Who owns your knowledge base? Product, Product Marketing, Support, Other?
Hi TSIA Community,
We're a small but growing SaaS business and all of our knowledge base content to date has been written by our support and services teams. Often, as bonus tasks to their core support function. For the first time, we have technical writers on our Product team and we have a Product Marketing function -- both of which have valuable input.
I'm curious to how this plays out as we grow. Where does your knowledge base ownership and its associated content development sit in your org?
Thank you!
Greg
Best Answers
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In my experience, Support Services, because this org very often owns the Self-Service capability and benefits directly from it, also owns the KM process.
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@Greg Higgins I have had both. My preference is to have a dedicated resource to be responsible of KM tools & processes; that includes review old content for retirement or requiring updates, responsible for publishing content,... But the content itself needs to be created by the people who actually know what they are talking about.
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At Ibbaka it is owned by customer success, but marketing and sales contributes and can flag assets and FAQ questions that are often used in the marketing and sales process. They can also contribute assets. We have dedicated content resources.
What we started to do this month is to have a more holistic plan for rolling out new functionality in which the marketing, service development and customer success teams must file a joint plan with management before an epic begins.
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Hello Craig. Our support organization is running their activities according to the Knowledge-Centered Support methods, which brings us a lot of value for us in terms of support efficiency but also to the customers in terms of self-support possibilities. In this methodology captured knowledge is a by-product of the support activity. So, content development is clearly in the support organization. For managing the knowledge base we have set a Knowledge Council, consisting mostly of the heads of local support teams. They are taking care of the rigth adoption of the KCS method in the organization, metrics, structure of the knowledge etc.
There is a lot of info on the Internet about Knowledge-Centered Support, if you are interested.
Hope it helps.
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@Greg Higgins We at Coveo, just like Kirill was saying, base our KM practices on KCS. Support is definitely a key contributor to the knowledge base (by creating knowledge articles), but using our own tool (Insight Panel in the Coveo for Salesforce package), we tap into other knowledge sources like our product documentation, JIRAs, Confluence, etc. The Insight Panel acts as a one stop shop for support agents to quickly find relevant content for resolving their case. Same concepts are used on our community where all public content is made available to the customer, whether it's through the main search function, content personalization or the case creation page. Content will be adapted to user's context and intent as their session progresses.
Let me know if you would like to know more.
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Answers
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Thank you, @David Perrault!
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@David Perrault Follow-up question if you're open to it. Do you have a dedicated content resource? Or do your support reps create content when they're not managing the queue?
Thank you!
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@Kirill Markelov so helpful! I'm reading up on KCS now.
@Patrick Martin That's fascinating. You guys are killing with the information on your website as well. I love the public SLA and escalation matrix. Really inspirational to see it all laid out like that.
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@Greg Higgins feel free to reach out if you would like to know more. I can walk you through some of the stuff we do in more detail.
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@Patrick Martin If you're willing to spend the time, I would LOVE to see some of the stuff in more detail! Thank you so much for your generosity. Honestly, at your convenience, I would make the time.
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