4 Tips for Knowledge Base Content

Just bookmark it, is the new just-write-it-down. But we do both. We use Post-its, handwritten to-do lists, scribbled notes, and many such things. Digital bookmarks and dozens of browser open tabs. Anyone who tries to get any personal information organized and accessible at the moment knows that it can be challenging and unproductive.

Product knowledge base provides customers with the information they need in a less challenging way. It is not as complicated as you think. You can create, curate, and share effective knowledge base articles. You can easily do it if you have the right guidance and tools like a knowledge management portal.

Best practices for knowledge base articles:

By providing a knowledge base to your customers, you are enabling them to find quick solutions and reduce inefficient call center performance. Knowledge base requires proper planning and design actually to be able to help. Otherwise, it will not serve your agents or customers and create chaos, not to mention your customers will leave with even more problems than they came with.

We all want to provide our customers with informative, engaging, and clear content; these best practices can work wonders.

• Create level-based content:

Does your knowledge management portal provide customers everything they need? Think from the perspective of all kinds of users, from beginners to experts. Yes, even experts have something to learn from the knowledgebase. Start from how-tos and step specific instructions for beginners and go from there.

Experienced users ignore those to get the information they need. If one article does not work for both user types, you can also split the information according to the topic/problem into different articles and then link all of them to the original one. This way you are creating a series that takes the user through a journey of the product or service.

• Anchor links:

Putting links inside articles in your enterprise knowledge portal is a great way to allude to something that you might not want to fully explain in the article but is necessary. Use relevant keywords for the links instead of saying ‘click here’. The user should be able to know why there is a link there and what it leads to before they click on it. These links are useful in lengthy articles so people can click on them and jump to the exact information.

• Create simple content:

BY 2025, 3/4 number of people are expected to come online via their smartphone. Take a look at the style and UI/UX of your article and content and the knowledge management portal as a whole. Make sure it is smart phone friendly. Look at it from a formatting POV, big blocks of text in small paragraphs, bullets, numbered lists and callouts, CTAs. These things will make your content more approachable.

Short articles are a good choice for knowledge base articles. People need these articles to answer questions in the moment rather than spend time reading long forms. Keep the language simple and approachable. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes to choose topics based on pain points. Two good sources of titles are recent support tickets and customer search terms.

Finally, images, GIFs, and explanation videos are strong ways to reinforce your support articles. They also help you provide your audience with pauses between paragraphs and an excellent way to engage them.

• Structure the articles properly:

Treat each article like a mini onboarding process. For example: start by using simple words to describe a problem, and then use an example to show customers how to solve it. Solution articles are to help, even though it might be tempting to use them to sell, keep the focus on the instructions and the features that each article is about.

Create content that adapts to the customer’s workflow. Take them on a journey from one point to the other based on the natural flow of your product. Give people easy solutions first as often they work the best. Keep things moving, and don’t give alternative solutions as that can confuse them. Place related content with each article or video so the user can quickly get to those.

Conclusion:

Technology has made companies more accessible to customers, and now they are used to getting all the answers immediately. It has also helped companies scale much faster. With fierce competition in products, customer happiness has become a factor in measuring a company’s success. And self-service via portals helps with that a great deal.

Mr. Maulik Shah is the founder & CEO of CRMJetty, a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions, provides ready to CMS integrate portal solutions for SuiteCRM, Sugar CRM, Salesforce, and Dynamics CRM including WordPress Customer Portal.