Introduction
It's no secret that customers want faster and more efficient support. The 2021 Customer Expectations Report suggests that only 19 percent of users feel customer service exceeds expectations.
For SaaS businesses, it's possible to address this concern by creating a knowledge base as a self-service tactic.
But, a product knowledge base requires overcoming certain challenges, like choosing the right medium to host it, defining the scope and complexity of the information, types of content, etc.
You'll also need to create a product knowledge base that offers a concise summary of your product or a comprehensive guide that would fill volumes. However, the underlying requirement remains to provide necessary information conveniently and readily.
Here are a few tips to build a helpful, effective product knowledge base.
#1. Create user journeys
Creating user journeys for a knowledge base requires understanding how different users may interact with your product. Accordingly, you can craft knowledge base narratives and guides that simplify product adoption. This process helps create content tailored to the needs of various user personas and improves the overall usability of your knowledge base.
When creating user journeys for the product knowledge base, consider the following aspects.
Discover user personas
Different users with multiple needs from your software product may interact with your knowledge base. Here, you can categorize such users based on new users, experienced users, administrators, etc.
Create detailed user profiles or personas, including sentiment analysis, that outline the needs, expectations, goals and common problems they might face.
Any automated solution for analyzing user sentiment gives you a bird's eye perspective of audience sentiment over time. This lets you track the success of your attempts to influence public opinion.
Map users journeys
Next, you can map out typical pathways each persona might take when interacting with your knowledge base. Therefore, consider some of the following questions when creating a knowledge base.
- What are the bottlenecks of using the product?
- What sort of information would they seek from the knowledge base?
- How would they interact when using the knowledge base?
Offering step-by-step solution
The knowledge base should offer a step-by-step solution that begins with imparting knowledge at fundamental levels. And you can then think of structuring a pyramid covering specific features and common issues by developing a detailed, step-by-step guide.
Here are a few tips on how to get started:
Provide clear instructions: Break down the process into small, manageable steps. If required, consider creating an employee profile for a process owner who ensures overall customer success whenever they undergo a process to find the solution.
Include visual elements (more on it later): Screenshots, videos and diagrams can make instructions easier to follow.
Offer context: Explain why a particular step is necessary and how it fits into the overall process.
Provide alternate solutions: If applicable, provide different ways users can perform the same task that helps simplify product adoption.
#2. Put multimedia into the mix
If you want your SaaS product users to fully leverage the knowledge base, consider integrating a range of multimedia elements such as pictures, screenshots, videos, or even animated images like GIFs.
The goal is to enhance your written content with these visual tools, making your knowledge base more valuable to users. Research from the University of Minnesota showed that the human brain can interpret visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
Therefore, consider adding visual elements to your knowledge base content that help address users’ ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions about the product,
Here is the Moz documentation explaining to readers how to create a campaign.
As you see, they also provided annotations with screenshots, making instructions easy to understand.
#3. Provide easily accessible content
Accessible content is relevant and easy to find, enabling them to overcome product adoption issues. Therefore, include a search bar in your knowledge-base UI that allows users to search for specific information based on keywords or topics. This is perhaps one of the many ways to easily provide accessible content using a knowledge base.
In the longer run, link related support documents, case studies and other user guides with the other content. This can help users explore the same topics, enabling them to quickly navigate through related concepts.
Next, consider different ways to make your knowledge base content more discoverable, ensuring that users get access to the right documents and information just like how they would search on Google search engines. The key lies in offering them what they are looking for.
For this, you will need to leverage knowledge base analytics to research keywords or phrases your users often type to search a particular set of content. Once you identify these terms or phrases, incorporate them in the various parts of a knowledge base page to drive visibility and accessibility of your information.
Below are key factors to consider when creating highly accessible knowledge-based content.
- Article headings: Consider crafting concise, action-driven headings incorporating a central keyword for maximum impact.
- Page descriptions: Include phrases in your page descriptions that customers frequently use when searching for the answers provided on that page.
- Main content: Include a set of researched keywords that typically align with the user's queries into the main text of your knowledge base content (naturally).
- Perform interlinking: Ensure a smooth Interlinking between knowledge base articles by using keywords as the anchor text instead of generic phrases like click here.
- Monitor analytics: Leverage analytics to track how your knowledge base is being used. For this, identify the most popular articles, frequently used search terms, and where users tend to drop off.
Bottom line
SaaS businesses can follow the aforementioned tips to create an effective knowledge base for faster product adoption. An ideal knowledge base will offer product adoption and strive to exceed customer service expectations.
All these strategies need refinements as you pave the way to create a comprehensive knowledge base that fosters a deeper connection between the product and its users.
