Documentation doesn’t just tell people what to do when they’re stuck—it aids in every aspect of your organization, from success to retention to upsells to marketing. Knowledge articles help your organization keep your employees informed, retain customers, increase sales, and market your product or service. Knowledge bases encompass a wide range of documentation from wikis to frequently asked questions (FAQs) to community forums and ticket repositories.
Knowledge articles help your organization keep your employees informed, retain customers, increase sales, and market your product or service.
In 2001, I realized that my IT job had a major issue: a weak knowledge center. We were providing technical support for dial-up customers in Arkansas at the very beginning of the Internet, and we had two shifts of about 20 people at peak. We’d get common questions about setting up dial-up on Windows and Macs, and had to support people through the infamous browser wars of the early aughts. It was chaos.
When I complained about this, my boss looked me dead in the eye and said, “Okay, English major. Write one.” So, I did.
I’d work the peak hours supporting customers with getting online, onboarding new users, and escalating complex issues to my Senior CSR. I spent the rest of the time writing the most critical component of any IT firm: the knowledge base. So, why is a knowledge base so important for any organization that provides products or services?
A Knowledge Base Informs Your Employees
At Arkansas.Net, we had to support tens of thousands of users across the state, including those with old technology. Before I expanded our knowledge base, there was a lot of putting people on hold and turning to a Senior CSR or other CSRs to ask how to do a task. Instead, I put the most common questions into a central repository and worked with subject matter experts on how to do the more complex stuff.
So, this is a “No duh” moment, but it can apply to other aspects of your business, even if you’re not a technical firm. When I started at Tyson Foods, the key component of Project Next Frontier was informing and enabling team members with an extensive, centralized HR knowledge base. Knowledge empowers your employees, helping them grow and succeed on their own. Tyson recognized this and so made it the top priority with a centralized knowledge base and ticketing system for HR issues and questions.
Knowledge empowers your employees, helping them grow and succeed on their own.
Empowered employees can start to work independently, grow with the company, and become advocates for your organization.
A Knowledge Base Increases Retention
A critical component of any customer journey is centralized knowledge. Empowered customers retain products and services that they know how to use. Without a knowledge base, customers can get lost on basic product benefits and use cases that they come across. Instructions on the back of the box only go so far.
Empowered customers retain products and services that they know how to use.
If you have to Google how to use, say, Photoshop, the first link you should see is Adobe’s knowledge base. Adobe is a major corporation with many moving parts, so to ease its customer service load, it not only created an extensive searchable knowledge base but also curated an experienced community of forum users with which its IT professionals are directly involved. A small or medium-sized business may not need such an extensive network of SMEs, but centralized help articles are a critical jumping-off point.
Knowledge bases also reduce churn by addressing pain points as they arise. Customer success agents can see a user struggling with a product, send a quick knowledge article, and retain a customer who was ready to leave.
A Knowledge Base Leads to Upsells
Let’s face it: Not all service levels are the same. A knowledge base showcases higher-priced tiers by explaining their benefits in plain terms. Education leads to curiosity, which leads to talking to sales about upgrading or adding new products or services.
A knowledge base showcases higher-priced tiers by explaining their benefits in plain terms.
This actually happened to me on a personal level. I was trying to organize my (embarrassingly) disarrayed hosting plan. I realized I had multiple plans for ten websites apiece, and when I looked into consolidating them under one plan, I realized I needed to talk to sales, not IT.
Knowledge bases let your customers research on their own by exploring features and products they may not have realized they needed when they started out. A customer might start by looking up how to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, only to realize they need another ingredient your CPG sells, such as a baking pan or brining kit. With an FAQ or use case scenarios, your customer can see the benefits of your products and services and buy more of what they need.
A Knowledge Base Markets Your Organization
Your audience will Google you, and if you have an online knowledge base, they can read about your product or service and learn how it will benefit them. Knowledge bases market your organization by showcasing how potential customers can benefit from your products or services.
My friend is a product marketing manager for a WYSIWYG text editor. Their role is largely technical in nature, and they must use IT knowledge to market their product. With a deep understanding of the editor’s technical aspects, they created a unified brand positioning document to align everyone around a single message and speak with a single voice.
Another anecdote: I have a client who was looking for a point-of-sale system. In my research, I needed to know which option allowed offline sales during network downtime. By digging through help desk files on different services, I found the one I needed and reached out to sales. Knowledge bases detail your product benefits in terms of real-life use cases. By Googling for a POS system that supports offline sales, I found the one I needed from a knowledge article.
Knowledge bases detail your product benefits in terms of real-life use cases.
Through knowledge bases, your organization can move customers through the marketing funnel with ease, making them aware of benefits, engaging with them as potential and current customers, and turning them into brand advocates.
The Four Benefits of Knowledge Bases Summed Up
As we have seen, there are many benefits to having a knowledge base. Here they are summed up:
- Keep employees and team members informed.
- Empower customers and retain them.
- Increase upsells through customer success.
- Detail product benefits to new customers doing research.
Knowledge bases aren’t just for tech support anymore. They’re used by employees, in customer success to aid in retention, through business development to upsell tiers and other products, and, finally, to market the benefits with real-life use cases.
Don’t Know Where to Start? Contact Us!
Meet with us for a free 30-minute consultation to learn how we can help you get started on a centralized repository of information on your brand. We interview your team, research your use cases, and learn your products and services to empower your business with knowledge.
Contact us today!
