Good customer service is super important for any company striving for customer support greatness, but it shouldn’t be all there is to it. Sometimes, the best solution allows your customers to help themselves by giving them access to immediate knowledge without requiring personal assistance. Today, we’ll talk about knowledge bases-why you should have one, what makes one great (or not so great) and how to get started with building your own.
Why should you have a knowledge base?
An effective knowledge base allows you to stay two steps ahead of your customers’ issues.
- A knowledge base consists of an online library filled with guides, tutorials, and answers to common customer questions about a business’s products or services. It’s a self-service portal which can be easily accessed by customers and internal employees alike.
Search function
Before the full list of knowledge base articles, find the search bar and find what you are looking for
- What else to include depends entirely on your unique needs
- Make sure you have the structure and components of your knowledge base section figured out before you start writing content for it
Agree on the structure of your knowledge base articles
Create a simple knowledge base template to use for every article
- Prioritize the customer’s workflow and use cases
- Put the most important information first
- Avoid distractions
- Have information architecture guidelines to follow on every topic page
Publish your knowledge base
It should be easy to find both on your own website and through search engines.
- The more places you feature the knowledge base link, the better. You can also link to it from other forms of support (e.g., collaboration-savvy knowledge bases).
Decide on the core elements of your knowledge base
If you’re using a convenient pre-designed knowledge base foundation, most likely, it will have these elements already included.
Analyze and improve your articles
Audit the entire base on a recurring basis, aim for monthly or quarterly check-ins.
- Add new products, updates or other changes to your knowledge base articles, and delete old, irrelevant posts about features that don’t exist anymore.
Contact support option
Make sure you’ve got a “contact support” option available on the actual article or page, so your customer doesn’t have to go looking for it once they’ve realized they need personalized support
Choose your knowledge base content
Create a solid foundation for content by first creating overall topics, then plotting out individual articles within each section, and finally coming up with clear titles for each.
- When crafting the titles of your topics, remember that people tend to search using very basic terms like “how to…” or “Using…”
Save time, money, and resources with a knowledge base
A good knowledge base will save you tons of time, and make both your customers and support agents happier
- Gather your customer support team and start simple
- Figure out the basics, then get writing
- Once you have a functioning and effective knowledge base, you can build and improve on it anytime
Getting Started with Your Knowledge Base
It has to be good
- Documentation is the media-text, images, and video-that explain a product or service, the material that provides official information
- Like documentation, your knowledge base should be easily accessible
- Organized and easy to navigate
- Solve common problems
- Be up to date
- Understand your goals
Write your knowledge base articles
Assume the reader is a complete beginner
- Make it simple
- The less text, the better
- Keep explanations as simple and to-the-point as possible
- Short paragraphs
- Bullet points and lists
- Bold and italics
- Adding links
Add visuals to your content
Visual materials enrich your support content and keep users engaged
- However, with the great power of visuals comes great responsibility.
- If a customer can’t access an image or video for whatever reason, provide a back up in the form of good old text
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