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Online and mobile applications are more popular than ever, and a plethora of useful tools are now available to small businesses and do-it-yourselfers. If you have a specific problem, a simple Google search will usually put you on the right track to find a solution.
Once you actually find the tool you need to solve your problems, the next step is to start using it…and that’s when new problems start to arise. Your questions start to pile up, and you need some immediate help. It’s after hours, so you can’t call for support and you don’t want to wait until morning. You stumbled upon some online forums where people are talking about issues similar to those you’re experiencing, but nothing directly from the company regarding the issue. You’re now officially frustrated, and you just started out.
This sort of a bad onboarding experience can jeopardize business relationships, preventing future paid upgrades and creating other serious repercussions like bad PR and awkward mentions on social media. What could have prevented this issue? Knowledge base articles.
Simply put, a knowledge base is a store of online information or data that is available to the public to draw on. Most companies that sell a product or service (including BoostSuite—we use Desk!) have a collection of articles in their knowledge base that answer FAQs and are meant to help users with everyday product features and functionality.
From a support perspective, knowledge base articles help you save valuable time by sharing pre-written content that users can review at their leisure. These articles can also be accessed at any time via the web.
Follow this three-step process to quickly and easily turn FAQs into valuable knowledge base articles you can use to better support your users and customers.
Obviously having an online support center where you can easily create a knowledge base and field questions and feedback via an email form is the first step in this process. I suggest creating your knowledge base and email form using a tool like Desk and add links to said email form from your product, website, social media, and email communications.
Encourage an open Q&A dialogue between your support department and everyone who comes into contact with your business—whether it’s on your website, social media outlets, or in person. Here are some more common feedback methods:
Make sure that the content submitted from each of these items goes directly to a support team member as well as someone on your marketing team. Once you’ve added as many relevant channels of communication as you need and you start getting some suggestions and feedback coming in, it’s time to move to the next step.
Alright! Now that you have valuable feedback and frequently asked questions coming in, you need to keep it all organized and review it periodically to determine what to write your next knowledge base articles about. For this I suggest creating a spreadsheet in Google Docs and then sharing it with your team using the “Share” button in the top right corner of the interface.
Start by categorizing FAQs into their own buckets, maybe something like this:
If you want to get even more granular, you can also add subcategories like “product x questions”, “service z questions,” etc. As the questions roll in, go and place a tally in a dedicated column next to the question if it’s already in there, or document the question for the first time in the appropriate bucket sheet.
There will be some questions that will get tallies quicker than others. These will be the questions that you focus your knowledge base articles on.
Use the data to drive your decisions here. Set a monthly, or even weekly, meeting where a member of the support team, the marketing team, and the product team (or just you if, if you’re a solopreneur) get together for 30 minutes to review all the questions that come in.
Look at the number of tallies each question has and sort the spreadsheet so that the most frequently asked questions are discussed and addressed immediately. Next, make a content schedule for the top 5-10 most frequently asked questions. Depending on how much internal time and effort can be dedicated to this, you can either answer one FAQ a week or more.
Now you’ll start writing the article, but don’t rush through them. Make them great. Use imagery (great for how-to’s) and proper formatting (bullets and numbered lists) so readers can easily skim and find exactly what they need. Have a colleague proofread for grammatical and procedural errors.
Once you publish your articles, make sure everyone (both users/customers and employees) is aware so you can utilize them in future support situations. This will help keep your users, your customers, AND your support team happy! You may want to consider alerting all your newsletter subscribers with a quick email and link to the new article.
Not only are knowledge base articles great for support, they’re also great for marketing! You can use how-to articles to display how your products/services solve specific issues, then use a tool like BoostSuite to properly optimize them for the search engines. Then when people search for how to solve a specific problem in the search engines, your knowledge base articles will have a higher likelihood of appearing and being viewed!
This post was originally published on the award-winning Desk.com blog.
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