Importance of Knowledge Base for a SaaS Company
Creating a great customer service experience for your audience is essential. But it’s arguably even more important for SaaS companies with tools that aren’t always the most self-explanatory or simple to use. If you’re in the world of SaaS, you probably get tons of support questions each day about how to use your features and navigate through your software. To lower your volume of support tickets and give customers a self-serve support alternative, you need to provide customers with a comprehensive, self-service portal.
That way, they’ll be able to find the support answers they need on their own time. But a knowledge base can help you with so much more than just basic SaaS customer support. It can serve as a marketing aid (and so much more).
Customer Support Plus Marketing
Knowledge base articles can help demonstrate the quality of your product and set your company apart as an authority figure in your industry. How? They allow you to show off the features of your software to those who haven’t become paying customers just yet.
Software for knowledge management allows you to store, share, and manage critical information. But they’re not just helpful for providing customer service. You can also use your knowledge base to market and display your software with images, gifs, and videos.
And you don’t have to limit your knowledge base articles to only cover user information or frequently asked questions. You can also write posts mentioning important information about your industry that explain trends in the market or predictions for future developments. Add in expert advice, tips, or suggestions while also showing off your products and explaining how to use them.
Here’s how Slack does it in their knowledge base posts:
The more versatile and built out that your knowledge base is, the more effective it will be as a marketing tool since it will appeal to a much wider audience.
Gain Valuable Insights
Creating a comprehensive knowledge database can be incredibly insightful for your team. If you can measure and view which kinds of articles are getting the most attention, you can increase your customer support success by creating more similar content. Or, you can improve what’s already there.
For example, one of your articles could be getting a ton of attention, but you still keep receiving a ton of questions about that topic. This insight might be a sign that you need to rewrite the article to make it more concise or add more visuals to explain each step. This way, you’ll understand exactly what your customers are struggling with, as well as the type of content they’re looking for. Freshdesk’s reporting and analytics features make it easy to view similar insights.
Boost your SEO
You probably already know that blog posts help boost your SEO. But did know that knowledge base posts can do the same thing? They have huge potential for helping you grow your audience organically, while also serving up the kind of content search engines love.
Knowledge-rich articles are full of fresh content that you can pack full of keywords and long-tail phrases. This can skyrocket your rankings. Articles, ebooks, and user guides naturally include tons of product-related keywords, which will probably cause your site to rank higher on search engines without a ton of work.
But with some more effort, you can optimize each post to its maximum potential. And you don’t even have to be an SEO expert to do it. Identify the keywords that best help you reach your SaaS goals for each piece by using SEMrush to find keyword suggestions.
Then, use them in your FAQs and articles for an added SEO boost. You can also try WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool to find related keywords that competitors are ranking for.
You should also include those keywords in your meta tags to make them even more easily discoverable by search engines. In Freshdesk, it’s simple to add meta tags and SEO elements to articles.
Improve Employee Productivity and Encourage Collaboration
Research shows that 20 percent of employees’ time is spent searching for information they need but can’t find. That means that employees spend one-fifth of their workday searching through cluttered inboxes. By giving agents a shared platform, you can help them centralize all of this knowledge instead (and make it searchable). That way, they aren’t stuck combing through inboxes and thousands of tickets to find the one piece of information they need.
Knowledge bases can also give your agents a platform to collaborate on issues, ask questions, tag one another, or leave comments, which can give productivity a huge boost. The collaboration features in Freshdesk make it possible for your employees to collaborate with one another whether they’re across the world or right next to each other.
When the number of incoming tickets surges, agents can even link similar issues together to make it easier to send status updates to one another.
Provide Consistent Support with a Self-service Option
One of the most significant benefits of having a knowledge base is that it’s available 24/7. Your customers don’t need to wait until business hours or until an agent is available to find the answers they need. This availability is especially helpful if a large portion of your customer base is international since they’re in a different time zone than your agents. The best part? They can access your knowledge base from any device, including mobile. And that’s huge.
According to SmartInsights’ 2018 Search Engine Statistics, over half of all global web traffic is mobile.
With so many people out there using smartphones to access the web, a mobile-friendly knowledge base can be just the solution you need to meet their expectations. They’ll appreciate that they can get quick answers when they need them and where they need them from the device that they use most often.
Conclusion
If you’re in the SaaS world, you know just how important great customer service truly is. And you probably get a ton of support tickets each day from customers. But did you know that a knowledge base can help you provide better support and lower your ticket volumes all while helping you with other efforts, like marketing?
A helpdesk knowledgebase software can take your SaaS customer support to the next level. Focus on building a comprehensive knowledge base that will continually satisfy your customers, all while providing tons of unexpected benefits like customer insights, improved SEO, and more.
