Secret Guide: How SaaS companies create great knowledge base pages?

The software as a service (SaaS) business model has become very popular over the past decade. Since, in the most cases, there is no direct physical contact between the seller and the customer, SaaS companies take special care of their customer support service. This is why every successful SaaS company has top notch help documentation available on their official website.

Help documentation is published and managed using a knowledge base software solution. By utilizing this software tool, companies are able to provide perfectly formatted, short, and actionable help documentation to their customers. The scenarios where using knowledge management software comes in very handy are:

• Inform interested customers about your services, recent updates, and features;
• Help new customers to smoothly get on board with the software they have just purchased;
• Extend an olive branch to frustrated customers who need help with a certain issue.

What is Knowledge Base Software?

KB software is a sophisticated and complex solution that helps businesses store important information and publish it online. The knowledge base discussed in this article falls under the external knowledge base category. This means that it is published online and anyone can access it and read the provided information.

It is a mobile-ready cloud-based solution that supports creating and publishing help documentation that can also contain videos and images. The most advanced knowledge base software solutions can be integrated with Zendesk, Wufoo, and Google Analytics, which makes them very versatile.

This software platform is very easy to use and it comes with a lot of customizable options which can be used to create beautiful FAQ pages, help documentation, and informative articles that reflect the business’s tone and branding strategy.

Key Features That Enable the Creation of Great Knowledge Base Pages

Before the SaaS company can share valuable and great content, it has to use some features of the knowledge base tool. A great knowledge management tool includes the following features:

• A very simple, intuitive, and “what you see is what you get” interface;
• Drag and Drop features for better ease of use;
• Support for importing image, video and document file types;
• Multi Language translation options;
• Easy implementation of tooltips, pop-ups, and lightboxes (context sensitive help);
• Access to dozens of themes and fonts;
• The ability to edit HTML and CSS;
• Roles and permissions, so that only specific people can access and edit certain documentation;
• Full revision history.

When one has all these features at their disposal, creating a great knowledge base page is easy.

Now that you know what enables the creation of great help documentation, let’s see what SaaS companies do in order to make it great.

Standardized Authoring Quality

“If you acknowledge that standardizing means defining rules that guarantee the desired degree of consistency on the desired level of quality, you should start with those topics that promise the best revenue with respect to quality and/or cost reduction.” – Juergen Muthig, a professor of technical communication with a specialization in standardized document engineering at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Germany.

Before anyone can create content for knowledge base pages, certain standards have to be put in place. These standards will ensure the same level of quality with all pages found in the knowledge base.  

This doesn’t apply only to the tone and style of writing, videos, and images, but also to page formatting. By doing this, customers will always know where to look for information and it will make it easier for them to navigate through your knowledge base and articles.

Dedicated Content Authors

Not everyone can write content and decide on how to format it. This is a very responsible task and companies always assign their most talented and dedicated employees who have already been in touch, in one way or another, with the customer support job function.

Some of the employees have a better skillset for writing Troubleshooting documentation, while others may be better at providing technical information or resolving specific service related issues. These roles can be easily assigned by using the user privilege rights panel in the knowledge management software interface.

Accuracy is Always Ensured

Providing inaccurate information to customers will definitely make them more frustrated while rendering the entire knowledge base obsolete. This is why quality and accuracy control have to be maintained. Successful SaaS companies usually perform this check with two different approaches.

One is from the perspective of a professional who knows their services inside and out. He is the one who makes sure that everything in the knowledge base page is correct and accurate.

The other is from the perspective of the customer. This is why top notch knowledge base pages offer the famous “How helpful was this article?” survey to the reader. The pages that are flagged should immediately be revised and improved.

Pay Attention to the Purpose

Purpose of use is one of the most important aspects of great knowledge base pages, and it is a very simple one – to help the customer. If the issue is highly technical, the best SaaS companies divide the solution into little fragments.

The idea is not to make things more complicated, but to make them easy and simple. Knowledge base software supports the creation of the table of contents, which allows customers to jump to a section that interest them the most.

Flagging the Issues

When you take a close look at how great SaaS players play the game, you can see that every time they announce something new, there is information already available in their knowledge base center. This is why, guided by previous experience, they flag the possible issues upfront and share them with the customer base. Not only do they gain customers’ trust this way, but they also generate a little buzz for the service lunch.

Regular Updates

With access to analytic tools, it is very easy to see which pages are performing good and which should be worked on further. Since knowledge software also makes the entire content searchable, companies can also see what their customers are searching for. Whenever changes are made or a new knowledge base page is published, it gets promoted on the homepage so that users can easily spot it.

Now that we let you in on the big secret, you know what it takes to create a great knowledge base page. As you can see, it is not a one-time thing, but it requires constant effort to make it valuable to your customers.