Ultimate Guide on Knowledge Base Best Practices and Tips
Deliver exceptional service and form deeper connections with your customers by picking up the knowledge base best practices.
Did you know that, “More than 69% of consumers prefer to solve issues on their own, and 63% almost always start with a search through a company’s online resources before ever turning to a support rep?”
In today’s scenario, a business website is not just a platform to share information about your brand but to offer self-service opportunities to engage the customer on their terms.
A knowledge base best practices has become the most efficient way to offer self-service, it has almost replaced human support by allowing businesses to harness data in an organized and self-help pattern. It has become a vital resource, where information can be retrieved by submitting a query.
Let us understand what knowledge base management is and why businesses need to build one.
Table of Content
- 1 What is Knowledge Base Management?
- 2 10 Types of Data Included in the Knowledge Base
- 3 Key Benefits of Having A Self-Help Portal
- 4 9 Knowledge Base Best Practices for Effective Customer Support
- 5 Tips and Techniques for Effective Knowledge Base Management
- 6 Start Creating Beautiful Articles with Omni24’s Knowledge Base Software
- 7 FAQs about Knowledge Base Best Practices & Tips
What is Knowledge Base Management?
Knowledge base management refers to the process of creating and managing information within an organization’s knowledge base. It acts as a centralized repository of knowledge, consisting of documents, articles, manuals, FAQs, and other resources that are easily accessible to employees as well as customers.
Key elements of a knowledge base are:
- Content: Comprehensive collection of information, including articles, guides, FAQs, and troubleshooting resources, covering various topics relevant to users.
- Organization and structure: Clear categorization and navigation to facilitate easy access and retrieval of information.
- Search functionality: Robust search capabilities allowing users to quickly find relevant content using keywords and filters.
- Updates and maintenance: Regularly maintaining content to ensure accuracy, relevance, and usability over time.
10 Types of Data Included in the Knowledge Base
A knowledge base is a vital self-serve customer service library that includes information about a product, service, or topic that helps customers find answers so they can solve problems on their own. It helps customers to retrieve data on a wide range of topics.
Here are some types of data provided in the self-help portal.
1. Frequently asked questions (FAQs): FAQs answer common queries that users may have about a product or service. By including FAQs, businesses can reduce customer service requests and provide easy access to information.
2. Troubleshooting guides: These are step-by-step instructions to address common issues or problems. They help in resolving technical difficulties or navigating through challenges independently, saving both time and resources for businesses.
3. How-to guides and tutorials: These guides and tutorials provide detailed instructions on using various products or completing specific tasks. They empower users to learn and accomplish tasks independently, reducing the need for external support.
4. Product documentation: A comprehensive product documentation covers various aspects of the product, such as installation guides, user manuals, release notes and frequently updated information on new features or updates.
5. Policy and procedure documents: Such documents include employee handbooks, company policies, and compliance documents. Centralizing this information in a knowledge base ensures that everyone has access to the latest versions and avoids confusion
6. Case studies and success stories: The case studies provide users with insights into how others have successfully implemented a particular product/service. The success stories inspire users, offer guidance, and illustrate the potential benefits.
7. Tips and best practices: Knowledge bases are a valuable resource for sharing tips, tricks, and best practices related to technologies, or processes. Businesses can use this section to provide guidance and recommendations for optimizing product usage or achieving better outcomes.
8. Training materials and webinars: Some knowledge bases include training materials, such as recorded webinars, workshops, or presentations. These resources offer users the opportunity to further enhance their skills and knowledge by delving deeper into specific topics or subjects.
9. Research papers and articles: In certain industries, knowledge bases may include research papers, articles, or academic publications. These resources provide in-depth analysis, studies, and expert opinions on various subjects, providing users with a valuable source of reference.
10. Glossaries and terminology: Knowledge bases often incorporate glossaries or terminology sections to define and explain industry-specific terms. It helps users unfamiliar with certain jargon to understand the content better and ensures consistency in communication.
Key Benefits of Having A Self-Help Portal
Customer service departments always focus on improving the customer experience. When users have a query, they contact the support team for a solution, which is reactive and time-consuming.
Let’s go over some key benefits of having a self-service portal.
- Easy access to information: A knowledge base provides immediate access to relevant information, eliminating the need to contact customer support. Users can find the answers they need within seconds, saving valuable time and effort.
- Increases employee productivity: With quick access to information, employees can work more productively. They do not need to spend time searching for information, allowing them to focus on their tasks and goals.
- Provides accurate information: A knowledge base ensures that all information provided is accurate and consistent. By centralizing information in a single location, businesses can easily update content and maintain its accuracy, avoiding confusion.
- Facilitates 24×7 customer support: Businesses can offer round-the-clock support with a knowledge base. As it is available online, customers can access the information they need at any time, regardless of geographical location or time zone.
- Helps in cost optimization: A knowledge base reduces the need for extensive customer support, resulting in saving costs. By enabling customers to find answers independently, companies can allocate resources more efficiently.
9 Knowledge Base Best Practices for Effective Customer Support
Planning the structure of the knowledge base is very important. Following the knowledge base best practices and tips can help in the effective designing of a self-help portal.
We have listed some best practices for building, structuring, and organizing an efficient knowledge base.
1. Structure Your Self-Service Portal
The essence of a well-designed content experience lies in its structure. The better a user can navigate and sense the logic of your knowledge base management, the better experience they will have with your brand.
The structure defines the overall architecture of your knowledge base, like
- How well the topics are segmented
- How the articles have been classified, and how each aspect of your product or service is covered in these articles?
- How easily can your customers navigate from one article to another?
Here are some actionable tips for structuring your knowledge base:
- Categorize articles – Choose broad top-level categories. You can survey your customers and propose categories to them. Classify articles based on the most searched topics and create proper subcategories.
- Apply appropriate tags – Figure out tags that your readers would use to search for information. Create tags that can be associated with keywords, making it easier to search the articles.
- Create workflow articles – You can tailor your knowledge base experience by defining a workflow for the articles. Direct your customers in the right way by applying rules for workflow articles. Set conditions and choose the action you like to get triggered once the conditions are fulfilled.
2. Exercise Knowledge Base Design Best Practices
Your knowledge base is not visually appealing despite engaging content- you will still miss out on your objective.
The first thing the audience observes about your knowledge base page is its readability.
Some recommended knowledge base tips are:
- Make your knowledge base design simple and clean. Make the best use of white space.
- Make your content as crisp as possible. Apply short titles that contain search-oriented keywords.
- Give clear directions to your audience by creating subtitles and bullet points. Allow the audience to jump through articles and get information on relevant topics easily.
3. Make Search Bar Prominent
On a content-heavy section like the knowledge base, the search box is the most frequently used element.
Whenever your audience or user encounters a complex issue, they will immediately look for a search box. It is the reason you should focus on building an efficient search box.
Here are some knowledge base best practices recommended:
- Make your search bar visible: The search bar decides your customer journey ahead. Offset a different color, apply a different text, and place it centrally on the page to easily invite your audience to engage with your knowledge base.
- Use auto-complete intelligence: Autocomplete can make your search bar smarter. To make the features effective, build relevant suggestions, display them quickly, correct typo mistakes and make use of an alias to cover a large number of keywords.
4. Make Content Interactive with Videos & Images
People get a better understanding of your knowledge base when the elements of images and videos are used in the right way.
Follow the actionable knowledge base tips for using the images and videos rightly:
- Create onboarding videos: Make “how to” videos to give instructions for completing common tasks and troubleshooting. Videos usually ease the product adoption process.
- Make the best of two worlds: Include a video at the start of the article and add the transcript of the video below to optimize the content fully.
- Using Video tutorials for internal purpose: Recording and sharing product information videos internally can provide more insight that helps a business develop their knowledge base.
5. Give Your Articles Appropriate Headline
Keep your article title as simple as possible. Add words that include user-oriented phrases.
For example, rather than using a title like “Shopify integration with our product”, you can use a simpler title like “How to connect your Shopify store?”.
Here are some actionable tips suggested:
- Add keywords like “How to”, “Adding” and “Using”. These keywords quickly convey the purpose of the article. Keep track of the searches with a search bar log and use that as information to create headlines.
- Keep the article title as short as possible. Many experts even suggest that your article titles should not exceed more than 4 to 5 words.
6. Optimize Your Knowledge Base with SEO
Once you optimize your knowledge base content, you structure the information in alignment with the Google algorithms, which enables your users to quickly find the solution and eventually help you reach new audiences across the web.
One of the tried and tested tactics to SEO your knowledge base is to make an entry in the Google knowledge graph.
When you search for a particular content like “How to add a live chat option with my website?” you will find a section of the Google result that will include related questions to the topic. Adding such questions to your knowledge base will give you an edge.
Here are some knowledge base best practices:
- Make use of keywords: Including industry-specific and user-oriented phrases in your knowledge base to help you capacitate the search engine.
- Google prefers bullet points: Ensure to make use of bullet points and numeric values to showcase complex steps.
- Create a URL structure: Interlink your articles accordingly to make it easier for search engines to crawl your knowledge base. Add relevant anchor text to the URL title and create it in a way that is appropriate to its function, like www.mycompany.com/support/setup-tutorial .
7. Measure Your Knowledge Base Analytics
The purpose of creating a knowledge base is to reduce the number of support calls and provide a satisfactory first-hand resolution to customer requests.
Therefore it is important for businesses to periodically check on the performance of their knowledge base, to understand the gaps and improve on that.
Here are a few basic analytics to get started
- Number of views per knowledge article vs customer request submission: A user instead of getting his answer from your knowledge center is seeking support assistance, you should analyze the content of that topic and improve it.
- Customer feedback: Track user analytics, like the number of article views/ clicks, or ask your employees to rate the helpfulness of an article/section. One of the ways to get feedback is to embed a simple icon of “thumbs up and down” within the help article.
- Successful search item vs failed search terms: If there are queries that your search bar is not able to address, measuring such instances and creating topics for the same will help in reducing the volume of customer requests.
8. Collaborate with Teams to Create Useful Content
Delivering a consistent, valuable and customer focused content is a collaborative process.
Businesses need to have the experts involved to curate engaging content that covers all the aspects of your product and services.
Some actionable tips to follow:
- Develop a common platform for teams to interact, when your team can share their views on common topics, you can gather a list of valuable information about the topic.
- Encourage knowledge sharing and collaboration. Make internal knowledge sharing an easy and efficient process.
- Involve the sales & support team to share their view, as they interact with your customers directly and can help you identify topics which you have taken for granted.
9. Keep Your Internal Knowledge Base Content Private
There are instances when you don’t want to share specific content online with your customers but want to share with your team members – in that case you can keep them private, so that all your support content stays in one place.
Here are the knowledge base best practice that are recommended:
- Before creating an internal knowledge base, decide – What information you would like to cover in the articles? How you will structure them and which team member has access to which document.
- Articulate & categorize documents according to workflows, processes, training curve and common issues faced by employees everyday.
- Set processes to collect feedback from the employees. Enable them to share their views on a subject.
- Include video tutorials and presentations that help them get a better understanding of the practical application of your content.
10. Add a Live Chat Option to Your Knowledge Base
Integrating a live chat link with your knowledge base enables your agents to quickly access help assistance articles in the sidebar and offer immediate support on complex matters. The users don’t need to switch between the tabs to have an interaction with your agents, they can simply leave a message on the live chat window and can expect quick.
You can follow the actionable knowledge base tips mentioned below:
- Add an “Add to Reply” button within the articles or as a sidebar to invite users/audiences to connect with your support agent and ask for help.
- Add AI elements to the live chat window, auto-suggest, and auto-respond to common inquiries while being offline.
- Collect your knowledge base live chat messages and use it to create new content.
- Send URLs of knowledge base articles straight to visitors as messages.
- Copy any sentences or images from the article and share them with the users.
Tips and Techniques for Effective Knowledge Base Management
A well-organized and easily accessible knowledge base can significantly improve productivity within a company.
Here are some tips and techniques for effective knowledge base management:
- Keep content up to date: Regularly review and update your knowledge base to ensure that the information remains accurate. Outdated content can lead to confusion for users. Encourage a collaborative approach by involving subject matter experts within your organization to contribute to the knowledge base.
- Define a clear structure: Defining a clear structure for your knowledge base. Categorize information based on topics, departments, or any other relevant criteria. It will ease navigation for users to find the information quickly.
- Use a consistent writing style: Consistency in writing style helps create a user-friendly knowledge base. Establish specific guidelines for authors, such as tone, language, and formatting, to ensure a consistent experience for users.
- Include multimedia elements: Text-based articles may not always be the best way to convey information. Consider incorporating multimedia elements like images, videos, and infographics to enhance understanding. Visual aids can be particularly helpful for complex topics.
- Implement a User-Friendly Search Function: Incorporate a powerful search function into your knowledge base management system. It will allow users to search for keywords, phrases, or topics, retrieving relevant information instantly.
Start Creating Beautiful Articles with Omni24’s Knowledge Base Software
Creating a knowledge base from scratch is a tiresome process. You can use tools that can help you create, publish, and manage a knowledge base for multiple products/services. They also let you collaborate on common topics and help you identify customer pain points so that you design content that reciprocates their needs. Such tools are cloud-based in nature and are much easier to maintain.
Establish a robust knowledge base management system that enables efficient information sharing and improves overall organizational knowledge management. Remember, a well-maintained knowledge base is a valuable asset that can drive productivity and customer satisfaction.
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FAQs about Knowledge Base Best Practices & Tips
1. How should I structure my knowledge base?
To ensure easy navigation and accessibility, it’s crucial to organize your knowledge base logically. Start by categorizing articles based on topics or themes that align with your products or services. Use clear headings, subheadings and a search function to make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for. Consider implementing tags or keywords to facilitate quick searching.
2. What should I include in my knowledge base articles?
Ensure that your articles are informative, detailed, and easy to understand. Begin with a concise summary or introduction, followed by step-by-step instructions or explanations. Use visuals, such as screenshots or videos, to make complex concepts more accessible. It’s also essential to keep content up to date and regularly update articles to reflect any changes in your products or services.
3. How can I encourage customers to use the knowledge base?
There are several ways to encourage customers to use your knowledge base. Firstly, make it easily accessible by integrating it into your website or app. Promote its existence through proactive messaging and provide clear instructions on how to use it. You can also incentivize customers to use the knowledge base by offering rewards or discounts for successfully finding answers to their questions.
4. How do I measure the success of my knowledge base?
Measuring the success of your knowledge base requires monitoring key metrics such as search success rate, average time spent on the knowledge base and customer satisfaction ratings. Additionally, collecting feedback from customers through surveys or comments can provide valuable insights for improvements.
5. How can I promote my knowledge base?
Promoting your knowledge base is crucial to ensure its effectiveness. Start by integrating it into your website or app by including a prominent search bar or a dedicated “Help Center” link. Use proactive methods such as chatbots to suggest relevant knowledge base articles based on user inquiries. Provide links to relevant articles in your customer support emails and social media channels. Encourage feedback from users and continuously improve your knowledge base based on their input.
6. What type of content should I include in my knowledge base?
Your knowledge base should include a range of content types to cater to different learning preferences. This can include articles, FAQs, tutorials, videos, diagrams and more. Provide step-by-step instructions, troubleshooting guides and best practices to address common issues.
