HubSpot Service Hub Knowledge Base: Dos, Don'ts, + Strategic Power-Ups

Intro:

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, lord lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt? Knowledge.

Intro:

Never fear hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub Heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers.

George B. Thomas:

Oh, yeah. Activate those powers, baby. Alright. Yeah.

Liz Moorehead:

So we're back for part two of the service hub knowledge based conversation. Yeah. I'm excited, but I've gotta be honest, gentlemen. George, just go ahead and derail us. What's going on?

George B. Thomas:

No. No. Not yet. No. No.

George B. Thomas:

Not yet.

Liz Moorehead:

You can't say.

George B. Thomas:

No. What?

Max Cohen:

What's going on, George? Alright. I got it here, Ellis.

Liz Moorehead:

We're here.

George B. Thomas:

We're we're gonna talk about we're we are. We're gonna talk about the knowledge base and some things and all that. But but I got I'm excited. And I gotta talk about something. I I've gotta share with the world something that's happening this Friday.

George B. Thomas:

Friday, the sixth, twenty twenty five, Eastern Standard Time.

Max Cohen:

I'm not available.

George B. Thomas:

I don't know if anybody has heard yet. And so I'm letting you know that there is a HubSpot help call in show. What? It's gonna start happening every Friday from 3PM to 4PM Eastern. Ladies and gentlemen, listen closely.

George B. Thomas:

One, Mr. Kyle Jepsen will be on the show.

Liz Moorehead:

Shut the front door.

George B. Thomas:

Number two, Rob Jones will be on the show. Hold on, hold on. Number three, Casey Hawkins will be on the show. Hey, wait, wait, wait. And yes, your boy, George B.

George B. Thomas:

Thomas will be on the show. The four of us are going to start showing up on Fridays. You can call in. By the way, there's a voicemail. Like if you get like online shy, which is kind of weird, like, but whatever.

George B. Thomas:

But if you get online shy, there's a phone number that we're going to be dropping later this week that you can call in and you can leave a voicemail to which we'll then put on the show that way. Or you can call in and we'll take your question and I'm excited because my mind goes to like, here's the scenario, right? Somebody asks a question and Kyle goes, oh, you could ABC. And then Rob Jones goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And because of ABC, you could one, two, three.

George B. Thomas:

And then Casey Hawkins jumps in, oh, yeah. And then you could XYZ. And I don't know what numbers or letters I'll use, but I'm sure I'll have something that I could put on top of that and be like, and so just the way to help these.

Liz Moorehead:

Oh, there we

Max Cohen:

go.

George B. Thomas:

Like we do here, but there. So we're literally hitting Monday mornings, Friday afternoons, helping humans with Hubzard. Okay, I'm done. That was the derail.

Liz Moorehead:

Now, question. Where can people watch this show? Was it LinkedIn you said? Or are

George B. Thomas:

you So going to go over to Profoundly's LinkedIn channel. There's more details. I don't have it in front of me. But yes, it's LinkedIn that you can go and sign up for or attend or just hit the buttons and

Chad Hohn:

Whatever the live thing is.

George B. Thomas:

Profoundly, go find it. This show is gonna be I'm excited. Did it hit It's freaking amazing. That I'm excited. The sketch.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah.

Max Cohen:

Me and Chad are gonna call in.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. Yes.

Max Cohen:

Under a under a under a pseudonym.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What? I'll know it's you.

George B. Thomas:

Spot. I'll know it's you when you're like

Max Cohen:

I'll just call him. What? I need to reset my password. How do I do that?

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. Yeah. I I can I can hear Max? This is more black. Yeah.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah.

Liz Moorehead:

Yeah. No. I'll call it. I haven't organized my HubSpot hub data in ten years. What do I do?

Liz Moorehead:

Okay.

George B. Thomas:

Brother, this guy sank. Okay. Let's get into the good stuff. All

Liz Moorehead:

right. So we are back for part two of our HubSpot Service Hub knowledge based conversation. If you missed the last episode in this series, I highly recommend you go back and check it out. You do not need to listen to it in order to dive into today's discussion, but we got into a really fascinating sidebar conversation about what it means to build a healthy culture inside of service organizations that I think any company should listen to regardless as to whether you have a service team or not. But with that said, we're going to be diving today into the tactics, the applications, the actual doing of the thing when it comes to knowledge base.

Liz Moorehead:

But first, George, let's say for a moment we've got some listeners who are jumping into this conversation midway. What is the TLDR CliffsNotes definition of the knowledge base? What is it? Where is it? Why is Yeah,

George B. Thomas:

yeah, yeah. So Service Hub, it's where you can put information that customers will need along the way. It's a place where you as a HubSpot user can be proactive instead of reactive. But like, that's a big piece that I want to throw out there. And so you can go into your HubSpot Hub.

George B. Thomas:

If you have Service Hub, you can then see knowledge articles, which by the way, this is only a fraction fraction of the conversation that you should even be having around Service Hub in general for your But then at the end of the day, well, we'll get into it. We'll get into what should be in there. But service hub, knowledge base, multiple things that you should be thinking about inside of there.

Liz Moorehead:

Love it. Max, Chad, any other CliffsNotes you want to add to our listeners for our listeners before we get into it?

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. I mean, the only

Max Cohen:

thing I'll reiterate, it's the it's, you know, it's it's a heat shield. Right? Like, you wanna make sure that your humans are focused on doing the really tough work that actually needs human intervention as much as you can, and the knowledge base is like the, you know, the first sort of shield to put up to get those people to stop getting hit with unnecessary things. Yeah. Crack their time down, burn them, or yeah.

George B. Thomas:

It feels like it would hurt.

Max Cohen:

It would hurt.

George B. Thomas:

Ouch. Yeah.

Chad Hohn:

Reentry. That's something. Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, for for me, I think, also, I just wanna reiterate the difference between, like, service hub versus support tools, which is like, you know, Intercom, Zendesk, whatever.

Chad Hohn:

If you're on HubSpot, but you have those other tools, you still don't necessarily have as perfectly integrated or well knit view of your customer support interactions along with all their other interactions with your business if you're on HubSpot. Right? Even other tools like Zendesk or whatever that are out there, your tickets aren't gonna be perfectly linked or properly associated or all of the data of your communications back and forth logged in HubSpot. And so I think Service Hub is really like, you know, again, HubSpot's offering in the place. And as we mentioned last time, it really is trading blows with the big players out there, if not excelling in certain areas and while they're not excelling in certain areas or they are excelling in other areas still.

Chad Hohn:

But they're they got a ton of new features coming out all the time in Service Hub. It is really one of the most heavily advancing hubs, I think. They're pouring a lot of resources into it. I've been working with the help desk team the past number of, actually a couple years now. And they've they've they're really cool.

Chad Hohn:

They really got a a big heart for the tool over there.

George B. Thomas:

Which which I'm glad to see because there were years where we were like

Chad Hohn:

We have a conversations inbox that hooks to tickets.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. Is Service Hub gonna become something? Well, it's something. It's something. And of course, part of that is knowledge base.

Liz Moorehead:

Love it. Alright. Well, let's dig in, guys. First question I have for you. How should organizations decide what content belongs in their knowledge base versus what doesn't?

Max Cohen:

Yeah. I mean, the I think it's it's funny because, a lot of people kind of, like, approach their blog without, you know, kind of understanding this this fundamental point here. Often oftentimes, people are just writing about their own product in their blog and how to do stuff and how it works and everything when what they should be writing about or goals and challenges that people actually have. And, the the content that they wanna be writing, right, which is all that, is the exact stuff that belongs in the knowledge base and not necessarily the blog unless it's like a very, you know, bottom of the funnel decision stage piece of content around your your actual product. Right?

Max Cohen:

But, you know, it's again, this is really a place where it's like, you wanna know how to do x y z for your specific product. That content goes here type of situation for me at

George B. Thomas:

least. Mhmm. Yeah. When I sit and think about this, by the way, try to zoom up to like the 50,000 foot view and think about like different knowledge bases that I've seen, good, bad and ugly. And there are some organizations out there that I feel like they think this is like the digital junk drawer, where it's like just different documents and like copy and pasted email replies and like, Oh, I had this brainstorm.

George B. Thomas:

Let me throw that in the knowledge base too. And all of that starts to equal confusion. And so even having this layer of, Let me make sure that it's this strategic place. Let me make sure it's this like self-service powerhouse, kind of like Max was leaning into like, so people aren't getting hit by plasma. The words you want to think of is self-service powerhouse, because by the way, we'll talk about this in a little bit, but like the different places it could be shown and used.

George B. Thomas:

And so when I think about what belongs there, we can boil down to something very simple. It is the content that helps humans help themselves. Right? It's any of those reoccurring questions that you get. It's any way that you can smooth out the friction or save humans time or save your humans inside your organization time from answering that question for the forty seventh time.

George B. Thomas:

And so like, it needs to teach, It needs to kind of lead. It, it, it, think troubleshooting, think problem solving. This is not a place and, And again, Max leaned into it. You're not trying to get people bought in. You're not trying to get people to convert.

George B. Thomas:

Although what's fun is the amount of conversions that can happen from knowledge articles is quite insane if you're measuring that. And by the way, did you know that it's now in the campaign stool? I'm saying. That's not why we're here. Sorry.

George B. Thomas:

I'm just saying.

Max Cohen:

Well, I mean, also, it's like you're projecting how good your support is on your product, which is something people evaluate. Right? Right. Like, if they go, oh, man, this thing looks big and crazy, but then they go, oh, wow. All the every single thing I could possibly imagine that I needed to be taught to use this is openly available, easy for me to find, and really kinda lets people take a sneak peek of your product without having to get a demo or something like that.

Max Cohen:

Like, it can be used as a marketing tool indirectly.

George B. Thomas:

Oh. Mhmm. Without a doubt. I would love to see the numbers and then I'll shut up because I want to hear what Chad has to say, but also I have some questions that maybe the listeners could be asking themselves. I'll circle back around to that.

George B. Thomas:

But before I shut up, I would love to see the amount of data around HubSpot's knowledge articles that actually ended up to conversions, that ended up in positive ROI. Because I hope that the reason that knowledge base actually ended in a campaigns, the campaigns tool, is because some one or some army, small army of humans, has collected a campaign of knowledge articles, which is a lot by the way, into some type of internal HubSpot campaign where they can be like, Oh, shoot. I feel like I should Like, swear there for Oh, shoot, 7,900,000.0 worth of, like, income or influenced income based okay. I'll shut up. Chad, what are your thoughts?

Chad Hohn:

Well, I I was thinking about, you know, just as well going back to the question. Right? Maybe one of the things that shouldn't go in the knowledge base is really just, like, if it's proprietary information. Right? If you have some stuff that should be behind a password for subscribers or users only that are almost like a level of trade secret or if you have any kind of contractual or NDA type language with the sales of your products for larger organizations, might be pretty relevant.

Chad Hohn:

Right? But outside of that, it's really anything that can be helpful because it's just like I I second exactly what everybody else was saying is, like, people will evaluate what's in there on the public facing side, just to really know how helpful is your tool or whatever service or offering you're selling, like, even if you're only selling services. Right? A knowledge base is still helpful. Like, what does x package look like when interacting with my brand?

Chad Hohn:

Right? And really even being able to get that question answered and to train your your, customer service agent on that information as well. Right? Your, your HubSpot AI agent that can assist your support reps. Right?

Chad Hohn:

Super, super helpful. So, like, the more you put in there, the better it can answer questions without you having to manually CSV upload or, you know, attach other documentation to it.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. I love this. Okay. So I want the listeners, viewers, humans, oh, shoot. Humans.

George B. Thomas:

To have some type of kind of filter to apply mentally before they, dare I say, write the article or look in an article that AI has written to fill the gap based on some functionality in HubSpot or definitely before we hit publish. And so a couple of questions, you can jot this down in your notepad that you can ask yourself before you hit publish. One is, is this content relevant to a customer's experience or a customer's goal? Yes or no? Okay, check, yes.

George B. Thomas:

Does it prevent frustration or reduce support volume? By the way, the frustration of the external human or reduced support volume of our internal team. If yes, okay, check, we're good. Would a new user or a power user or even a prospect benefit from this content? Because by the way, I can only imagine the amount of humans that have stumbled into knowledge articles before they even stumbled into the HubSpot sales funnel.

George B. Thomas:

Okay? Does it reflect how we, whatever your organization is, talk as a brand? Not just how we write, but how we talk. Again, Liz could probably wax poetic on the importance of voice and tone. Knowledge articles isn't something you just turd out.

George B. Thomas:

Right? Like you take time and you make it something good. All right. Those are some filters, some questions that you should be asking about. Then, yes, yes, yes, yes.

George B. Thomas:

Okay. Publish.

Liz Moorehead:

No. I love what

Max Cohen:

you mentioned there, George.

Liz Moorehead:

And we did touch upon this, I think in the first part a little bit, but it is worth co signing here once more. When we think about our marketing content or our sales enablement content, in theory, we should all be thinking about what is in some ways the user experience of the content, right? Voice, tone, visual structure, things like that. And I've noticed when I've looked at a lot of knowledge bases, a lot of those thoughts just go completely out the window. It is literally just like here is the basest version of this answer stripped of any sort of experience, any sort of humanity.

Liz Moorehead:

And that's something that you everybody needs to be mindful of. Like, one of the reasons why I was excited to see things like knowledge based articles end up in campaigns is it has been a maxim of every business for decades that the place where you can get the most revenue is from where? The customers you already have. And yet we do not give a lot of thought to the experience they have, not just from a revenue producing standpoint, but also a delight standpoint. We want the humans we serve with what we do ourselves better than anybody else to have a good experience with us.

Liz Moorehead:

That includes the experience they have when you are answering their questions. That is part of your product. That is part of your service. That is how it is viewed.

George B. Thomas:

It's interesting because my brain goes to two interesting places before you head into the next direction that we're heading list. One, I've often sat back and wondered if They Ask You Answer is truly the amazing blog content creation process that it has been in. What happens when you apply They Ask You Answer to your knowledge articles? I just want you to, if you know what I'm talking about, I want you to think about that.

Liz Moorehead:

Here's It's the most literal interpretation

George B. Thomas:

of Oh my ask god. You Yeah. It's it's I mean, anyway, but I don't think people make that connection of like, well, we've been using it for years for blogging. How about we use some of that stratagem stuff over there for the not Here's the other thing that I wanna say too, and then I'll again be quiet and we'll move on. Please, by all that is holy, make it easy to find.

George B. Thomas:

Please make sure that when it's easy to find, it's relevant. And I am speaking to HubSpot and so many other organizations right now. Please, when it's easy to find and relevant, can you make it accurate? Let me talk about what I mean. There's nothing worse than changing your entire navigation of your SaaS software or adding new features to an old feature and you go to a knowledge article to find out about it and you immediately go, Well, this is outdated.

George B. Thomas:

Please, by all that is holy, easy to find, relevant and have a strategy to keep them updated as your things change. And not everybody listening or watching this as a SaaS software company. So that's what I'm saying things change. But as your things change, make sure that there's a strategy to keep the knowledge articles accurate. Okay.

George B. Thomas:

I think you get my point.

Liz Moorehead:

No, I get it. I love it. And I actually want to stick with this thread a little bit because we started moving away from the what and the what not of what goes in your knowledge base but let's talk about once you have that content, once you have those banging knowledge base articles out there where are some of the overlooked opportunities to integrate that content into other parts of the experience? Because I think sometimes what can happen, right, is you create this mecca, this giant mountain of beautiful knowledge based content, and then you just sit there like, well, we're writing. Come find us.

Liz Moorehead:

But that's not necessarily how it should work. There should be a distribution strategy around it. Right?

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. What are you guys' thoughts? Yeah. You gotta make

Max Cohen:

it you gotta make it like a an actual tangible usable tool for your for your sales reps. Right? So, like, you gotta think about all the little funky funky little tricky ways that it integrates with everything that HubSpot already has. Right? I remember one of the original reasons that I, you know, like, thought the the the knowledge base was so cool is that back, I think, when it, like, had came out, I feel like it launched with the ability when you were writing an email to just be able to click a button and insert a knowledge base article.

Max Cohen:

Like, you could search your search your articles from this little, like, drop down. Right? And even something like that where it's just like, oh, I don't gotta go, you know, take time and, like, go find the articles and and, like, go, like, look into it and, like, Google it, look into it, grab it, get the link, and then come back to it. Like, I could literally just, you know, as I'm on the phone with someone, be like, oh, yeah. I'll email you this knowledge base article.

Max Cohen:

Oh, let me see if we have a knowledge base article on that. Right? Now we're way past that. Right? Like, we've got knowledge or these these customer agents getting trained on the information.

Max Cohen:

You know, we've got all these these tools to help you, like, write and create the content. But, like, you know, I think the the the big part is is, like, train your team on how to use it as a weapon in combating customer issues. Right? And find all these little places where you can, like, surface this stuff. Whether it's, you know, kinda like what I just said, your your your folks who are working with people having the ability to reference it and send that stuff to people right away through the HubSpot interface instead of having to actually go to the knowledge base and find it that way.

Max Cohen:

But the other thing is, like, not everyone is gonna know know you have a knowledge base. Like, I feel like us in the in the marketing tech space are are like, we intuitively know that I can type in company name knowledge base, and there's probably a knowledge base we can go find. Not all customers are like that, though. That's like a very marketing tech brain thing that we all have that not the rest of the world has. Right?

Max Cohen:

That we don't think is, like, so obvious. So it it comes down to, like, make it easy to find. Right? When someone comes to your website and they start talking to your chatbot, right, or whatever it is, the little thing that pops up, yo, you can build your knowledge base into that now. And when I say build, I mean, check a button and have it show up.

Max Cohen:

Right? Like, you gotta give people easy ways to find it. Right? Whether that's putting it, like, front and center in your, like, top navigation or big CTA button somewhere on your website or as part of your onboarding journey to whatever product you have, you're pointing people to there. Right?

Max Cohen:

Like, don't just assume people are gonna find it on Google. Right? Sure. There will be people that do that, but not everyone's gonna do it. You know?

Max Cohen:

So, like, find different ways that HubSpot can help you put it in front of people. And it's not just your customers, it's your internal folks as well. So they can easily access it ergonomically and use it as a weapon.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. So I wanna jump in here and then just for a quick second, I might flip back around after you, Chad, but I wanna give you a chance to talk. But because Max, you brought up, and I'm gonna put these together, and I don't mean any disrespect to a customer agent, but let's say chatbots or You're

Max Cohen:

about bot to be hella disrespectful.

George B. Thomas:

And customer agent, right? Like I'm going to put that in a bucket, that live chat, chat bots, or customer agent. I just want everybody to realize, like, if you look at the knowledge article about Customer Agent, which by the way now is a standalone or soon today, tomorrow, I don't know, soon, by the time you're listening to this dang on it, it'll be standalone. Let's just put it that way. But when you go to the article on customer agent, and you go to the best practices section, it says when working with customer agent, it's recommended that you use content sources that, and the number one on the list of one, two, three, four, five, six things contain common user queries, comprehensive information, and are regularly updated.

George B. Thomas:

For example, FAQs and knowledge base articles. If you go over to another one where it's like, add content sources, it literally says click the sync HubSpot content drop down menu and select HubSpot content. You can sync knowledge base articles, website pages, landing pages, and blogs. So like, we're not even talking about how maybe historically this was a nice to have if you gave two shits about, oh, if you gave two craps about your customer, sorry

Max Cohen:

It wasn't me. It wasn't me.

George B. Thomas:

Please, please Apple, don't make us explicit

Max Cohen:

because I'm I'm not trying to doing Morse code to get an apology. Yeah,

George B. Thomas:

yeah, yeah. Help! If you gave two craps about your customer, like now it is a very foundational needed piece to get a pretty amazing AI assistant

Intro:

to

George B. Thomas:

actually work right. Okay. I'll shut up, Chad. What are your thoughts?

Chad Hohn:

Well, I was gonna, I think, tap on, what Max was talking about, which was the putting it in front of both your humans and, you know, the humans that use your tool or product. And that I, you know, I I don't know if people know necessarily, because they don't necessarily peruse the old API docs all the time. But there is a chat widget SDK. Right? So software development kit where you can, if you have a SaaS product, not just like put the widget like on your website, but actually get into the widget behavior events and like allow users to see all their open support threads with your business and start new threads.

Chad Hohn:

And that also allows the customer agent to serve up KBAs to them with natural language queries, just like asking ChatGPT but trained on your stuff. Right? And so, like, if you actually have a SaaS product and you're running your support through HubSpot, it will really let you serve your customers where they're at, which is in your product, right, without them having to email or call or text or whatever, you know, with your team. So very, very, I think, helpful if you're especially SaaS.

George B. Thomas:

I love that in product kind of help widgets that you're talking Here's another place I want you to think about, because you could have in automated email replies, like you could add additional value. For instance, if you're using Hub Spot, you're listening to this podcast. You're using Hub Spot. I'm just saying. You have something that is smart content.

George B. Thomas:

Imagine adding a hidden section that only people who are customers see based off of them being a list of customers that are, Did you know? And it having like two or three knowledge articles that might be related to the thing that they've actually gone into a funnel around or downloaded or whatever place it is. But think about automated emails and smart content to be able to deliver these knowledge articles in places. If you're doing any type of onboarding and you don't have links to your knowledge articles for people to get back. Like I literally use HubSpot projects tool when I'm training new humans on HubSpot and most of my projects that I, cause I, and here's why I can share it from my portal to other portals.

George B. Thomas:

And so most of my projects have like videos we've done, but also then a plethora of knowledge articles that I know exist, but I can curate for a training or onboarding flow, the information that they might want to dig in or go deeper based off of the training that they just had. Okay. So you have to think about where are all the places, where all are the interactions happening, and what knowledge based articles make sense to show up in those spaces and times.

Chad Hohn:

Well, there's two things I was thinking about while you were talking there, George. And I was really interested thinking, you know, how we have the customer agent or sorry. Well, we have customer agent, obviously, but we also have, like, Breeze workflow actions. Right? Yep.

Chad Hohn:

And one of those Breeze workflow actions, you could just, like, I think possibly on a conversation, started event because you can like start conversation based workflows, possibly get the data from the first email that comes in, you know, and try and, like, parse out what their inquiry is really about with that. But also the customer agent now can reply to emails, and I don't I haven't messed with the configuration of it yet. But I'm wondering if there would be a helpful way for it to, like, have a special block that is specifically related to the knowledge base articles relevant to their inquiry if it can find any. Right? Yeah.

Chad Hohn:

Interesting. So, I mean, there's a couple of things, like, maybe you could try and actually extract that information out, right, and try and give them dynamic responses based on what they're talking to you about.

Liz Moorehead:

I also think there's a good opportunity just to be this nerd for a second. There's an opportunity to just directly link them in your marketing and sales enablement content, particularly if you're doing more bottom of the funnel stuff. You know, like, if you're writing about what are your first ninety days like with our company? Mhmm. You know, these are the most common questions we get.

Liz Moorehead:

You can then link to those articles to show this is how we support you throughout that process. I mean, whenever you think about any piece of content that you're creating, I mean, obviously, if it's more educational, top of the funnel, not really dealing with the product or service, like let's not go too crazy. We don't need a kitchen sink. But if you're really starting to think about ways in which you show early on and often how much support and care is a part of the product or service that you sell, the better off you're going to be. Tells that story earlier.

Liz Moorehead:

It makes people feel safer and more secure earlier. They feel more confident in a potential purchase that they might be making with you. You know, I've worked at a company where we had knowledge based articles, and they would often be included when we were talking with prospects before they had signed on the bottom line. Like, this is actually a question we get a lot and obviously it's going to depend on your x y z a b c circumstances, but these are the some of the ways in which we can help you. So there are ways in which to organically include this content in the comp marketing and sales conversations you're having.

Liz Moorehead:

You know, again context matters because if you're not striking it at that right balance of it is relevant, the intent matters, it's just gonna look like you're giving a knowledge pile on. But just think about the ways in which you could start telling that story earlier in a way that is relevant, intentional, and purposeful in the moment that you're talking. So I know we only have a few minutes left here, but I want to throw this out there. I know you guys have already started talking about some interesting ways and outside of the box ideas in terms of how knowledge based content could be used. But have we seen any other creative or advanced ways teams are using knowledge base to go beyond the basics?

Max Cohen:

I mean, it the other thing to remember is that, like, we're we're back when knowledge base first came out, I think the biggest limiting factor was that you could only have one knowledge base. Right? You couldn't have multiple ones. So, like, one, keep in mind, you could have multiple knowledge bases. Right?

Max Cohen:

So, like, whether that's having different ones for different product lines that you have or if it makes sense. Right? If you're doing multi brand stuff in HubSpot, it's kind of an obviously up there. But the other thing too is, like, you can put those knowledge bases on different domains. Right?

Max Cohen:

You can put them behind like SSO. Right? You can use them for like internal company stuff. They don't have to be public facing. Right?

Max Cohen:

So, you know, I've seen some companies kind of like build their like company intranet off of like, knowledge bases and just having, you know, all that stuff be gated membership content that can only be seen by folks who are on a list of contacts that have the internal company as their email address. Right? So, you know, think outside of the box. It's a lot more flexible than it used to be, you know, and it doesn't have to just be for your customers. Like your employees to an extent need a knowledge base too as well.

Max Cohen:

Right? So just keep that in mind.

George B. Thomas:

So so there's a couple of things I'll throw out here Because again, I don't know how in the weeds with the service hub or knowledge base in general, people who might be listening. Like you might just be one of those guys or gals that just has Marketing Hub or just has Sales Hub or just has Marketing and Sales Hub. So I think when I get this question, Liz, from you, my brain goes to like, one, did you know that like there's a new knowledge base? And by the way, if you have the old knowledge base, you could go see if you can migrate to the new knowledge base because you're going to be able to do some customization because there's now customization tools in the knowledge base. Cause that was like a big issue of like, you can't make it like super dope, right?

Chad Hohn:

It was like old HubSpot forms. Everyone looked the same about, just about, right? Outside of a couple colors.

George B. Thomas:

Yep, yep, exactly. Here's the other thing too, is like, you need to think about like private con And again, kind of where Max was headed or what Max was talking about, like a cousin sister brother of this is like the idea of private content. And like, so there can be like the SEO valued kind of what we've been overarchingly talking about if somebody can Google it. But like imagine there could be a deeper level private content knowledge based stuff happening as well. But here's the thing, if we don't talk about like how HubSpot can actually write knowledge articles for you now based on finding the gaps.

George B. Thomas:

Like if you don't have that turned on or in your brain using that, I think that's a definite bonus that we could think about. Yeah, that's where my brain goes.

Chad Hohn:

I I once, saw a team using they were using there was actually, like, the website widget inside of their SaaS product to tell page usage inside of their because their their SaaS product, even on the mobile app, was also just an embedded website, essentially. So you embed a website in the native mobile app for, like, app stores and stuff. They were using that widget to track page usage to almost do kind of like an Amplitude or Pendo product usage sort of analytics to be able to tell what help articles were going to be most relevant along with inquiries that they were getting. This was like years ago before we had any, you know, like chat widget SDK or other types of things that we would, you know, now have in the HubSpot docs and in the HubSpot tools. But, I think that was, like, a really interesting way that they were leveraging native HubSpot stuff to build up the correct, most high value content for their users by seeing what their what pages their people are on and, what like, also, were able to track some error logging to it as well, like in in some some capacity, drop some notes on the contact records.

Chad Hohn:

The these were, like, error issues that we were able to see. The support reps understood this person's had error logs recently, if that makes sense. Right? Yeah. Oh, nice.

Chad Hohn:

When they go to their ticket, it's real really helpful. Oh, This person has like 10 errors in the last twenty four hours.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. I love that. Oh, before, because I know we're running out of time, I have to say one thing. We could have gotten through this entire episode, And we've used the word knowledge based articles, which my worry is that people are stuck in a mindset of it's only textual information. So one other thing that I wish Hub Spot did more of, and I hope you as a listener will do more of is embedding rich media, video, interactive modules, GIFs.

George B. Thomas:

Uh-oh. I just sparked something in Max brain. Hang on. Gotta

Max Cohen:

be very excited.

George B. Thomas:

Yeah. Like, I I wanna see more like, your boy needs you to show me. Like, I think that's why I loved creating tutorials so much is because that's my love language is just show me how to do the thing. Like, don't necessarily want to read if I can watch. And so make sure that you're kind of leaning into that.

George B. Thomas:

How do we create a media experience? By the way, I'm also leaning into this because in the future, I totally want to do an episode where we unpack the new video platform inside of I've mentioned that just in passing to a couple clients and also folks that I've been on calls with. And as soon as I say video platform in HubSpot, I get, oh. So a, you have a video platform in HubSpot that you could be editing and then using these videos in your knowledge articles. Max, you sat up real quick when I said that.

Max Cohen:

I mean, I I did a cool thing. I we we have this, like, new feature in Event Happily that we've been kind of, like, building out, and it involves, you know, a field that without getting too much detail, you have to create this, like, JSON string and put it into a field, and it does this, like, really cool stuff. Right?

George B. Thomas:

Hashtag

Max Cohen:

money. But no one likes to write JSON strings, including me. Right? They're long and hard to write. Know, like I kinda like

George B. Thomas:

Chad does. Chad actually probably does like the right JSON strings.

Max Cohen:

Yeah. Go ahead. Into it. So I went on ChatGPT, and I had ChatGPT build me a generator that would automatically generate these JSON strings based on selections I'd make in a form and some data that would put into it. And then I took that, and I told ChatGPT to give me the code in an embeddable format.

Max Cohen:

And then I went on to the knowledge base where I wrote an article that explained this field, and then I embedded the tool to generate the JSON thing from ChatGPT right into the knowledge base article. So, like, literally, it explains how the property works, and then it goes, you don't wanna write JSON. We have a little tool for you. Boom. It's like, dude, I'm not a coder, but I was able to, like, build that, which one, AI is sick.

Max Cohen:

Yeah. I'm starting to understand it. I get it. Right? Boom.

Max Cohen:

But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's converting. Dagger.

Max Cohen:

Chill up. Chill up.

George B. Thomas:

Chill up. Oh my god.

Max Cohen:

But it's the the point there is, like, you can embed content into knowledge based articles. Right? So, like, you're not just limited to text or video or pictures. There's other stuff that you can do there. And especially with tools like ChatGPT, right, the things that you can create and embed, they could be tools as well.

Max Cohen:

Yeah. It doesn't have to just be what you might be used to being able to, like, slap onto a WYSIWYG editor website page.

George B. Thomas:

Right? Max, keep that I love you.

Max Cohen:

I love you too.

George B. Thomas:

It's a whole new world. Max, so there's two bought

Max Cohen:

a PS five, so I'm pretty stoked about that. George, you know, my favorite part about that thing was you basically answered question I always ask you at the

Liz Moorehead:

end of every episode. What's one thing you want somebody

Max Cohen:

to take away from this? And I think that was probably one

Liz Moorehead:

of the most important things. You

Max Cohen:

know? Mhmm.

Liz Moorehead:

Think about the different types of media. Think about the different ways to tell the story of helpfulness. Yeah. So you gotta help all those humans out there.

George B. Thomas:

At the end of the day, it comes down to this. Help the humans.

Liz Moorehead:

Oh, yeah.

George B. Thomas:

Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes.

George B. Thomas:

FYI, if you're part of the league of heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag hashtag hub heroes podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and of course, be looking for a way to be someone's hero.

Creators and Guests

Devyn Bellamy
Host
Devyn Bellamy
Devyn Bellamy works at HubSpot. He works in the partner enablement department. He helps HubSpot partners and HubSpot solutions partners grow better with HubSpot. Before that Devyn was in the partner program himself, and he's done Hubspot onboardings, Inbound strategy, and built out who knows how many HubSpot, CMS websites. A fun fact about Devyn Bellamy is that he used to teach Kung Fu.
George B. Thomas
Host
George B. Thomas
George B. Thomas is the HubSpot Helper and owner at George B. Thomas, LLC and has been doing inbound and HubSpot since 2012. He's been training, doing onboarding, and implementing HubSpot, for over 10 years. George's office, mic, and on any given day, his clothing is orange. George is also a certified HubSpot trainer, Onboarding specialist, and student of business strategies. To say that George loves HubSpot and the people that use HubSpot is probably a massive understatement. A fun fact about George B. Thomas is that he loves peanut butter and pickle sandwiches.
Liz Murphy
Host
Liz Murphy
Liz Murphy is a business content strategist and brand messaging therapist for growth-oriented, purpose-driven companies, organizations, and industry visionaries. With close to a decade of experience across a wide range of industries – healthcare, government contracting, ad tech, RevOps, insurance, enterprise technology solutions, and others – Liz is who leaders call to address nuanced challenges in brand messaging, brand voice, content strategy, content operations, and brand storytelling that sells.
Max Cohen
Host
Max Cohen
Max Cohen is currently a Senior Solutions Engineer at HubSpot. Max has been working at HubSpot for around six and a half-ish years. While working at HubSpot Max has done customer onboarding, learning, and development as a product trainer, and now he's on the HubSpot sales team. Max loves having awesome conversations with customers and reps about HubSpot and all its possibilities to enable company growth. Max also creates a lot of content around inbound, marketing, sales, HubSpot, and other nerdy topics on TikTok. A fun fact about Max Cohen is that outside of HubSpot and inbound and beyond being a dad of two wonderful daughters he has played and coached competitive paintball since he was 15 years old.
HubSpot Service Hub Knowledge Base: Dos, Don'ts, + Strategic Power-Ups
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