Recently I had a chance to chat with Ben, owner/developer at Borlabs, a Hamburg based company, that focuses on premium WordPress products.
To be honest, I’m very interested in how Minerva Knowledge Base helps small businesses and startups, as these types of companies usually get the most benefits from using our support products. That’s why feedback from companies like Ben’s is always most welcome.
I was extremely happy to find out that Borlabs managed to reduce their support requests by 35% using our knowledge base. As someone who manages support for his own products on a daily basis I know just how important that can be.
Read on to get more insights into managing customer support effectively as a startup owner.
Hi Ben! Would you give me a quick overview of your company?
Borlabs is a small company located in Hamburg Germany developing premium plugins for WordPress.
Our flagship is Borlabs Cookie.
Borlabs Cookie is an opt-in cookie solution which helps to comply with the GDPR and upcoming ePrivacy.
What are some of the great features your product/service offers to customers?
Can you please describe your role?
How long has your company been in business?
What tools or processes did you use before to organize and manage your documentation?
We tried simple blog posts + categories, custom post types, and knowledge bases which were part of helpdesk systems.
But it was a mess. When I found MinervaKB I was super happy (no kidding!).
It is one of the very rare, very polished, and feature-rich plugins you can find for WordPress.
Whenever I was about to ask for a feature, I found it a few minutes later, or the developer told me how I can find it.
What were the major pain points of your process prior to using our knowledge base?
Without MinervaKB it was hard to structure all the information and make it easy to access.
The integrated autocomplete search helps our customers to find quickly the info they need.
And with the also integrated feedback system, we can better understand, when people are happy/unhappy with an article, so we can improve it.
Have you investigated alternative solutions or products and what limitations they had?
Since we have MinervaKB, we stopped looking, because there is no better WordPress plugin for handling a Knowledge Base.
How does our knowledge base help your team to achieve its goals?
Thanks to the integrated Google Analytics Event tracking, we can better understand, what kind of information our customers are searching for and can very quickly create new knowledge base articles for them, to reduce support requests.
Can you measure any reduced costs or saved time after using our knowledge base?
What knowledge base feature do you find most helpful?
Automatic table of content creation, feedback system, autocomplete for the search, and the shortcodes for info, tip, and warning boxes.
Since we are about to release a completely new version of our product Borlabs Cookie, I started to appreciate the Article Version feature.
How using our knowledge base affected customer satisfaction or team effectiveness?
What is your advice to others who might be considering our knowledge base?
Conclusion
It’s always rewarding to hear that your products actually help people.
Being a small business owner and developer myself, I know how hard it is to find time to answer all the support questions while developing and promoting your products.
Perhaps in the not so distant future, artificial intelligence will be able to handle customer support completely.
For now, however, not only customer support is time-consuming for the person answering the questions, but it’s also frustrating for the customers, as they need to have answers now, not in 1, 4 or 24 hours.
This also is not very pleasant from the psychological point of view, as your clients feel that they are not in control of the whole situation.
Using an online knowledge base can help you greatly in this situation. It reduces the customer support requests and it provides a better customer experience, as clients can search for answers exactly when they need them, without waiting for support agent responses.
