Top Tips to Create and Maintain an Effective Knowledge Base

ModSquad

A robust knowledge base is among the most effective tools in your customer support toolbox. A report from Salesforce reveals that 89% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a merchant again after a positive customer service experience. Sounds like an easy win, right?

If you’re looking to scale up your business using customer support, develop an excellent knowledge base. Provide a robust self-serve online library of support articles and tutorials, which goes a long way toward pleasing customers who need help. Follow these sure-fire tips and tricks to ensure that your customers don’t have to struggle to find answers.

Design an Easy-to-Navigate Structure

Your knowledge base must offer a high level of discoverability. Users will flee as fast as they landed on your website if they can’t find the solution to their question quickly.

With robust search functions, the answers to a specific query should be just a few clicks away. Using smart categories like “Getting Started,” “Troubleshooting,” and “Tips & Tutorials” will make the self-service experience a breeze.

Display the top articles prominently on your homepage and allow the user to search by the most popular articles.

Write Impactful Articles

Attract readers to dig deeper. Knowledge base content can be similar to educational blog articles and other non-fiction. Don’t forget to sprinkle links to as many helpful resources as you can.

This is not the place for complexity and nuance; instead, maintain optimum readability and understandability. At the end of every article, the reader should walk away with new ideas.

Other things to keep in mind when curating knowledge base articles:

Use clear and strong headlines
Give descriptive and insightful instructions
Link to relevant resources
Boost readability and the user experience
Add common FAQs in the auto-responder of the customer support ticket

With the right strategy, your text-based content will rank highly with search engines and will be discovered by potential clients browsing the web for solutions to their questions.

Use Insightful Videos and Visuals

Spice up your knowledge base content by including educational videos. A video can help customers understand more complex concepts or steps. With text-based content, users can encounter barriers related to knowledge, language, and accessibility. Videos are the perfect format to offer help with troubleshooting, account setup, and other issues that can benefit from visuals. Just remember to keep your videos short — ideally, between one and three minutes. Break them up if you need to, and keep your intros and end credits short.

Videos not only provide helpful walkthroughs, but they can also boost your SEO efforts. YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the internet, for good reason: Video is expected to account for 82% of all online traffic by next year. Posting a video tutorial is a great way to get discovered.

Consult Analytics

Don’t stop there! Delve deeper into your analytics to discover what your visitors are searching for on your website.

For example, if your company uses Google Analytics, here’s how to make it work for you: Select “Behavior,” then “Site Search,” followed by “Overview.” This is where you’ll find the common search terms visitors are using on your site. You can also click on “Absolute Change” to reveal trends in topics.

Know Your Buyer Personas

Customer information is crucial for your customer support force, so reference it when creating and maintaining the knowledge base. This information will help you enrich your content with answers to your audience’s exact needs.

Knowing your buyer personas will help you inject the right tone and style into your content, to resonate with your audience. You don’t want to sound too casual or general when your target audience consists mostly of lawyers specialized in tort laws in New York, as an example.

Laser-targeting your content to the right audience helps you comprehensively cover queries. Your customer service team can then focus on other things and let the knowledge base take care of most visitors’ queries.

Update Your Knowledge Base Proactively

Your knowledge base needs to change with your company, products, and services. A customer can become frustrated when an old link dumps them onto a 404 page.

Did you roll out new products or features? Update the articles as soon as possible. Pro tip: Just describe the core features or concept once. Then after launching new features, use hyperlinks to direct readers. That way, you don’t have to remember to update content in multiple articles.

An effective knowledge base is one with seamless navigation plus rich and updated content. If you already have too much on your plate to handle this project, leave the legwork to experts who can help your business thrive.