This case study describes how Melbourne-based coworking space, LaunchPad, have managed to improve their internal documentation workflow using our knowledge base product, MinervaKB.
David Thomas, a co-founder and Chief Operative of LaunchPad, kindly agreed to answer our questions about their company and how they use knowledge base in their daily tasks.
Because LaunchPad has a large team, using Sharepoint / Word docs and individual web pages for sharing knowledge quickly became a bottleneck. That’s how they’ve discovered our knowledge base product and started integrating it gradually into their business processes, using it both for team communication and customer service.
We spoke about the challenges they have faced in automating their internal and external documentation and how they solved them, as well as gathered some useful tips for the new knowledge base users.
Hi David! Would you give me a quick overview of your company, LaunchPad?
LaunchPad is a Collaborative Coworking space located in the heart of Melbourne’s innovation precinct – Cremorne.
There are three large sites, each branded for the communities they serve – Startups, Scaleups and Grownups.
What is the main value LaunchPad offers to customers?
A supportive and nurturing environment to grow their businesses. Three unique and themed sites to choose from. Colocation with some of Australia’s most innovative companies Realestate.com, MYOB, Carsales.com and Seek.com.
Can you please describe your role?
As a co-founder and Chief Operative, my role is to lead the company in creating a brilliant place to grow businesses. We are dedicated to creating an environment where businesses flourish and contribute more –more to the community and more to the economy.
How long has your company been in business?
Founded in 2010 after our Management Consulting business, iOctane, reinvented itself into a company specializing in creating collaborative communities.
How many people are on your team? What are their roles?
Our Groundcrew team has four involved in coaching, mentoring and community building. A larger extended team looking after business services.
What tools or processes did you use before to organize and manage your documentation?
Sharepoint/Word documents, dedicated web site pages, Knowledge Base in our backend system Nexudus.
What were the major pain points of your process prior to using our knowledge base?
Accessibility – we wanted to have private KB information just for our team and public information for our community.
Ease of editing information – Sharepoint Word required a lot of steps to check out/in and update (generate PDFs etc).
Integration – we wanted something that looked Web 2.0 that we could link into our Collaborator Portal.
Have you investigated alternative solutions or products and what limitations they had?
Ideally, we wanted something that would work with our existing Divi template, Minerva was the closest we found to providing what we wanted – a seamless UI look and feel.
How does our knowledge base help your team to achieve its goals?
Our primary goal is to create a resource our members could access without needing our help. In any one day we have a large number of enquiries that could be satisfied by self-service. We’re currently building out the knowledge base and our next step is to link it into our helpdesk, allowing a bot to recommend articles that could satisfy a members request.
Can you measure any reduced costs or saved time after using our knowledge base?
For us, it’s less about reducing costs and more about providing timely support for our members.
What knowledge base feature do you find most helpful?
For our Members – Search and categories. For the Groundcrew team – ease of editing pages.
How using our knowledge base affected customer satisfaction or team effectiveness?
Our major hurdle is changing the behavior of our members to search the knowledge base instead of finding or emailing us and asking questions. Once we have sufficient articles in the base, we’ll push people more proactively to the site. We think that this should give our members a much better experience.
What is your advice to others who might be considering our knowledge base?
Segregate the KB into a separate site and link back to our main site. This avoids confusing Google SEO work and makes maintaining sites much easier.
Conclusion
Handling knowledge sharing inside a large company is an interesting, but sometimes challenging task. There are new customers who need support and there are colleagues who need help with onboarding. Handling all these manually is a huge waste of resources.
A Knowledge Base can help greatly in such scenarios. It helps to organize content, it provides powerful search and your content is published on the web instantly. You can read the docs anywhere and from any device you currently have, as long as you have access to the Internet.
In addition to that, MinervaKB provides flexible access rules that allow you to choose which parts of the knowledge base are public, and which are for registered users only. This allows you to handle all information in one place, apply the same styling and settings, update different types of content during the same session and many other benefits.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, you should check the available features of our knowledge base or chat with us – it’s likely that your documentation problem is not unique and can be easily solved.
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