Saravana Kumar, founder of Document360 and CEO Kovai.io joins us in the first ever episode of the Knowledgebase Ninjas podcast!
Connect with Saravana and Document360 here:
Key Takeaways:
How Saravana came up with the idea for Document360
Over the four to five years of growing Biztalk 360, Saravana and his team spent a lot of time writing documentation. He found that many existing solutions were not built with a focus on the knowledgebase and were more built to accommodate existing chat or support ticket products.
What is Document360’s documentation process?
There are multiple stakeholders in Document360 documentation process:
- Product
- Customer service
- Marketing
- Quality assurance
This highlights the importance of a specific process and the right software for building quality documentation. Without a process, it would be impossible to produce high quality documentation fast at the pace required in a high growth software business.
Don’t let your product and documentation get out of sync
In their early days, SaaS businesses often focus heavily on their product and forget about documentation. This can lead to these two getting out of sync and making things very hard for the documentation team at a later date. Saravana urges SaaS businesses to keep product and documentation in sync during the early days.
Documentation plays a crucial role in customer support strategy
Saravana states that modern users do not want to speak to your support team, they want to be able to solve their issue by themselves. It is very hard to enable this without documentation.
Documentation as content marketing
Saravana is seeing conversions from organic traffic coming to their knowledgebase. He also states that this is a big opportunity for all SaaS businesses that are adopting content marketing as part of their customer acquisition strategy as documentation is keyword rich, high quality content that can easily boost rankings for product related keywords.
Saravana’s top three Document360 features:
- Category management – the ability to segregate articles by category
- “Google Doc” editor – an easy to use text editor that supports both markdown and html
- In-app assistant – a help icon within specific parts of a SaaS application that can link directly to a piece of documentation
Saravana’s documentation advice to his twenty year old self
Sometime writing documentation can be very challenging, but it’s important to understand the context of the user and then writing to that need. Sometimes an image or video can be worth a thousand words.
Keep in mind who is reading the article and address their need.
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