How we improved our external knowledge base and created infobip.com/docs

When your business is shaping the future of customer experience by simplifying communications between businesses and end-users, you need to provide the same level of quality to your customers. 

In the CPaaS industry (Communication Platform as a Service), your product needs to be easy to use, and the support backing it needs to be outstanding - otherwise, customers will find a new provider. Seeing as 70% of customers prefer to look for the answers alone on your webpage, a comprehensive knowledge base designed to help those customers is a must today. 

And I agree because I am one of the 70%! A self-service online library with product documentation and use cases is something that comes handy as I always prefer to troubleshoot and figure things out on my own.

 All of this got the ball rolling on building our comprehensive Documentation Hub - infobip.com/docs. It started as an idea to provide our customers with a single place where they could look for quick answers about the products they use. Also, we imagined it as a place where we'd share all the best practices in messaging, with detailed steps on how to implement and execute them with the Infobip platform.

 The first step was to organize a workshop, of course, :). We needed to put ourselves in the customers' shoes and imagine the flow of looking and searching for various information.

This was an easy task for our team, as we were newcomers to the company back then. We were on the journey of discovering our products and platform - we weren't in the customer's shoes, we practically were customers!

Our multi-day workshop produced the following (please don't judge the handwriting):

We were quite satisfied with the outcome, and after usability testing with several colleagues, the challenging part came – collecting all the content.

With 40+ Product Owners and 40+ products, it's hard to document everything properly. All of them are constantly developing and launching - at the same time. Everything existed – but some information was scattered around different places, document repositories, and some in the heads of our product owners and developers.

It all had to be translated into a human, customer-centric language with a clear goal to showcase the possibilities and options our products provide.

What are customer jobs with a certain product? Why should they use it? How will it benefit them? - It sounds easy to vocalize when you know your product, but hard to write down in a consistent, unified way across an entire portfolio.

After several iterations and interventions from Content and Technical writing teams, after designing and building the page itself, we finally rolled out infobip.com/docs in July this year, in a structure very similar to the product envisioned back during the very first workshop in September 2018.

We divided it into 5 main categories:

1.Product Documentation

Detailed WHAT IS and HOW TO information about the products in our portfolio. Don't know how to use a particular feature to achieve your goal? This is the place to start.

2. Use Cases

An ever-growing list of WHY TO use our products, with best practices explained in step by step tutorials. We wanted our customers to get inspired, see the best practices, and improve their customer experience by communicating directly with their end-users.

 3. API Reference

Our developer documentation, dev.infobip.com, where our customers can explore how to integrate Infobip over API.

 4. Essentials

A place where customers can learn how to create an Infobip account, what are some country specifics, how to top-up, etc. The essential actions one may need to perform are now clearly explained, and there's no need to contact and wait for a reply with an explanation or a how-to from Infobip.

 5. Release Notes

Release notes is a place that contains all the novelties we release in a month, with a purpose to keep our customers up to date with product enhancements and new launches.

An important thing to note is that as our company grows, the /docs will grow too. We're treating it as a standalone product, a living organism that should always reflect the image of the company.

With the launch of /docs, we want to provide our customers an easy to use knowledge base where they can quickly find what they need. A knowledgebase that not only saves their time but reduces the support costs for our company and increases customer satisfaction.