The apps that can make your Google Drive knowledge base a success. The goal is to create documentation so good that your customers don’t need to contact your support team. Figure out the basics, then get writing. 1. Then, move on to the fun part. How else are your customers going to find it? So, how do you make the most of your resources to create a good internal knowledge base software for your employees? We’ve got you. Designing your knowledge base shouldn’t be a one-time thing—a great knowledge base requires continuous improvement over time. You could ask staff for their perspectives too. We’ve prepared a list of helpful tips and things we learned when creating our own knowledge base to make it easier for you. The quality of the service is vital. Do it. The Create a New Knowledge Base Article page will open. Keep your eye on these customer questions to identify any areas where you can improve, including which topics to add to your knowledge base. Your knowledge base is yet another reflection of your branding. Make it simple. I’ve been debating how to best go about adding a knowledge base for my plugins. Many businesses include a “Quick links” or “Popular topics” section on their knowledge base, which is essentially a product- or category-specific FAQ. Customers need online knowledge bases to find answers to questions, to learn more about your product, or to make the process of teaching someone else (like a teammate) a little easier. It’s understanding your customer’s pain and analyzing their capability of using your product. Swifttype includes a number of advantages that make it a great tool to include. The benefit of these knowledge repositories isn’t just on the customer side, though. You should either go for action words like: Or use exact phrases of the actions they’ll take, such as: Build 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. Soliciting your customer support team’s feedback on both existing and potential articles is imperative to designing a knowledge base that can grow and scale with your business. Identifying the Knowledge Base Type Your knowledge base software can be either internal or external or both. Outside of these basic necessities, what else to include in your knowledge base depends entirely on your unique needs. Groove’s easy-to-use Knowledge Base is included for free with every Groove account. A great knowledge base design should create an effortless experience for your customers to find answers to their questions. Some people will treat your knowledge base as a homepage, simply looking around to learn more about the product or service. Use correct spelling and grammar. Find out how to provide exceptional customer service using our 15-point checklist. To Create a new Wiki Library, click on Site Contents > Add an App > Wiki Library. Decide on the core elements of your knowledge base, Agree on the structure of your knowledge base articles. (No credit card required). Free Download: How to Create Perfect Knowledge Base. The most obvious type of visuals to use in your knowledge base are screenshots of new products to show how things work. Phone support? Most of your knowledge base articles probably include a set process the user needs to follow. Follow these tips to improve your knowledge management. An article about a subject should be as thorough as it can be without being obscure and … Don’t use any advanced terminologies or industry-related jargon, even if it makes sense to you. If you’re already a Groove user, we have a customizable, collaboration-savvy knowledge base ready to be published with the click of a button. In some instances, the information you need is already created and you only have to pull the necessary information together. Input for topics will come from your customers. Your self-service portal is often an important first point of contact customers have with your brand and a well-designed external knowledge base can help grow your community and build deeper connections with your customers. Use wording from your tickets You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to writing the content for your knowledge base. Deciding on which help topics to start with can seem like an overwhelming task. But that can only happen if you have a Knowledge-Base on your site. Groove’s Shared Inbox, Knowledge Base, and reporting can help you delight customers with fast, personal support at scale—without breaking the bank. SocialTables. It’s there to assist them, while allowing your customers the luxury of getting answers to their questions with no hassle. Tom Ewer wrote an amazing post on “ How to Create User-Friendly WordPress Instruction Manuals for Clients ”. Any good knowledge management solution allows company admins to restrict access to sensitive documents or information. When your customers have questions, they can easily access your knowledge base and get the answers they need without having to reach out to or wait for your support team. By Hannah Wren, Content marketing associate, Published May 12, 2020 Groove’s platform includes a reporting database specific to knowledge base metrics: A good knowledge base is never complete. For example, here at Groove, our customers want to know more about specific sections of our product. Understand your goals and the tone you want to set with your knowledge base. Sometimes customers have questions that are best posed to other customers. In other words, you need to highlight the human side of your knowledge base. When it comes to frequently asked questions, eye-level placement and easy one-click access are key to a sterling self-service experience and improving customer satisfaction when it comes to your help center. Everything we've learned (and are still learning) about growing a business. One way to achieve customer service consistency is to create a knowledge base as a single, infallible point of knowledge for customers or even for your staff. However, simply offering a standard knowledge base portal isn’t enough—the design of your help center affects your customers’ experience with your brand. Try asking your customer support team members about the questions they encounter most from customers to get a good idea … Here are a few pointers: 1. This requires your team to vet articles on a regular basis to ensure their relevance as your product and business evolves. If the vendor can meet your basic requirements and deal breakers, you can invite them to present a demo of their software. And, artificial intelligence enables your team to spot self-service trends that an individual support agent might miss. 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. A good knowledge base will save you tons of time, and make both your customers and support agents happier. CX Lead & Content Creator @Groove. A list of good knowledge base examples is helpful. Nobody likes to read (well, some of us do). Imagine this: A customer discovers your business and has some basic questions, but you don’t have a knowledge base. Melissa is a CX Lead and content creator at Groove. Go for it. There are many resources available to help you create killer product documentation for your … That’s where knowledge base comes in. Your knowledge base tool must do more than just exist. How to Create a Knowledge Base. Download Now Today, we’re going to 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. Help Upskill Your Workforce and Improve the Onboarding Process . You need to show to your customers that there is a team that cares behind your knowledge base. We suggest seeing a minimum of 3 knowledge base demonstrations. As you develop your company Knowledge Base, you most definitely will need an ability to link between different Wiki pages you create. However, if it is necessary to create articles for your knowledge base, keep in mind that you must be thorough. So plan ahead and add some subcategories if necessary, but do not exaggerate, remember to keep it simple. Of course, building a knowledge base that works for both the customers and the support engineers can be challenging. With all the information in one place, the costs can be drastically lower. Sign up for a 15-day trial today! Don’t miss out on the latest tips, tools, and tactics at the forefront of customer support. Also, you don´t have to create hierarchical nodes if you don´t think that’s fitting. Typically, contributors who are well versed in the relevant subjects add to and expand the knowledge base. Think about common terms people would search for when looking up your product or even your market. Firstly, let’s imagine that knowledge you want to share with end users are in Category A, Category B and Category C. All pages related to different category should under the proper category, right? The more places you feature your knowledge base link, the better. Good knowledge bases follow somewhat of a formula. But, most prefer to fix their own problems without getting others involved. The more prominent your search bar, the easier it is for customers to get their answers and get out—and that’s what we call a low-effort experience. Here’s the basic process of building a knowledge base: Seems like a big bite? A knowledge base ensures that even the neediest of people can find answers quickly, no matter what kind of method they use. The reason for this is that there are many different knowledge bases on the market, all with varying levels of capabilities and approaches to knowledge management. Preparing a knowledge base may seem like a daunting task that involves a lot of planning and hard work. Waiting for customers to come to you is a dangerous strategy. This might be the first time the reader has seen any of this information. A simple knowledge base design makes for easy navigation and quick answer finding—just what self-sufficient customers want. What’s important is that you’ve got the structure and components of your knowledge base section figured out before you start writing content for it. How many steps does the customer have to take to contact you and get answers to their questions? Last updated November 11, 2020. Your knowledge base should not be cluttered with articles that answer one or two customer queries each year, but neither should it be so basic that it’s rarely helpful at all. In today’s connected world, people expect and demand easy access to accurate information. Your guide to customer-centric digital transformation. It has to be good. Explore this eBook to learn how companies of all types, large and small, have flourished after making the switch from Salesforce to Zendesk. However, with the great power of visuals comes great responsibility. The first step is to choose topics that your customers will find useful. Collect, or create, copies of the information necessary to build your knowledge base. If there are various people writing content, it’ll be consistent throughout the knowledge base. Here is a four step guide to help you kickstart the creation of your knowledge base. The manager will use knowledge ratings or other metrics within the knowledge base to identify items that are not being used to great effect. Creating a knowledge base for your business is a win-win customer service strategy. I assume you might want all the Wiki pages to have the same look and feel, so why don’t we create a basic page we will reuse for our Knowledge Base Wiki in SharePoint Online. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about customer support? Having information architecture guidelines to follow on every topic page helps ensures consistency. The best knowledge bases are simple, intuitive, and agile. A knowledge base directly meets this need by providing a fully searchable database of information that customers can explore quickly and conveniently. If your knowledge base design is lackluster, it could make for a poor impression. Keep that in mind when thinking about your knowledge base. Also with the online web access (OWA) for Word, PPT, etc., creating a standard library with files is the way to go - easier for users to create and manage content versus the complicated management of a wiki library. Why would you not make that process easier? Short titles that contain main keywords can help customers find the right knowledge base article with the answers they need more quickly. Users may browse through individual articles to learn more about your product, but when they need help they'll want it fast—and that's when search is crucial. If there’s no chronological order or dependencies between tasks. If you’ve landed on this post, you’re probably convinced of the fact that you need a knowledge base to help support your customers. You’re not writing a blog post on wordpress or a novel. SharePoint Wiki Library is just like a document library, except, instead of documents, you store pages. On the technical side, it’s easy to create it with knowledge base software, but other challenges remain. Before you can begin developing you knowledge base, you need to determine what it will be about. Another surefir… The self-service analytics provided by your knowledge base software empowers your support team to take a data-driven approach to content upkeep and design by giving them insights into the popularity, effectiveness, and pain points of content. To make the whole thing more useful and create a better experience for your customers, the knowledge base that houses your documentation cannot do without an excellent search engine feature built-in. G Suite makes it really easy to set view, comment, and edit permissions for each document. Something that could have taken 10 seconds has now turned into 10 minutes of their time and yours. Writing knowledge base articles is inherent to almost every customer support team. Audit the entire base on a recurring basis, aim for monthly or quarterly check-ins. For example, some people hate video tutorials. That’s why it’s important to prioritize what topics you address in your knowledge base in order to make … Read on to see how other companies are doing it, and what you can learn from them. What parts are customers engaging with most? Note: Is your business growing? Any business set for growth can’t rule out the use of knowledge base software. Those insights can help you understand the content gaps between your help center articles and customers’ needs to determine what to write next and where to improve existing knowledge. Beyond the two premium knowledge base solutions that we featured above, there are also free knowledge base plugins that you can use to create a knowledge base in WordPress. When it comes to bringing new staff into your organisation, you need the resources to help them understand how you operate and what they need to know. To create a new article, right-click and open this link in a new tab. You’ll save time and money on high-volume, simple questions, and make your customers and team members happier and more productive. It must answer common questions efficiently to save customers time and confusion. Many visuals are at the mercy of technology and formatting. We’ve talked about the importance of structure and language in previous articles, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind when it comes to knowledge bases specifically. Here are our <> simple tips for creating a knowledge base: 1. A great knowledge base design should include a powerful search system. Sorry something went wrong, try again later? Because while it’s fine to get creative with your marketing pages, quality knowledge bases should be formulaic. All without breaking the bank. Let’s go through all these steps in depth and talk about some best practices to keep in mind. While we’re all about empowering customers to help themselves, you don’t want to shy away from them either. Increasingly, customers expect to be able to self-serve wherever and whenever they want, whether they’re at home by their computer or on the go using their smartphone. Content management vs. knowledge management, Please also send me occasional emails about Zendesk products and services. So, now that you know about the common types of knowledge bases, the next step is to decide which one to create. Create a Knowledge Base for Free. Building a knowledge base isn’t easy, but luckily there are examples all around the internet that you can take inspiration from. Then it’s just up to you to provide the content. But others are looking for a very specific thing. Step 3: Create a page template. 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