Business Background

Dampsoft is a leading provider of dental software in Germany, offering various tools that dental clinics require for their operations. Athena, one such digital tool, helps clinics digitize patient records, including history of illnesses, allergies, and other details. Patients can directly input their information into the app through a form when they visit a clinic. The app now also provides add-on SaaS features like AI-assisted X-ray analysis.

Business Requirement

The Athena app, serving B2B markets, caters to different user groups, including dentists, dental hygiene managers, nursing assistants, and receptionists. Dampsoft realized they needed an easy-to-access, easy-to-understand customer-facing resource containing all the necessary information about their tools, installation guides and troubleshooting guides.

Dampsoft’s success with their public knowledge base led them to create a mixed knowledge base for internal use. This internal knowledge base includes step-by-step guides on handling customer queries and using the right terminology when communicating with customers.

Previously, the Athena team stored different knowledge in PDFs, which posed multiple challenges:

• Inconsistent customer support solutions for the same problem.
• Difficulty sharing knowledge due to outdated PDFs.
• Repeated customer support requests for installation guides and user manuals.
• Customers dealing with outdated PDF or print manuals often needed additional support.
• Internally, it was tedious to answer repeated questions about finding specific manuals, guides, or installation notes.

Initially, the Athena team used a wiki to create an internal repository of information. However, they faced challenges with access control, making it cumbersome to give different people access to different sections of the knowledge base. This prompted the Athena product teams to decide on creating a centralized repository of information, serving as a single source of knowledge for everyone.

They sought an online knowledge management tool that was easy to access, regularly updated, and visually appealing.

Business Solution

After evaluating various knowledge management solutions, they chose Document360 to host their first public customer-facing knowledge base, named Athena Hilfe. Some of the tool’s salient features that influenced their decision include:

• Customization options using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• A role system making it easy to assign specific people as authors, reviewers, and publishers.
• A categories tab functioning as a table of contents to organize content.
• Homepage builder to customize their help site to look like an extension of Athena’s website.
• The KB widget installed on their website to provide visitors with contextual information, with plans to integrate it into their app.
• The ability to convert the knowledge base into a mixed access one, prompting them to move their internal knowledge base to Document360.
• Reader groups to manage and distribute both private and public content.
• Rich metrics providing weekly reports on:
  • Number of likes and dislikes certain articles received.
  • Most searched keywords.
  • Frequently visited articles.
  • Keywords that did not yield results.

Julien Bergner, founder of Athena-app and business unit leader at Dampsoft, says,

There are thousands of internal knowledge base providers designed to empower customer support teams. But Document360 is the only one providing a great customer-facing public service page.

Business Impact

The Athena team reports that

Document360 enhanced customer happiness immensely.

Athena’s customers, mainly healthcare professionals, appreciate the 24/7 accessibility of Athena Hilfe.

Frauke Wiegand, Head of Product Athena at Dampsoft, says,

Our customers do not have the time to reach out to a phone number and wait in a hotline for minutes or even hours. They need a 24/7 reachable place to go to for help. Athena Hilfe makes our customers independent in setting up, learning, and using the software – where – and whenever they like.

Frauke also notes a reduction in customer support tickets or calls on topics covered in articles on Athena Hilfe. Issues that do receive calls see a quick drop in numbers once an article on the topic is uploaded.

Conclusion

The Athena Team made a bold decision to opt for an online knowledge base, moving away from the standard practice of using PDFs to provide their customers with a better troubleshooting experience and enhance customer satisfaction. Since adopting Document360, they have achieved most of their goals, creating a path for many critical SaaS tool providers to follow.