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Business Requirements Document: Support Knowledge Base

Document ID: BRD-SKB-2026-05-17 Date: 2026-05-17 Owner: Director of Customer Support Status: Draft for IT and Engineering review

Executive Summary

Our support team is drowning. Ticket volume is up roughly 40% year over year and we have not added headcount to match. The CEO has asked us to "go build a real KB" so customers can self-serve and our agents can stop answering the same questions over and over. This document captures the business need at a high level. Product and technical details are deferred to IT and Engineering, who will own the build.

The goal is straightforward: stand up a knowledge base that customers and internal agents can search, that contains articles on our most common issues, and that measurably reduces ticket volume.

Business Objectives

  1. Reduce inbound support ticket volume by 25% within 6 months of launch.
  2. Achieve a ticket deflection rate of 30% (measured as KB sessions that do not result in a ticket within 24 hours).
  3. Cut average handle time by 15% by giving agents faster access to canned answers.
  4. Improve CSAT by at least 5 points (assumed downstream effect of faster answers).

Stakeholders

Role Name Responsibility
Executive Sponsor CEO Funding, strategic alignment
Business Owner Director of Customer Support Requirements, sign-off
Technical Owner VP Engineering Build and delivery
IT Lead Head of IT Platform selection, integration
Product Input Product Manager (TBD) Feature prioritization
End Users Support Agents, Customers Daily use

Scope

In Scope

  • Public-facing knowledge base accessible from our marketing site and in-app help.
  • Internal knowledge base for support agents (may be the same system with permissions).
  • Article authoring, categorization, and search.
  • Basic analytics on article views and search terms.

Out of Scope

  • Community forums.
  • Live chat or chatbot deployment (separate initiative).
  • Translation and localization (phase 2).
  • Migration of legacy wiki content (will be evaluated separately).

Functional Requirements

  • FR-001: The system shall allow authorized users to create, read, update, and delete knowledge base articles.
  • FR-002: The system shall support categorization of articles into a hierarchy of categories and subcategories.
  • FR-003: The system shall provide full-text search across all published articles.
  • FR-004: The system shall support both public (customer-facing) and private (internal-only) article visibility.
  • FR-005: The system shall be intelligent.
  • FR-006: The system shall allow users to vote articles as helpful or not helpful and leave optional feedback.
  • FR-007: The system shall maintain version history for each article and allow rollback to a prior version.
  • FR-008: The system shall support rich text formatting, images, and embedded video in articles.
  • FR-009: The system shall use AI to suggest relevant articles to customers and agents.
  • FR-010: The system shall provide a tagging mechanism for articles.
  • FR-011: The system shall integrate with our existing ticketing platform so agents can attach articles to tickets.
  • FR-012: The system shall be easy to use.

Non-Functional Requirements

  • NFR-001: The KB shall be available 99.5% of the time.
  • NFR-002: Search results shall return within 2 seconds for typical queries.
  • NFR-003: The system shall support at least 10,000 concurrent users.
  • NFR-004: The system shall be mobile-responsive.
  • NFR-005: The system shall comply with our existing SSO and access control policies.

Assumptions

  • IT and Engineering will evaluate build versus buy and recommend a platform.
  • Existing support content (scattered across Google Docs, Notion, and old tickets) is sufficient seed material.
  • Support agents will contribute articles as part of their normal workflow.
  • Customers will find and use the KB if it exists and search works.

Success Criteria

  • Deflection rate of 30% measured 6 months post-launch.
  • 25% reduction in inbound ticket volume on topics covered by the KB.
  • At least 100 published articles within 60 days of launch.
  • KB search used in at least 50% of support sessions.

Sign-off

Name Role Signature Date
CEO
Director of Customer Support
VP Engineering
Head of IT