How to Create a Knowledge Base: Building Self-Service for Customer Support | Groove Blog

An overwhelming 91% of customers said they would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs. Beyond that, 55% of consumers fall in love with a brand when that brand offers “easy access to information and support.” Reduce customer effort and you’ll improve customer loyalty.

How many steps does the customer have to take to contact you and get answers to their questions? Something that could have taken 10 seconds has now turned into 10 minutes of their time and yours. Why would you not make that process easier?

Your customers will be empowered to find their own solutions, feel accomplished, and appreciate your effort to make things as easy as possible.

A good knowledge base will also give a boost to your customer support agents by:

• Helping them be more productive: Shifting basic support queries over to the knowledge base frees up your support staff for the really important issues.
• Making them happier: Employees are happier when they’re able to spend more time on meaningful interactions. (For example, preempting a problem rather than resolving it after it has already negatively affected the customer.)

Your knowledge base tool must do more than just exist. It has to be good. The first thing to note is that a knowledge base is, at its core, documentation.

Documentation is the media—text, images, and video—that explain a product or service, the material that provides official information.

• Be easily accessible
• Be organized and easy to navigate
• Solve common problems
• Save a customer time
• Be up to date

• Decide on the core elements of your knowledge base
• Choose your knowledge base content
• Agree on the structure of your knowledge base articles 
• Write your knowledge base articles
• Add visuals to your content
• Publish your knowledge base
• Analyze and improve your articles 

1. Having a FAQ section: If a customer has a basic question about your product or service, the first place they generally look is the FAQ section.
2. Ensuring that the contact support option is always available.
3. Search function: Just like Google’s search bar, you’ll usually see this before the full list of knowledge base articles.

Being with these two topics, no time-consuming customer or behaviour research is needed.

• Basics: Every single question a complete stranger would have about your company or service.
• Getting started: The basic onboarding and setup process a customer goes through when starting to use your service/product, broken down into steps.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when it comes to knowledge bases specifically.

First, focus on scaling the structure of your help content. Create a simple knowledge base template to use for every article.

Second, prioritize the customer’s workflow and use cases. Most of your knowledge base articles probably include a set process the user needs to follow. Make it as smooth as possible.

• Problem or topic: Describe the task on hand or the customer issue.
• Step by step process: Describe the process of completing the task or solving the issue in detailed, but simple, steps.
• Result: What should happen after the steps have been completed by the customer?
• Related resources: Similar articles, questions, or topics

• Put the most important information first. If there’s something the user absolutely needs to know before they get into the process of taking action.
• Chronological order. Make sure the order of each step makes sense and doesn’t interfere chronologically with any other steps.
• If there’s no chronological order or dependencies between tasks, make the easiest ones the first ones. 
• Avoid distractions. Structure the instructions in a way that keeps them focused on the tasks on hand and won’t interrupt their workflow.

• When writing the actual text for your articles, mind your language first and foremost to make your knowledge base as effective as possible. Assume the reader is a complete beginner.
• Don’t use any advanced terminologies or industry-related jargon, even if it makes sense to you. This might be the first time the reader has seen any of this information. Make it simple.
• When it comes to actually formatting your text, simplicity is key. Focus on making your communication as scannable as possible.

The less text, the better: Customer support isn’t the place to practice your novel writing skills. 

Short paragraphs: Nobody has the time or attention span to pick out important information from a wall of text.

Bullet points and lists: You’ll make everyone’s life easier by structuring information in a way that’s easy to read and follow.

Bold and italics: Use them to give more dimension to your text. Do not underline words unless they contain a link.

Adding links: Point out resources that go more in-depth so you don’t have to explain everything in one article. 

Visual materials enrich your support content and keep users engaged.

The most obvious type of visuals to use in your knowledge base are screenshots of new products to show how things work. But you can also play around with instructional videos, GIFs, or whatever else you feel would add a little something extra to your content.

Make your knowledge base easy to find both on your own website and through popular search engines. 

Feel free to link to your knowledge base from other forms of support, too. Don’t be afraid to rub the fact that you have a knowledge base into people’s faces. How else are your customers going to find it? 

The more places you feature your knowledge base link, the better.

The success of your knowledge base (or lack of success) should be constantly measured to see where to improve.

When looking at your knowledge base performance, focus on impact. Examples of what to track include:

• Increase in customer satisfaction 
• Decreased volume of tickets

Examine how your customers are using your company’s knowledge base. What parts are customers engaging with most? What are they searching for?

A good knowledge base is never complete. Don’t be that company with an outdated, useless portal. 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.

• A good knowledge base will save you tons of time, and make both your customers and support agents happier. It takes time up front, but it’s worth it.
• 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.