This is a sponsored post by Kovai.co, written by Gowri Ramkumar.
Customers are the backbone of any business and SaaS products are built to provide business value to them. Customers use SaaS products to solve the business problem they have and are able to achieve desired business outcomes.
All SaaS companies focus on customer retention activities so customers can derive more value from their products and can offer more value-added services. All these activities lead to maximum customer satisfaction and an increase in stickiness of their product. This helps SaaS companies gradually grow their customer base and scale up.
SaaS companies release new product features to address customer use-cases and eliminate customer pain points. To achieve this, SaaS products need to be designed to have an intuitive interface and be easy to configure. However, there are instances where some product features need technical assistance to configure it properly such as product security, application of IT policies, and the setup of appropriate access controls.
Customers may find it difficult to configure some product features and may contact your customer support to troubleshoot. Customers raise support tickets and the customer service team responds to solve their problem. It is difficult for SaaS companies to scale their operations if there are many support tickets relating to the same problem. If the customer support team’s responses get slow due to the high volume of support tickets, it leads to customer dissatisfaction and churn.
SaaS companies are looking for a sustainable model where customers can configure their product features and troubleshoot problems on their own. Customers are encouraged to contact the support team if there is a product bug or have complex problems.
A good knowledge base provides an excellent platform to help your customers self-serve. SaaS companies can hire technical content writers to document their product features, prepare how-to guides and collate answers to commonly-asked customer queries and make it available via their knowledge base. A knowledge base is a great tool to reduce your customer support tickets and maximise your customer trust.
5 Ways to Reduce Support Tickets using a Knowledge Base
Here are five simple ways to reduce support tickets using a knowledge base and delight your customers by answering their query on time, helping to improve customer satisfaction.
1. Create clear product documentation
Product documentation is fundamental to increase your customer satisfaction and helps your customers to self-serve. A knowledge base provides capabilities and functionalities to help technical content writers to author and publish articles. These articles contain detailed technical information and provide a quick walk-through for customers to understand and configure their SaaS product to full extent.
The knowledge base articles contain clear screenshots, animated gifs or short videos to provide better clarity and aids quick understanding. Product documentation written in layman terms will help both technical and non-technical audiences to understand, configure and set up SaaS product features.
Customer support teams and technical content writers need to work in tandem to review knowledge base articles to update the article content. Based on customer support queries, existing knowledge base articles may need to be revised as they may contain older UI screenshots, old process flows, and obsolete feature nuances. Periodic revision of articles helps to enhance documentation quality and helps with your customer self-service. This will greatly reduce your customer support tickets!
To produce clear documentation, a good knowledge base platform needs to provide good capabilities for:
- Authoring capabilities to provide rich “content editors” to produce content with rich multimedia
- Article versioning to review and update existing article content
2. Sharing product documents
Customer support teams can refer to a knowledge base to respond to customer queries quicker. Responses from the customer support team can include links to product documentation that contains solutions to customer problems. This helps SaaS companies in multiple to reduce the volume of support tickets ways namely
- Including links to product documentation increases the visibility of their SaaS product and its related documentation. Customers are aware of where to find product related artefacts
- Helps to change customer behaviour on when to contact the customer support team. If the technical documentation provides an easy way for a customer to self-serve, it tends to create a habit for your customer to choose the easiest route. Instead of raising a customer ticket and waiting for a response, they can troubleshoot and solve the problem by themselves with the help of product documentation
- Product brand awareness
If your SaaS company can provide high quality technical documentation, customers will admire the efforts. This helps to increase your brand awareness without spending humongous marketing dollars!
3. Collate customer support queries
If many customers are raising support tickets for similar queries, those queries can be used to create Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) pages. It helps find answers to their queries in no time! This will boost your customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. These FAQs can be featured in your documentation site’s homepage which makes it easy for your customers to find and access documentation. Based on the customer support tickets, these FAQ pages need to be updated in order to reduce the volume of the support ticket.
Integration of your knowledge base with chatbots and helpdesk platform is essential to deliver quality customer support service. Customer support agents can refer to internal documentation without leaving helpdesk and use/share relevant knowledge base articles to resolve customer queries.
Chatbots can make use of existing knowledge base and use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities to recommend right articles to assist with customer queries interactively. Chatbots have to be natively integrated with knowledge to enable it to index all newly created articles and serve it to the customers at the right time.
4. Knowledge base discoverability
There are many chances that your customers will use a search engine to type in their keywords and look for solutions in online forums. Thus, it is crucial to generate organic traffic to your documentation site to ensure that your customer finds the right information at the right time.
Ensuring that you do relevant SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tasks such as adding a title, description and slug to your article content, will help search engines rank your documentation site in top search results. Using documentation links to answer customer queries in popular customer forums also helps with improving visibility of your SaaS documentation site.
In addition to search engines, your SaaS documentation site needs to have good search capability which enables your customer to type in keywords to find the right articles to solve their problem. This reduces their burden of navigating through different taxonomy to find information they are seeking for.
5. Ticket deflection capabilities
Ticket deflection is when you create a customer experience where they can find their own answers to questions rather than contacting your customer support team. This provides a flexible method to ask a series of questions or focus search relating to customer query which then suggests the right set of actions for the customer. This ticket deflection approach is engaging as it interacts with the customer in a meaningful way.
A good knowledge base platform should provide capabilities like a ticket deflector feature to reduce the volume of inbound customer support tickets.
Conclusion
Knowledge base is indispensable for SaaS companies to document their product features and services. This helps SaaS companies to create a self-service portal whereby customers can troubleshoot any product related issues, understand how to configure product functionalities and be aware of new features. Knowledge base helps to deflect the customer support ticket by shifting customers to self-serve. This helps SaaS companies to scale up and expand their customer base without compromising on customer support quality.
About the Author: Gowri Ramkumar is serving as Vice President – Sales & Customer Success at Kovai.co. Document360 is one of Kovai.co’s fastest growing products. Gowri is responsible for the company’s global sales, customer nurturing and partnership activities related to its software and B2B SaaS products.
