This article originally appeared on the Desk.com blog.

So, you’re using Desk for email, but you keep getting some of the same questions over and over again. You’ve setup some Macros for canned responses, but how do you educate your customers and deflect these questions?  Create a customer-facing knowledge base! But that brings up another question: where do you start?  Desk makes it easy to create and scale a knowledge base for your customers, and here are some best practices on how to get it up and running:

Create a Documentation Style Guide for Your Team

Work with marketing to create a standard style-guide for common word formatting, like Company Name, Internet, and customers/users/clients.

Your Marketing and PR teams might already have style guide documentation, so get them involved as well. If they don’t have this, it’s time to create it. Maintain your branding and styles across all public-facing documentation.

Use a Google doc or some other shared document so that your team can collaborate and edit this documentation as necessary.

If you don’t have time to create a style guide, search for one online and use that. Like this awesome one here.

Your Support team can use that document as a point of reference when creating new articles.

Create Templates to Standardize the Look and Feel

After you’ve dabbled around a bit and created some test articles, you’ll want to decide on a standard look and feel for your knowledge base articles. This will ensure that your content is formatted consistently across all articles. Once you’ve decided on a format that you like, create a “Templates” Topic to store templates of what these articles should look like. Then, you’ll have a good starting point for your Agents when they need to create new articles, and it will ensure consistency in formatting if you have multiple people creating articles. Also, make this a Hidden Topic so it’s not shown in the Support Center by toggling the topic setting of “No” for “Show in Support Center.”

When you start creating your template articles, utilize HTML elements in the source code to ensure that formatting is consistent across articles (e.g. use <p> tags for normal text, use <h1> for top-level headers, <h2> for second-level headers, etc.). You can check that HTML source code of an article by clicking the “Source” icon in the upper left-hand corner of the article editor. If you’re not familiar with HTML, don’t fret!  Just use the “Format” button on the article editor to change text from “Normal” styles to  “Header” styles by highlighting the text and then selecting the appropriate format.

Agents can copy the Source Code from the template articles when creating a new article in order to maintain consistent formatting.

Start a Document Review Procedure

Similar to how you can hide topics, you can hide articles as well. When you whip up some new content, make the first draft of an article hidden so it does not appear in the support center right away.

When your support team creates a new article, have other members review it and check for style guide consistency, grammar, and spelling.

Once it’s ready to go live, it’s as simple as clicking “Show in Support Center” and assigning the article to the correct topic.

Use Videos and Pictures

You can upload pictures directly to Desk.com and embed videos that are hosted video sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Detailed directions are here.

Similar to the style guide documentation, develop some documentation for your team to use when capturing and using photos in the support center.

You might want to suggest a tool like Jing or Monosnap so your team can easily copy screenshots.

Have Agents Utilize a “FAQ Candidate” Label when Handling Cases

Agents get busy during the week and may not have time to create a KB article on the spot.

Instead, have them apply a “FAQ Candidate” label to the Case, and then when your Agents have downtime, they can search for: label:”FAQ Candidate”

Agents should be able to use some of the text from the response to the customer as a starting point for the new KB article.

Check out some detailed documentation on this Mini-Workflow here.

Utilize an Internal Knowledge Base

In addition to creating “hidden” article and topics for templates, you can utilize this same functionality to create internal documentation for your team.

Now your team has instant access to this internal documentation when resolving a Case. From the Agent view, they can easily insert this text into responses as needed.