Startups often feature teams with a ton of knowledge. Sometimes it will be spontaneously generated as the team works, or not even recognised as vital. And a lot of it is implicit, never formally defined and stored. After all, most startups are more about hustle and flow than documentation and analysing.
Knowledge management (KM) sounds like the kind of thing we can deal with after a break-even, or US$1m ARR, or second round, or… you get the idea. Not now.
However, unexciting knowledge management seems, it’s a way to access more growth fuel. Knowledge, and the ability for employees as well as customers, to easily access it from your company is a valuable commodity.
Here are four ways a knowledge management strategy can help your startup grow.
1. In your day-to-day
The average employee spends 20 per cent of their working time searching for information about their own company, according to McKinsey.
Does that sound crazy to you?
People waste time searching for information because it’s not centralized and it’s not searchable. Often it’s not there at all, and they have to make do with the nearest equivalent.
The solution is to start by accumulating all the obviously useful information you can about your company and putting it into a centralized database that can be searched easily.
2. On your onboarding strategy
Knowledge bases, which typically serve as the underpinning of any knowledge management solution, can be used to onboard new customers, letting them take control of their journey through your offering’s features so they can quickly access the value that matters to them.
The key, regardless of whether you’re using knowledge management to onboard customers or employees, is to make it easy to access and easy to grasp. Build it from ‘what do I do’ backwards, rather than hiding actionable takeaways and instructions in long documentation that no-one wants to read.
3. In your marketing strategy
Knowledge management tools, in particular, a knowledge base, allows your startup to provide an organized collection of the things your team and your customers need to know, to identify their own needs and understand how to meet them.
It’s also a great source of content marketing material: for example, every question your customer asks in your knowledge base can be translated into the basis of a blog post or video.
What’s more, those knowledge base pages become targets for search traffic. 70 per cent of your customers prefer to use your website to get answers to their questions.
Meanwhile, potential customers, researching solutions to their problems, look first to search engines.
So as well as using it as the basis for blogging, video and social content, make sure your knowledge base is itself optimised for search.
4. In your customer success strategy
It’s not a lack of new customers that kills startups — It’s churn.
Customer retention is about giving customers access to the things that make your offering great. Yes, that means onboarding, and product-client fit and all the other choices you can make to drive ARR up and churn down.
But it also means paying attention to your knowledge base. Because potentially churning customers sure will be. A survey by the CMO Council found that 51 per cent of users thought better technical support was the best way for companies to improve their customer experience.
And with that in mind, 73 per cent of customers prefer to use a company’s website over social media, live chat, or SMS for support and 91 per cent of your customers would be happy to get help directly from your knowledge base if it met their needs. That’s one good reason to make sure your knowledge base is searchable direct from your website.
Source: e27
