A knowledge base or help center is a great self-service option for visitors to find information about your product. When done right, it can save your support staff a lot of time and can work wonders to improve the customer experience. But having created an extensive help center ourselves, we know that it’s time-consuming to create good support documentation. The content needs to be concise, enticing, timely and easy to find. If your business deals with different audiences, creating an effective knowledge base can be tricky. You don’t want people to feel overwhelmed by information or spend too much time searching for what they need. What if you could use personalization to make it easier for your customers to find the most relevant support docs? Let’s look at three use cases.

Making complex information easy to digest: a pharma example

Pharmaceutical companies need to juggle many different types of documentation for patients, regulators, and doctors. Documents for doctors have to be scientific and detailed. Information for patients must be easy to understand. Content for regulators should encompass complex legal details. Using personalization recipes, a pharma company can display these different types of docs more easily to the relevant audience.

For instance, if they know a returning visitor is a doctor, they can highlight medical documentation that is most relevant for medical practitioners. Conversely, if they’ve identified someone as a patient, they can feature patient-focused support docs more prominently. Visitors who have been tagged as regulators can be shown legal stuff right off the bat, making complex documentation easier to browse through. The information can be further personalized depending on the disease areas people have expressed interest in. Doesn’t this sound easier than reading through a long leaflet or navigating a complex pharmaceutical database?

Better customer success docs in B2B

In the B2B realm, companies often speak to different target profiles or personas. Understanding these profiles is key to drive sales and improve user experience. Salesforce, for example, is well-known for documenting the personas they target. They regularly conduct surveys to better understand their users and leverage the research to further enhance their product or finetune their marketing strategy. This is a common practice among similar B2B software companies.

What you don’t see too often though, is support content targeted at each user type. Someone who uses Salesforce as a “Pipeline Builder” spends more time entering new prospects or logging follow up activities in the system than someone who uses the CRM for reporting and sales forecasting. Highlighting different customer success materials for these different audiences would go a long way to ensure that each person has access to the content they need more quickly.

Let’s look at another example. Say your business targets very different user personas, like developers and marketers. You offer an API for the engineers, and a self-service tool for the marketers. If you’ve identified a customer as a developer, you can show them technical support documentation. But if someone is a marketer, display support docs for the self-service solution instead. You can go even further by customizing this material according to previous actions they have taken on your site. Don’t know who that new visitor is? You can just ask them with our self-segmentation tool!

Making B2C support a breeze: Expats of all types

Moving is not an easy task even within the same city or country but make that an international move and it’s a whole new story! There are a lot of things to get in order whether it be getting the right type of permit, finding a suitable bank, or having a roof over your head once you arrive. These are only some of the hurdles you’ll have to overcome and any expat will tell you, it’s stressful.

What makes it even more challenging is that the rules and requirements change depending on your reason for the move, where you are moving from, and if you are moving alone or with others. So how can an expat relocation business advice all its visitors with a single help center? Analyzing behavioral cues and referral source can be just as helpful as using a subtle self-segmentation widget.

Can we help you?

Albert Einstein once said “the definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.” Personalization can help you make customer care truly exceptional by making intricate support documentation more understandable and easier to find. Because the key to getting ahead of your competition is not just addressing multiple target groups at once but creating an individualized journey for each which leads to a better overall experience.

If these examples resonate with your needs, we’d love to help you implement them. Contact us to get started.