Determine the goals of your knowledge base
What are you aiming to achieve or solve for by owning a knowledge base? If your goal is to deflect ticket volumes, then the focus should be on having answers to commonly asked customer questions. If you want to train customers about your product or service features, then you can concentrate on building or curating in-depth how-to articles and guides. Being clear about your knowledge base needs and goals helps you decide on the right information to add to your knowledge base and also arrange the sections cohesively.
Gather the types of information to be added
The data that you include in your knowledge base usually comes from a few contributors that know the ins and outs of the relevant topic. Reach out to different internal teams within your organization to source a variety of knowledge base content. Support agents will be aware of the common questions raised by customers and can contribute to troubleshooting articles. On Freshdesk, agents can also convert their ticket responses to solution articles, thus expanding your help desk knowledge base.
Map out the structure of your knowledge base
Once you know the information to be added to the knowledge base, you can come up with a logical arrangement of the various sections. What categories and folders should you have? What are the topics to be added under a specific folder? You can also think about the placement of the sections. Crucial sections that customers might look for frequently can be placed right at the top for easy access. Adding a search bar will also ease the search for the right information in your knowledge base.
Write the knowledge base articles
Start drafting the content for the topics you’ve identified for your knowledge pages. Keep the language simple and easy to understand. Add images, screenshots, videos, or even gifs to explain the points clearly. You can also have templates for different topic types, making it easy for contributors to write the content. Several team members can pitch in to collaborate, review, and approve the docs with the right permission and access controls set for the knowledge base. If you’re building a multilingual knowledge base, start creating drafts in the other languages you support too.
Publish the content
After the articles are drafted, reviewed, and approved, ensure that you’ve optimized your article for search engines to gain maximum visibility for your knowledge base articles. A good knowledge base software has SEO capabilities like adding meta information or relevant tags to the documents. You can then go ahead and publish the content in your knowledge base.
Analyze and update your knowledge base
Managing and maintaining your knowledge base is as essential as creating or adding content. Customers should find your guides and articles helpful to take full advantage of a self-serve model. Track knowledge base metrics like article views and visitor feedback on individual pages to know if customers are finding your content useful. You can modify the content or even remove certain articles from your knowledge base based on your analysis.