Hello. And welcome back to another episode of the SaaS growth podcast. I'm your host, Carl Anderson. Today. We're going to deep dive into a topic that's absolutely crucial for all SaaS businesses. We're going to talk about knowledge bases.

So what exactly is a knowledge base and why should you, as a SaaS founder, care? Well, let me break it down for you. Think of a knowledge base as your digital encyclopedia. Your go to a repository of information about your product or service. It's like having a well organized library where your users can find answers to their burning questions without having to reach out to your support team every five minutes. 

 For small companies, often the founder themselves, are the support team. And in that case, it's even more critical that you have a knowledge base as it allows you to field common queries without sinking too much of your valuable founder time when you could be better, spent assisting them in other ways, like building new features or improving your sales funnel. 

There are three main reasons. We want to have a knowledge base as a SaaS founder. One is about scalability of our support. Second is our customer satisfaction. And the third. It's about proactive customer education. 

It's one question you might have is why bother investing a lot of time and resources and to build a knowledge base when you could just hire more support staff. Well, this is where the magic happens. So first off, let's talk about scalability. As your SAS business grows. 

So does the number of customers knocking on your virtual door and let's face it, hiring an army of support agents might not be the most cost-effective solution. 

With a well-designed knowledge base, you're able to scale your support in two ways. One is to improve the efficiency of your support by allowing support agents. To quickly reference knowledge bases. And use that as part of their response. And the second is to encourage self service on the part of your customers, meaning they never reached your support agents in the first place. The net result here being a lower support cost per customer than if you service them through support staff alone. 

The next up, let's talk about your customer satisfaction.

If support agents have a fault. Its that, it's very difficult to have a hundred percent uptime on support. And they are a limited resource, which your users can't all access at once.

So picture this, your user encounter, a pesky little bug in your software. Or even a concept that people struggled to understand. 

 If you only offer support agents. This, user's looking down the barrel of several hours of wait time before hoping the issue resolved when it's a problem they have right now. 

 With the knowledge base, the user will be able to go and solve this issue immediately. As an added benefit, it is Google-able and completely indexable, meaning that they would also find that if they went to Google or other third party sources for help.

But knowledge base. 

Isn't just about addressing issues. It's also a powerful tool for proactive customer education. You can use it to showcase your products, features, share best practices and even provide handy tutorials that empower your users to make the most of your software. 

As a cherry on top knowledge basis also do a lot to improve the internal efficiency of your business. By documented common queries and solutions and your knowledge base, you're not only helping your customers help themselves, but you're also freeing up valuable time from your support team and importantly yourself to tackle more complex issues or focus on strategic initiatives. 

One struggle. I've seen founder's head with all the spaces is knowing how to write a helpful article. Typically, when you want to write an effective knowledge based article, you need to base it off your support interactions with your existing customers. It's better to ask a question that you've already been asked because you know that those are things that your users care about and are struggling with. Additionally, the knowledge base should be searchable and it should have as few hierarchical layers as possible. Ideally only two, meaning that you have a layer of categories and then articles directly beneath that.

 Knowledge bases are an absolute game changer for SaaS. They're not just a nice to have, and there's something you will eventually need to do if you ever want to scale effectively. 

The name of the game of scaling is making these sorts of upfront investments to make all future efforts to do with your support and your onboarding more effective and more efficient.

It is well worth your time. Making that investment into a knowledge base today.

 Thank you for listening and I'll see you all next week.