supporting media. Images, screenshots, walk-through videos are great additions to any knowledge base content. They improve the overall knowledge base quality.

After all, would you prefer a tutorial guide that includes screenshots for every important step? Or one that vaguely explains how to complete a series of steps?

Having good knowledge base content will also improve your overall SEO efforts.

Once you have set up quality content, you need to step up your game. Surely, great content will start getting recognition, users will start sharing it and so on, but that’s not enough.

You need to also optimize the content so it becomes more visible. Which brings us to the next step.

Step #2 – SEO Optimization

Every time someone has a problem, they rely on Google.

We live in an age where the greatest part of the population tries to find a solution to each of their problems through a Google Search. The greatest part of queries made on Google, find answers within an organic listing or result.

In fact, paid advertisement influence only ~2.8% of all searches.

As such, optimizing your knowledge base content with the most up to date SEO practices works in your company’s best interest.

The reason why is simple. By increasing the overall online presence of your knowledge base’s content, customers are more likely to find an answer to their question organically.

If you are still not convinced, think about it this way. If you need to add an extension to your web browser (take Google Chrome for example), would you go and search for a way to do it on the web browser’s help section, or would you just search for it on Google?

Get your knowledge base search engine optimized to quickly connect with your target audience.

Request for Demo

For the most part of people, it’s the latter option. So, you would most likely want the help section article on extension installation to be featured on top of the SERP. Or even better, on the featured snippet.

If you want your customers to find out about the existence of your knowledge base, you should be putting effort into optimizing your knowledge base content using up-to-date SEO practices.

In simple terms, when writing an article for your knowledge base, you should keep in mind factors such as title, meta description, URL slug, keyword density, interlinking, CTA-s, etc…

Here’s what you need to know about SEO tactics to optimize your Knowledge Base for search.

Step #3-#4 – Linking to Your Knowledge Base Content

You could regard this step as an extended version of what’s known as “internal linking” in SEO.

Once you have great knowledge base content that is optimized through SEO practices, it’s time for you to link to it everywhere.

Everywhere?

Yes. Essentially, you want your customers and employees to be able to get to your knowledge base content from different sources.

This requires a two-step process.

Educating Your Support Agents

Your knowledge base is still fresh. That’s why you are trying to drive more and more traffic to it. In turn, that means you still have to rely on your support agents to cover some customer issues.

Your support agents are the ones who interact directly with your users. As such, they are your most powerful method for using your knowledge base as a marketing tool:

• Onboard new support agents on existing content. If your new agents get acquainted with existing knowledge base content, they can send a link to a customer issue instead of having to write down the answer.
• Notify agents on new knowledge base content updates. Every time new content is released or existing content is updated or deleted, your agents should know about it.

If you are using knowledge base software for maintaining your knowledge base, you can easily do this by creating a separate category for your support agents.

And then, you can create periodical (weekly or bi-weekly) knowledge base content update articles.

This way, your agents will always know which content is most up-to-date.

• Train your agents to link your knowledge base content. You can establish a process guideline. Every time your agents receive an inquiry, have them provide a link to a knowledge base article in combination with the answer to the issue.

This way, their response will be more complete. And if your user needs a more thorough answer, he can read the full post.

• Provide an internal search option. This is a necessity for any knowledge base. You don’t want your agents to waste their time searching for a knowledge base article.

Linking Content

Once you have all the above set-up you can move on to actually linking to the content. There are several places that you can focus on.

We have put together a list of places to focus your linking efforts:

Step #5 – Don’t forget to promote it!

Rule: Here’s the 80/20 rule by Derek Halpern from Social Triggers:

Spend 80% of your time marketing the content and 20% in creating it.

You created amazing content and optimized it using the finest SEO techniques. Heck, you even trained your agents on its content and implemented a major linking scheme…

But that could all go to naught if you don’t actively use your knowledge base as a marketing tool to promote the content.

Your marketing department should put as much effort to use your company’s knowledge base as a marketing tool to promote your product, your landing pages, and so on…

• Get your social media team involved. Train them to include posts from your knowledge base just as much as they do with other content. Promote it on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and just about any other social media platform in which your business is active.
• Ask an influencer for a quote. Before promoting a guide on how to install X and Y on your platform, ask for a quote by an influencer. Or by someone that created X and Y features of the product. This will increase credibility when marketing the content.

And lastly, simply share, share, and share..

Recap

So let’s go through a small recap…

We went through the different benefits of using a knowledge base as a marketing tool. More specifically:

• Reduce employee overhead – your chat support can focus on the highly important issues
• Reduce customer churn – users get their answer instantaneously, with little human interaction
• Allows you to scale your business – by automating the greatest part of your help center
• Helps you in creating a community around your product or service

And then we covered a simple 3 step guide to help you drive traffic to your knowledge base:

• Provide quality content – good content gets shared.
• Optimize your knowledge base content with SEO – treat your knowledge base like you would treat your blog section.
• Educate your support agents – your agents should be up-to-date with any changes related to your knowledge base
• Create an intricate linking schema – maximise your efforts by linking to your knowledge base and to its content in different channels.
• Promote it!

Next Steps

For your next steps, you could look into using specialized knowledge base software.

It can make managing a knowledge base a lot easier. This way you can spend your time generating the most enticing and useful content for your users, instead of dealing with technicalities.

If you are looking to custom branding your Docs then do it as tailor-made with Document360. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial, with no credit card required.

You might be using some other software for managing your knowledge base. Or maybe you have your own in-house solution. Either way, let us know in the comments section below how your experience with managing and using knowledge base as a marketing tool to promote the content.

Also, if you feel like we might have missed something, or some section in the post required more detail, drop us a line below.

The post Strategic Approach to Use Knowledge Base as Marketing Tool (5 Simple Steps) appeared first on Document360.