What's the purpose/goal of your KB?

The purpose is to improve product knowledge across our team so that we can better serve our customers. We are a relatively young company, and the average tenure of the team is 4-6 weeks. We sell a complicated product. We do our best to train, but there needs to be a centralized repository of information that people can access quickly and easily.

We tried internal wikis, internal Slack groups, and a weekly meeting to get questions answered. All worked to varying levels of efficacy, but none presented a scalable solution that would grow with us as an organization. Hence the desire to find a solution that would allow us to scale knowledge management.

What solutions did you approach before you decided to go with Helpjuice?

We tried setting up our knowledge base in Zendesk and Helpscout, but neither met our needs. We also tried a few ad-hoc ways of getting information out to the team, including a Slack channel, a weekly meeting to talk about product questions, etc. Those all worked to some degree, but we knew none of them were scalable.

Helpjuice was the kind of solution we were looking for to scale our knowledge dissemination. We knew we needed an easy searchable, internal website type of solution to improve the degree to which knowledge could be accessed. Helpjuice provided exactly that.

Why did you decide to use Helpjuice?

We went through a fairly rigorous selection process. We tried Zendesk, Helpscout, and a few other options. Helpjuice stood out for two main reasons: instant search and logical permissioning.

Other solutions did have auto-complete in search, but Helpjuice's autocomplete was by far the best. It loads immediately and shows a more complete preview of potential answers than any other solution. Also, while other solutions allowed you to set up permissions for answer editing / contribution, Helpjuice had by far the most straightforward way of managing those permissions. That was critical for us, given we have many people who are contributing answers to our database.

What's your favorite Helpjuice feature?

Unlike other knowledge base solutions, I love that with Habitat I can get instant search results. I love that the UI is highly customizable, and that I can set up permissions for each one of our teams uniquely.

What problem are/were you looking to solve with Helpjuice?

The core problem we had was one of knowledge dissemination. We sell a complicated product, and getting the entire team to use internal wiki documents effectively was a challenge. We knew that we needed a solution that was easier for our team to use, from Sales to Marketing to Customer Success.

Our first iteration of this was a Slack thread where, as Director of Product, I fielded questions directly. We immediately started getting 5-10 complicated, in-depth questions per day. I knew this wouldn't scale, and that we needed a solution that our team could use repeatedly in a self-serve manner.

What kind of an impact has Helpjuice had?

Since implementing Helpjuice at the beginning of July, we have fielded 130 queries from our team in Helpjuice (~40 a month) at an 88% success rate on searches. These are complex queries that require quite a bit of information - should they go to a member of the Product team, a response to each of these queries typically takes 10 minutes to draft and send.

That saves our team 6 hours a month in terms of raw processing time on queries. More importantly, it gives us a central repository to make it easier to train our team. We've been able to train our employees on product knowledge 2x faster, knowing that we have a robust knowledge database they can fall back on for ongoing questions.