Implementing a State-of-the-Art, Accessible Knowledge Base

OpenExchange provides software for virtual meetings and conferences with highly secure, highly facilitated, and highly reliable connections through a video streaming and presentation platform called Knovio that has over 600,000 registered users across corporate America and higher education.

They offer two different versions of the Knovio platform. One version is designed specifically for corporate learning and financial communications and has some of the largest investment banks as clients, including JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and more. A second low-cost or “freemium” version has a broader focus across multiple industries.

Too Much to Handle

OpenExchange’s software platform, Knovio, was initially developed by KnowledgeVision, which OpenExchange acquired in October 2019. Not long after the acquisition, the COVID pandemic hit, and suddenly, several large financial companies, including some of the nation’s largest banks, turned to them for help in virtualizing all of their investor conferences. OpenExchange grew by 850 percent, and their team grew from thirty people to almost 2,000, over a single year.

It was “all hands on deck” trying to meet the needs of their large financial services clients. As a result, their broader legacy product went on autopilot. People were still signing up for it, companies were still buying it, but their support database struggled to keep up.

After a year and a half of dealing with the pandemic, the OpenExchange team realized they had a lot of out-of-date content that needed to be refreshed, including numerous newer features and applications that needed user documentation. More than that, they needed to update the way all of their support knowledge was organized to provide a state-of-the-art self-help system.

They contacted Lara Frankovitch of Trek Advisory Group and asked, “Can you help us update our support content and modernize the way we organize it and make it accessible? We would also like to create a smooth way to transition paying clients from self-help to individual help when the knowledge base can’t answer their questions.”

Creating a Well-Designed Self-Help System

Lara went to work providing these solutions. In the end, she developed a thoroughly modern two-tier support system: a well-designed self-help system with video training and tutorial resources for people using the free or lower-tier versions of the software, and a way for higher-end clients to be directed to a support agent if the self-help resources didn’t address their immediate need.

Additionally, she developed a modern support page that was context-sensitive, providing a menu of support resources driven by the tier level of the client. In terms of content, every article was thoroughly reviewed for relevance, and every illustration was checked to reflect the current version of the product. All out-of-date or less useful support materials were eliminated, and new content was created to ensure that 100 percent of the features and functionality of the product were covered.

Finally, Lara helped them implement processes to ensure the content would stay up to date, tickets addressed in a timely manner, and analytics regularly reviewed to identify gaps in the knowledge base, FAQs, and tutorials.

According to Michael Kolowich, chief content officer for OpenExchange, “Working with Lara was a terrific experience. She was thorough in her planning and proposal, relentless in pursuing what she needed from very busy people, and editorially brilliant in laying out a content strategy. She made sure the strategy got executed in a timely manner, and she handled all necessary communications with our outside support platform providers to make sure we had the best and most appropriate features. Lara is generous with her time, generous with her knowledge, and a thoroughly pleasant and professional person to work with.”