Why Should a SaaS Startup Use a Knowledge Base?
Waiting for a customer service representative for a long time can really be haunting. In today’s face-paced world, all the customers are expecting instant answers. It is evident that the customer success team should also automate answering questions to their customers so that the process becomes smooth.
It is high time for businesses to adopt and automate their SaaS businesses with tools like a knowledge base that helps in different business areas. Now, you can create a knowledge base for your SaaS business that enables you to provide instant answers to the customers, which is the need of the hour.
The reason is simple: Whenever there is a person who wants to learn about the service or the product, a self-service knowledge base is a go-to place these days. That is how the person is directed to.
What is a knowledge base?
A knowledge base is a self-service tool that helps users to solve their queries instantly. It is a platform to store all the data, or information about the company, product, or service, other topics related to the business, and some of the most frequently repeated questions.
A public knowledge base helps a SaaS business to provide answers to most of the queries that their customers frequently ask. It can be in the form of FAQs (Frequently asked questions), how-to documents, product guides, and much more.
On the other hand, an internal knowledge base helps your business work together and collaborate easily. In addition, it can help your business with the onboarding process and information that allows the internal employees to learn and benefit inside the organization.
Be it a start-up or any business, when your customer base starts growing, it will be really challenging to consistently answer calls with the customers. That is why investing in the right knowledge base in the early stage of business is necessary.
Benefits of a knowledge base
The purpose of a knowledge base is to provide value and information together. Without contacting customer support, customers can quickly learn from the informative articles or tutorials you provide in the documentation in your knowledge base.
A knowledge base is a great helping tool for any business to keep their customers and users happy by serving them answers to all their queries instantly. This also helps in minimizing churns as the customers are satisfied.
A knowledge base can be created either solely for the customers or the employees. Then, based on the requirements of the business, you can either choose a public or a private knowledge base. Along with that, the structure of the knowledge base can be created based on the business you do.
Both the internal and external knowledge base can benefit the business, and the customers to a great extent. However, here are some significant benefits that you will get if you start using a knowledge base:
- Reduce the customer support costs
If you are a Start-up, you would obviously look to reduce the costs of spending over customer support. And it is also mandatory to look that you should not compromise on the quality of the support calls you offer to your customers. In such a situation, having a knowledge base that helps your customers clear all the queries and being able to help your customer support team as a helping hand will be a solution where everyone benefits.
Having a knowledge base that is extremely helpful in creating FAQs, How-To guides, step-by-step tutorials, and much more will add more value to the customer support team, and even a small group of customer support representatives can handle many customers as most of the work would be automated with the help of a knowledge base.
2. Improves overall customer experience
For a SaaS start-up that is very new in the field, giving the right customer experience might be a little difficult. However, having the right knowledge base helps to improve the customer experience to a greater level.
A well-structured knowledge base gives your customers instant results on whatever they search for with a 24*7 experience. In addition, a vast knowledge base makes the features more accessible to the users and offers a great user experience. Be it a product-related query or solving one of the most frequently asked questions, you can always make the knowledge base provide precise and clear answers to your customers.
This also helps reduce a lot of customer support tickets, which is a result of a great customer experience.
3. Provides easy access
Be it your employees, or consumers, having a knowledge base gives easy accessibility to your users. This will help the users understand how to use the knowledge based on their queries or doubts about your product. One of the significant outcomes of providing easy access is that the users feel good about using your knowledge base, and their perception of your brand will increase positively.
Easy accessibility is going to create happy users and give the best user experience
4. Instant solutions and faster results
Having a knowledge base is an excellent asset for any business. It helps to help customers instantly by offering the right solution at the right time. Because nothing makes a customer happier than giving instant solutions. Having a knowledge base feels like a quick fix for all the queries related to the product or the service. What if the other way around, where the customer keeps on raising customer support tickets and waiting for hours to get the issue fixed?
Without having a good knowledge base, time gets wasted on both the customer side and the customer support representative’s side.
5. Consistent support
There is a fine line between providing support and giving consistent support. You can help your customers with consistent support by having a knowledge base. In other words, it is 24*7. In addition, a knowledge base is accessible easily, anywhere, and at any time. Thus, it provides consistent support to your customers, making them feel good about your product or service.
One more crucial factor to consider here is that it gives equal importance to all your customers no matter how many times your customer visits the knowledge base. This also helps increase the branding of your product or service.
6. Reduces churn and retains clients
A knowledge base not only focuses on giving a great user experience to the customers but also helps in acquiring new customers and retaining the existing customers. It also helps in reducing the churn to a greater extent.
Having a knowledge base and delivering services to your customers through a knowledge base helps users get all the information they need, thus creating a situation where they are always heard. Each day, offering this kind of positive experience will help your customers believe in your product and create a long-term journey with your service.
7. Build trust
Building trust with your customers might be a challenging task. But with a knowledge base, delivering value to your customers consistently can help slowly develop trust and win their hearts. This will make you deliver value consistently at every level of your customer’s journey. Your customers will have trust and confidence that they can get it cleared with just a click, whatever question or query it may be. This will create a perception among the customers that you really care about your customers all the time.
8. Increase in Sales
Having a knowledge base helps your business increase sales in many ways. A customer looking at your site and then directed to your knowledge base can make the best decision in choosing your business. If there were no resources provided, obviously, the potential customer would not have stayed on your site for a longer time. There are high chances for the potential customer to switch to another alternative. The customer could consider opting for your product or service with an active knowledge base.
9. Generating more revenue
Though there are a lot of benefits that a knowledge base does to the customers, it also helps the business equally to grow at a greater level. A small customer call might create an opportunity to upsell your product. When you create wonderful customer service, the product speaks itself through word of mouth and brings more business opportunities to your SaaS business.
Now that the benefits of a knowledge base to your SaaS business in terms of offering services to your clients are listed, let us understand how it can benefit your business solely.
10. Improves team collaboration
With a knowledge base, you can improve the collaboration among your team members. Employees from different teams can come together, collaborate, and learn in the same space. This opportunity created by the knowledge base helps the employees feel more involved in the organization’s growth.
A knowledge base with features that helps the team members in the organization supports the business in so many ways. Allowing the employees to create and collaborate improves the bond between each other. It forms the basis of a foundation where people help each other and grow together and your business.
11. Increases productivity in your business
As a SaaS start-up, employee productivity must be one of the essential things you would be looking for. Do you know having a knowledge base increases the productivity of your business? Having a knowledge base for your business helps you put all the information together in one place in a centralized form. This saves time and, in turn, increases productivity among your employees. For example, your customer support team can cut off a considerable amount of time and replace the service with a self-service knowledge base.
12. Unified storage
The best thing about a knowledge base is that you need not search for resources in multiple places. It is all there in the knowledge base. Storing content is made easy to a greater extent. While leaving the company, employees can use this opportunity to save all their information. Anyone who wants to have a look, or any new employees can look at the information and benefit from it.
Documenting all the workflow processes help the company to function smoothly. This makes the knowledge deeper and allows all the future employees refer for any valuable information.
13. Saves time
Whether onboarding new clients or conducting a knowledge-sharing session, a knowledge base can always have your back and save so much time. This is because already all the knowledge is created and documented in the knowledge base. Therefore, a profound knowledge base can help your business drastically reduce its time in training or onboarding new employees.
Streamlining the onboarding process and the workflow helps the new employees save time and make them feel more comfortable in the organization and their work.
14. Provides valuable insights
Creating a knowledge base helps your team in many ways, and providing great insights is remarkable. First, insights help you understand the best-performing articles. You can create more value in the articles by sharing similar kinds of content that your customers are looking for. Or you can keep on updating all the best-performing articles occasionally based on the trends in the industry.
Not just finding the best-performing articles, you can also find the articles that are not performing well but have an excellent value. In such cases, you can work on the content to make it more interesting and engaging to help the content perform well.
Conclusion:
Being in a SaaS environment, you should understand how important it is to provide excellent customer service. And a knowledge base can help you provide great service and create delighted customers without worrying about a substantial number of customer support tickets, as a knowledge base does that job easily.
Investing in the right knowledge base takes a lot of time as it involves a lot of research, and building a knowledge base from scratch will be even more time-consuming. Still, once you invest in a great tool, it will help your business for a lifetime. A customer-centric knowledge base helps your business improve its customer experience with a user-friendly interface. As a SaaS business, it is high time for you to invest in the right knowledge base to empower your users and employees together. This is one of the best ways to create a solid foundation for you for a great customer experience.
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