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Knowledge sharing to improve customer support self service

Objective

To help scale Support as GitLab grows (both in terms of product scope and customer numbers) we will create high quality resources to help GitLab users.

The Support team can generate content to complement documentation based on the questions and issues we see in support tickets.

This Support Q4 OKR captures our initial goals: gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!14605 (merged)

Enable support team to create 30 updates to docs to help capture knowledge and improve customer self service. Track contributions and views to measure 'self service score' (support edited doc visitors / customers opening tickets).

Previous issues and discussion

UGC session at Summit 2018: #1260 (moved)

Start a knowledge base - support initiated issue: #1264 (closed)

Allow searching of docs from support.gitlab.com : #295 (closed)

How do others do it?

https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/

From this post, it's recommended to segment docs like this:

image

Current docs and resources

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/university/

Debugging tips: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/51617

This area was developed by Support: https://docs.gitlab.com/debug/ (source: https://gitlab.com/debugging/debug/ ) built when docs are built - not linked from docs, but nothing to stop Google indexing. Was discussed and set up following conversation in Slack #support-docs-collabo

Forum - to be discussed how we can make better use of: https://forum.gitlab.com/

Initial MVC

  • Agree with docs team areas of docs that Support Engineers can merge directly to Master to reduce publishing friction (e.g. 'Troubleshooting' sections)
  • Train Support Team with process for updating content to knowledge share and schedule time with team members to make this happen
  • Enable search with Algolia from https://support.gitlab.com: gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com#2651 (closed) (Tom A and others meeting with Algolia on 9th October to discuss ways forwards.
  • Configure analytics to track Support team contributions and page views for Support Team generated content
Edited by Tom Atkins