Have you built an internal use case library/knowledge base for your CS team?

Sofia Reimchen

Hi all, 

I was wondering if anyone has built an internal customer use case library for their team?
The general idea here is to be able to pool knowledge of our global CS team into a searchable database (that can be used not only by CS but also benefit Sales, PS etc ).
Ideally, users could then search by customer industry, region, product type etc. and access ALL relevant use cases/customer stories, not just the public customer reference stories. 

If anyone has done this, I would love to hear how you approached this and what tools you used?

Thanks!

Sana Farooq

Yes! We just switched from Showpad to Guru and the entire team loves it. The added bonus is that the team can even search for cards using keywords in Slack, so it saves a lot of internal back and forth with SME's. Strongly recommend!

Sofia Reimchen

@Sana Farooq that sounds great! I'll check out Guru for sure. In terms of how you collected and then categorised/organised/tagged the data, what was your approach?

Sana Farooq

That was a collaborative effort between myself, a few managers on the team, and our CS Operations Manager. We documented all of it within google sheets, so that all of the tagging was easily visible and consistent. This also helped us clean out any outdated or duplicate documents that lived in our archives, so that we could limit it to just the key "need to know" items in each area before we uploaded into our knowledge base.

The great thing about Guru is that you can set timeframes on your knowledge cards (monthly, quarterly etc), and they'll alert you or the SME when it's time to review and "verify" whether all of the information is still accurate or requires updating. Since we are in high growth mode and things are changing on the daily, the proactive reminders have been very helpful for us to stay on top of the knowledge dissemination across the team and feel confident in what they're accessing regularly (particularly as it pertains to product resources and information). 

Hope that helps and happy to answer any other questions or hop on a call to walk you through what we've put together @Sofia Reimchen!

Laura Lakhwara

Seconding the use of Guru if there doesn't exist an intranet of resources where a searchable wiki could be spun up.

I'd recommend Guru (I use it at Revenue Collective), and then we had external client-facing resources searchable on Hubspot Knowledge base.

Google drive is how we coordinated and had multiple editors to content. Then we had workflows to manage the upkeep of the information. Product marketing owned a great deal of this.

William Buckingham

Hi @Sofia Reimchen

We are working on something like this currently.  We use Gainsight so we actually created a Gainsight Timeline entry type of "Outcome."  When a CSM logs an Outcome that a customer achieved, not only will it be able to be looked up in the future by outcome, use case, product, industry, application, etc., but will also automatically post to a Slack channel when logged so we get real time sharing of outcomes/use cases.  So if a CSM is working toward achieving an innovative outcome for a customer, and sees a different CSM just logged a very similar, those two can immediately sync up and help accelerate the effort.

What I like about how we did it, is that the single action of logging to timeline, knocks out both A.  recording in customer lifecycle history, and B. adding to repository for team learning and referencing. 

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

We are currently building this at RingCentral.

I highly recommend empowering your CSMs, that whenever they ask a question of the team, they are now responsible creating the knowledge base article for that challenge or need. Helps scale the process and creates relatable article sets since these were generated from real life consulting and troubleshooting.