Winning Over Coworkers, Collaborators, and Customers to a New Knowledge Experience

Description

In 2020, I was hired by Splunk to build a customer-facing, internally crowdsourced use case and best practice repository. The project goal was to stop gatekeeping expert knowledge that was previously limited to high-spend customers and make it accessible to all customers through self-service. The larger business goal was to improve our product adoption and customer retention rates.

Over the last three years, my content strategy has continuously evolved, and Splunk Lantern has become a comprehensive customer success center. I faced so many challenges during this time, but what I didn't expect most of all was how much of my role would be marketing, promotion, and communication. Just because you build it, doesn't mean they will come.

In this talk, I'll share what I learned about:

  • Winning, and sustaining, support of executives for a new documentation project
  • Helping managers encourage their team members to contribute content
  • Getting over impostor syndrome and learning to promote your project internally
  • Finding ways to reach customers and get them excited about your site
  • Ensuring continued awareness as new employees and new customers join

If you are tasked with creating a new, crowd sourced knowledge base or if you are managing a knowledge base with low usage or low internal support, this talk is for you.

  • Conference: Write the Docs Portland
  • Year: 2023

About the speaker

Jennifer A Swallow