If you aren’t familiar, the term “knowledge base” refers to a centralized location for the storage of information about your products and services, for what is usually, the purpose of customer self-service support. A knowledge base commonly functions as a part of an organization's website, or as part of an organization’s customer self-service portal. A knowledge base can include a number of different features that provides customers with the tools they need to help themselves whenever and wherever they need support.

There’s a secret sauce behind creating the perfect knowledge base content. It’s called research. 

Knowing what you need to write about isn’t a simple walk in the park—it takes time to know what types of questions you need to tackle, and even more so, how to respond to them. 

All platforms, strategies and processes in your organization need to be measured in order to identify areas for improvement and areas to build on. Your knowledge base is no exception; collecting regular statistics on the performance and health of your knowledge base is what will keep it well-oiled and running as intended.

Neglecting to collect and measure KPIs from you community can lead to the decay of useful information and an inability to provide your customers with an adequate level of customer self service.

Hi, I’m Todd Burry, co-founder and Chief Product Officer here at Vanilla.  Welcome to my monthly blog! 

We’ve been at this for about ten years now and have worked hard to create software that’s simple and straightforward to use, with a lot of functionality under the hood. But as you probably know, getting to simple is complex. I’m writing to give users a peek behind the curtain, so you can understand the decisions that we make and why we make them.

On May 1, 2019, we publicly announced the general availability of Vanilla Knowledge, the newest major feature by Vanilla. The innovation we are bringing to the area of knowledge management is through combining the power and wisdom of the online community forum with the traditional knowledge base. Vanilla Knowledge makes it easy to repurpose community generated content as KB articles.  

That being said, I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss why we chose to develop a knowledge base—why this was a priority for us and what factors shaped its development.