Among the pros of using a wiki is that you can organise your information in an easy-to-follow structure, perform any modifications you need in real-time, and grant quick access to all users.

Many companies substitute FAQs and knowledge bases with a wiki. It has the potential to make information available to all team members while giving every user the chance to edit and add content.

By creating an internal wiki can keep employees in the loop. It allows for collaboration between team members from different parts of the world and can be excellent for managing small teams and simple projects.

MediaWiki, DokuWiki, TikiWiki, and PmWiki are some of the most popular wiki software available for companies. They’re free open-source wiki programs, so you can implement them quickly with relatively low cost–at least, in the beginning

There are plenty of disadvantages of using a wiki that you need to be aware of. When your company material involves extensive documentation and serves multiple teams across different geographies, a wiki’s limitations soon start to arise.

What may seem like a cost-effective solution for building a knowledge base could soon prove inefficient and hard to control.

The larger your team, the more difficult it becomes to manage when using wiki as knowledge base software. And if that wasn’t enough, if you want your knowledge base to provide customer support as well, a wiki isn’t the right tool for the job. It doesn’t allow you to customise your product around your users.

And here are a few more disadvantages of using a wiki, while we’re on the subject:

Main Disadvantages of Using a Wiki as Knowledge Base

While a wiki can encourage cooperation between team members and departments, the platform has notable difficulty keeping up with changes in our digital era.

As new technology has been continuously shaping people’s online behaviour, a wiki has a hard time providing users with the excellent user experience that you’re looking to offer.

Here are some of the most significant disadvantages of using a wiki as a knowledge base tool:

• The software can be too difficult for non-technical users to on-board
• You have a limited search function
• Sharing information outside your wiki is almost impossible
• As anyone can make changes in your content, you can’t maintain consistency in your knowledge base
• You can’t design a knowledge base on your customers’ expectations
• It’s not possible to separate public information from confidential information
• A wiki doesn’t provide analytics

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Let’s take a closer look at how these limitations impact your user experience–and why choosing Wiki for creating your knowledge base can make your product less appealing.  

Read more: How to Create An Internal Wiki

Poor Usability for Non-Technical Users

When you use wiki as knowledge base software, you need to give your staff time to familiarise themselves with its features. Your IT department should be available to show your employees how to write, edit, and organise content with a wiki.

And if your team consists of tech-savvy members, you probably won’t have anything to worry about.

However, if your contributors and front-end users come from different backgrounds, it may take them months or even years to learn how to use a wiki knowledge base.

All this extra work is more likely to turn people off instead of motivating them to contribute. And the development of your company’s knowledge base is crucial.

So get ready to spend significant resources on training and one-on-one Q&A sessions with your technical writers, to make sure they understand how to use the tool correctly.

A wiki is different from traditional Microsoft Word or the popular Google Docs. Moreover, it’s nothing like writing on Facebook or Twitter either.

If you use a tool like WordPress for your knowledge base, you’ll find formatting in wiki software more complicated.

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The Biggest Disadvantage…

Basically, one of the biggest disadvantages of using a wiki is that it’s only easy for people who have previous knowledge of using HTML language. If you don’t, you’ll have to learn how to write, edit, format, add images and links using the new editor.

Many wiki as knowledge base comes with a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get), which simplifies things but doesn’t make them smooth as silk. The feature is normally a bit buggy, and implementing it can be a challenge for your IT department.

On the other hand, a dedicated knowledge base software provides you with an intuitive text editor. This makes content creation and curation much easier for your staff.

An Impossible Search Feature

Fact: a substandard search feature doesn’t belong in our world anymore. With Google making search part of our daily habits, your users expect to find the information they need in seconds–from the first attempt.

Behemoth software companies, like Amazon or Facebook, optimise their search functions regularly to improve user experience since around 31 percent of customers want instant online help.

A wiki gives you limited user possibilities for searching for information inside your knowledge base, especially when you also work with attached documents.

You either need to know precisely where to look, or be pretty lucky to find what you need using the Search bar.

This basic search feature makes wiki as knowledge base software a weak solution for a business that has substantial content to share with its users.

Imagine your sales rep on the phone with customers, wasting time and business opportunities while looking for information inside your knowledge base. Their productivity plummets, as they can’t find what they need in time.

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The more information you publish, the harder it is for your staff (or customers) to find the answers they need with little time and effort.

A Killer Search Feature…

A killer search feature is crucial for a useful knowledge base and it goes beyond helping people find what they’re looking for. It helps you improve user experience and provide your customers and employees with consistent support.

A user-friendly search feature recognises misspelt words and “sees” the intent behind the question. This way, no one struggles to find the right information across multiple documents and articles.

Your sales team learns about prospects, your marketing content reaches the entire team, and your customers get the help they’re looking for.

A slow search function won’t allow you to provide these people with the information they need to perform their daily tasks.

Few Sharing Possibilities

Your knowledge base should bring all teams together, to share everyone’s knowledge using a unique, central platform. The concept of a knowledge base depends on the idea of efficiency above all other characteristics.

That’s why the way your staff shares information inside the team and with external partners is crucial to a knowledge base.

When the documentation is one click away, your employees are more likely to solve their problems in time, meet deadlines, and stay productive in all situations.

With a wiki, you have difficulties with importing and exporting information to and from your knowledge base.

Back in the old days, people used to publish an article on a wiki and email the link to the people who might have an interest in the piece. Imagine what would this mean for your knowledge base users today!

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Thousands of emails sent after publishing a new article that your employees would have to go through every time they needed information. Talk about inefficient!

You need to provide modern document management solutions that allow your employees to search, process, and share documents from any device, whenever they need to.

Over a quarter of all UK employees (26 percent) say that they waste working time every week looking for documents due to a high volume of emails.

Organising information and documents inside a knowledge base and making it shareable across multiple platforms can help your staff to gather information efficiently and reduce time wasted in the office.

Little or No Control Over the Quality of Your Content

One of the main characteristics of working with the wiki as knowledge base software is the ability of each user to contribute and make changes inside the knowledge base. Every user can edit the content–which makes a wiki an excellent collaborative tool.  

Wiki as knowledge base software allows you to create Information Architecture to build a structure for your knowledge base…

But when too many users add information with no hierarchy of content contribution or content calendar to follow, it’s easy to go from organisation to chaos. It’s a classic situation of too many cooks spoiling the broth.

Even with the best of intentions, users can end up by rewriting pieces too often and lowering the quality of your content. And too many modifications can lead to a lack of consistency inside your knowledge base.

So what appears to be one of the platform’s strengths quickly becomes one of the main disadvantages of using a wiki.

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Even if you have a style guide, too many writers who create and edit content as often as they like are hard to control. You won’t be able to stick to your content strategy or respect your content calendar.

The difference between a wiki and specialist knowledge base software is that the latter gives you complete control over the content you publish. Once you create a team of writers, they’ll be the only people to make modifications to your knowledge base, based on your goals and users’ needs.

Better yet, with knowledge base software, you can control all changes inside your content, including comments. This way, you make sure you maintain high-quality standards and a professional tone in all your business content.

Beware of Vandalism!

Since wiki software is designed for multiple users to edit content in real time, the platform is also prone to vandalism and spam. Take a couple of days off from managing your knowledge base and you risk finding all your technical documentation modified by hackers.

In 2010, Wikipedia used to register an average of ten vandalism edits per day. While your IT team probably won’t have to deal with so many, these kinds of edits can have a bigger impact on your business than on Wikipedia.

A public wiki simply isn’t a safe place for your documentation, especially if you’re publishing sensitive business or employee data. This tool has a low barrier to entry, so registering and entering your knowledge base is easier than you can imagine.

Malware and cyber attacks are more likely to happen when you use wiki as knowledge base software since they often contain vulnerabilities.

Hard to Manage and Personalise

Adopting a wiki as a knowledge base won’t just cause a headache for your technical writers. Another of the main disadvantages of using wiki as knowledge base software is that it eats time and resources of your IT department as well.

With all the updates and improvements performed in the past years, a wiki remains hard to master and configure.

Since you have to continuously improve your knowledge base to make it better for your users, knowledge management can become a significant challenge.

Structure modifications are hard to perform. Wiki as knowledge base software is rigid and provides users with little flexibility regarding design and interface. This leaves you with little room to personalise your product based on your audience’s preferences.

Moreover, you have to monitor your content on regular basis to keep the information precise and relevant to your business.

If the information in your knowledge base isn’t accurate, your employees will look for safer alternatives, even if this means wasting more time gathering information.

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On one hand, you need to keep an eye on all the changes performed by users. On the other hand, you have to revise all the existing information to keep up with your growing business.

Think about how often you update your product. Your knowledge base should explain and show every new feature you add. This way, your employees stay up to date with your product and can do their jobs well.

A wiki doesn’t maintain consistent workflows inside your company. And it doesn’t scale with your company’s growth. When adopting such a tool to create a knowledge base, instead of helping your staff to be more productive, you wind up giving them more tasks.

No Room for Confidential Information

When using a wiki as knowledge base, there’s no concept of “selective content”, since you can’t differentiate users.

In simple words, you can’t separate public information from confidential data. Everything that you share inside your knowledge base becomes available to everyone who has an account and a password.

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If you want to train new employees to use knowledgebase, you have to give them access to all your information.

It’s true that they might have a hard time finding critical data due to a poor search function, but you still put your technical information at risk.

Depending on how you want to use your knowledge base, this missing feature can slow down your progress significantly.

You have to create different platforms to meet the needs of various teams inside the company. And that means you won’t be able to have all your information in one place.

Moreover, as your business grows, you’ll have more difficulty controlling the information flows inside your company. This can lead to misunderstandings, communication errors, and time wasted tracking information across your documents.

A Lack of Insights About Your Users

One of the most significant disadvantages of using wiki as knowledge base software is the lack of analytics. In a data-driven world,  this translates into many lost growth opportunities. It’s like walking around in the dark.

When you don’t know how people are using your knowledge base, you lack the data needed to improve it. You keep adding information, without getting valuable feedback that will never show you whether your employees or customers are benefiting.

On the other hand, when you know how your employees or customers use the information in your knowledge base, it’s much easier to provide them with informative content that offers accurate answers and solves problems.

Analytics show you everything you need to know about user behaviour, including:

• Which articles have the highest traffic
• What topics are of most interest to your audience
• Where your users come from and what devices they use to access your documentation
• Which employees don’t use your knowledge base
• What information is missing from your knowledge base

This type of information is vital for a growing business and for training your staff efficiently. When you know what your employees need to become more productive, you can write better knowledge base articles that add value for your users.

Better yet, if your knowledge base is meant to provide self-service customer support, insights are crucial for excellent customer experience. The data can help you to improve your post-sale service and communication with your customers, as well.

A wiki Doesn’t Allow You to Build a Customer-Centred Knowledge Base

A wiki helps you to put your knowledge together, organise it, and archive documents. However, it’s woefully inefficient when it comes to using the information you’ve stored on it.

With a limited search function and a few sharing possibilities, getting the most out of your knowledge base becomes a challenge for non-technical users and a headache for your IT department.

Moreover, many of Wiki’s features are out-of-date, making it a poor option for building a knowledge base for modern internet user.

People expect search engines to capture intent and provide relevant answers without having to write the exact keyword.

On top of that, your employees need to be able to share the information online quickly with their colleagues or even with clients. If your knowledge base can’t do this, you risk investing in a tool that no one uses for daily activities.

The Takeaway

Wiki as knowledge base software’s lack of flexibility doesn’t allow you to build a user-centred product. Since you can’t customise your knowledge base, you risk losing your audience, despite your best efforts.

Your employees will waste working hours to find information and your customers will call for support, instead of using self-service.

Are you ready to implement your own customised company knowledge base instead of using wiki as a knowledge base? Why not give Document360 a try today? See how easy it is to provide superior customer support with minimal effort.

The post The Biggest Drawbacks of Using Wiki as Knowledge Base Software appeared first on Document360.

When you create an informative knowledge base, you reduce the effort your customers need to solve their problems. It’s the key to better customer support. This means improved user experience and higher chances of keeping your customers loyal to your brand.

What does it take to achieve a good online knowledge base?

Your online knowledge base should:

• Answer all common questions about your product and service
• Save your customers’ time
• Be easy to access
• Be organised and logical to navigate
• Provide up-to-date information.

To achieve all this, you need to follow a series of online knowledge base best practices that allow you to build a high-quality source of information for your customers. Let’s take a closer look.

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Treat your online knowledge base as a product

To provide excellent self-service support, you must design your knowledge base tool as a product — which means you should follow the same processes that you use for creating and developing your business products.

You need to plan every step of the project to create an optimal experience for your customers:

• Identify resources you can use to craft useful content
• Set a budget, goals, and deadlines
• Research your customers’ expectations to see what they’re looking for in a knowledge base
• Test various versions before launching to see which one works better
• Make decisions based on data rather than on instinct or budgetary considerations

When you treat your online knowledge base as a product, you’re more likely to deliver the high-quality content that helps people and lowers the number of tickets and phone calls you get.

Start from the core elements of your online knowledge base

Having a stable foundation for your online knowledge base is vital when looking to provide your customers with the excellent user experience.

Your support centre must have a series of elements that are functional and easy to use by anyone, including:

• A logical structure
• A Search option
• A ‘Get more help’ section
• A minimalistic design

Structure your knowledge base for your users

Information Architecture is the way you organise your content to help your visitors know where they are on your website and how they can get to the page they need.

Using menu bars and graphic elements, you should let your visitors know where they are in your knowledge base. What category or section, what other topics they can see in the same place, and how they can visit another section.

Spotify’s Support Page, for example, offers simple clues that let visitors know where they are on their website. There’s a table of contents on the left-hand side, and the page you open is immediately marked with a graphic element that screams “You are here!”.

To make things more accessible, right on top of the article, you can see the path that took you to the page: the category, followed by subcategory, and a hyperlink that can take you back to the main menu.

When you have all these clues, it’s easier to move back and forward inside the online knowledge base to find the information you need.  

A user-friendly menu bar gives your visitors quick access to any section they need and keeps them from getting lost in a multitude of technical articles.

You can also add a ‘Related articles’ section at the end of each article in your knowledge base. This way, you create a logical path for your visitors to follow to get the most out of their interaction with your product.  

Build the structure to make it accessible to the average user. This way, all your customers will feel comfortable with self-support. A structure that is too complex may scare them off or make them call for support.

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Add a killer search function

The naked truth: your online knowledge base features list should include the best possible search function. It’s the only way for your customers to get fast, accurate answers with minimum effort.

Place your Search bar right in front of your visitors — it’s OK if the Search option is the first thing they see when opening your support page. Spotify has a visible search bar right on the home page to allow users to search for anything.

This function goes hand in hand with SEO. Optimising your knowledge base content by using the right keywords helps your visitors to find the articles they’re looking for.

Keyword research is essential to implementing a useful search function. Use analytics to identify the exact words your visitors use to find answers in your online knowledge base. Then include these words in your articles and titles to show search engines what each post is about.

Make contacting your team easy

Every page in your online knowledge base should include contact information for those visitors who are stuck or find out that their problem is too complex for self-service.

When you show that you’re available to your customers, you build trust and create a feeling of safety that your customers need to try to solve their problems alone.

Use design elements to highlight the section where visitors can get more help. Make sure it includes fast ways to get in touch: email address, phone number, links to your social media accounts, a link to live chat with your support team or any other service you provide.

Follow knowledge base design best practices

Your online knowledge base should have a minimal design, so as not to distract visitors from their problems. From choosing the right fonts to using the right amount of white space, every element should make articles easy to read and follow.

Use colours to different topics and subtopics inside the knowledge base. Add visuals to break the articles down into smaller chunks to make them easier to digest for your average readers.

A key point to remember: Your online knowledge base should follow the same style as your business website, but with less accent on your brand elements.

Build a documented knowledge base content strategy

The primary goal of any SaaS knowledge base solution is to help customers get the most out of using the software. This means you must give your users accurate answers, together with solutions that are easy to implement.

Plan and write your content with your customers in mind. What problems do they have? How can your articles guide them without creating more frustration?

Do some basic research on how people and companies use your product. When you know your customers’ workflows and processes, you can identify pain points, possible issues, things to improve, and any bugs that can cause problems.

Make this research the foundation of your knowledge base content strategy. This way, your knowledge base ideas are based on facts, not on guesses. Every article you write solves a problem and creates new opportunities for your customers.

Don’t waste your time with articles that serve no purpose. Identify the hot topics and popular questions in your industry, and focus on providing accurate answers.

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Build your content strategy to support your customers. Include ‘How-to’ guides and tutorials, but also short answers to FAQs. Each piece of content in your calendar should have a purpose and help you achieve a specific goal in your strategy.

Use different types of content to engage your visitors and improve their experience on your page. Video content can help you illustrate new features of your product; text is an excellent way to provide quick answers, and screenshots help you give clear instructions to solve problems.

Establish a style guide for writing articles

Just as you have a style guide for your marketing content, you should set rules for writing your knowledge base content. This way, you create consistency across all your articles.

Make sure all your writers use a friendly, but professional tone when writing articles. Encourage them to use active voice and present tense only, and ask them to address the reader in the second person. In your style guide, give clear instructions on how your technical writers should treat any topic:

• Provide a list of verbs that writers should use to describe specific actions required for customers to reach their objectives
• Include indications for using punctuation
• Build a glossary of terms to make sure all your writers use the same terminology to define a concept
• Give directions about using units of measure; if you need them to use the metric system, for example
• Provide clear instructions on word count, phrase length, format, and the length of paragraphs.
• Add a list of accepted acronyms and abbreviations
• Set rules for choosing sources and adding links to your knowledge base article.

In some cases, article templates can help your writers keep in line with your style guide. This way, all your content respects a knowledge base article format that can help you to share information efficiently with your users.

Templates are also excellent tools for your technical writers can use to organise the information logically inside your articles, especially when you need to describe lengthy processes or explain complicated concepts.

Have a professional editor working with your technical writers

Writing technical content is a challenge for most companies as the articles need to help people. If you create confusion by being too technical, you risk losing some of your audience. The members of your team who have in-depth knowledge about the topic rarely have the writing skills to put together articles that are easy to follow by average readers.

Moreover, often, the experts don’t have the time to plan and write articles for an online knowledge base.

To counter these issues, you should create a team that includes writers, technical experts, and at least one professional editor.

This way, you have a successful creational process, generated by an information flow that goes from experts to writers to readers:

• Your technical writers craft articles that reflect your objectives, based on the information they receive from your technical departments
• The expert checks the accuracy of the information and provides suggestions for improving the content
• The editor makes sure that your writers respect the style guide and that the knowledge base works as a whole

This process allows you to deliver information in the language that your customers speak, rather than filling your knowledge base with articles full of technical jargon that no one outside your company understands.

Make your online knowledge base accessible from any device

Mobile browsing accounts for 63 percent of traffic in the US — which means your customers are more likely to use online your knowledge base from their smartphones than from their desktops. Optimising your online knowledge base for all devices is vital to providing an excellent customer experience. Therefore, make sure you choose a knowledge base software that includes a mobile-optimized version of your site.  

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The format of your knowledge base articles should be mobile-friendly, with fonts that can be easily read from any smartphone. All the necessary elements included in screenshots should be easy to see from any device, to avoid confusion and misunderstandings.

Name one person responsible for managing your company knowledge base

This number tells us that there’s a lot to improve when it comes to providing high-quality self-service support. Planning, building, and managing a company knowledge base is hard work. Whether you create it for customer support or as an internal knowledge base for employees only, you need to keep the information up-to-date. You need to optimise it for better search results and improve its content for better user experience.

It’s essential to have a person in charge who can take care of all these aspects. Leaving the entire project in the wrong hands can quickly turn a business opportunity into failure. You risk wasting resources on a mediocre website with poor usability and no positive effect on customer services.

Treat your company knowledge base as a valuable asset that has the potential to build better business relationships with your customers, increase retention rates, and boost revenues.

To Sum Up

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for building the perfect online knowledge base. You need to research your audience, test various knowledge base article formats, ask for feedback, measure results, optimise content… and then start all over again!

But let’s recap some of the essential takeaways when building an online knowledge base:

1. Treat your online knowledge base as a product
2. Start from building content around the core elements of your knowledge base
3. Build a documented content strategy for your knowledge base
4. Establish a style guide for writing technical content
5. Hire a professional editor to make your articles easier to read by regular users
6. Optimise your knowledge base for all devices: desktop, tablet, and smartphone.

Following these best practices, you can make the process easier and avoid the common mistakes that can result in additional costs and slowing you down.

Ready to build your online knowledge base? Get in touch with Document360 for your free demo and get started today!

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81 percent of all customers try taking care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative. It’s in the company’s best interest to provide kick-ass customer service.

It’s no longer about cutting down service costs. When you use knowledge base tools, you deliver a better customer experience, as you’re available all day, every day.

Your clients find everything they need on your website to get the most out of every interaction with your product. And get to solve problems by themselves, with no need for human interaction.

There’s so much that you can achieve by investing in knowledge base solutions and knowledge base tools for your business.

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5 ways to use Best Knowledge Base Tools

Here are five ways you can use the best knowledge base tools to improve your relationship with customers and increase efficiency across departments:

1. Self-service customer support
2. Online collaboration platform for your employees
3. Efficient resource for training current staff and new hires
4. A tool to glean useful feedback from your existing users
5. A source of web traffic

Knowledge Base Tools Help Meet Your Customers’ Expectations

Clients are expecting excellent self-service options, especially when doing business with SaaS companies.

Customers today have different consumption habits than they used to. They are looking for new features in a company when making their buying decisions. 67 percent of millennials have increased their expectations only in the past year when it comes to customer support.

Giving your customers instant access to all the information they need is part of your job. You must provide them with quick answers to their questions and with solutions that are easy to implement.

Not having a searchable knowledge base where your users can find the information they need quickly equates to poor customer support, below the industry standard.

Customers don’t like to call for support or to write and receive tens of emails to solve a simple problem. They want control over their interaction with your brand. Give them that, and they’ll be satisfied with your product and services.

Build your knowledge base tools to give your customers freedom of movement. Teach them how to change their settings without the need to call or email. Show them how to fix their problems alone and you’ll win their loyalty.

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Organise Your Knowledge Base Well

When organised well, your knowledge base tools help you to meet your customers’ expectations and provide them with excellent support. This way, you can consolidate business relationships with your clients — which means increased retention rates and higher revenues in the long-run.  

A knowledge base software allows you to build a flexible tool that solves problems in multiple departments. As a result, you’ll register a lower number of tickets, and you reduce the costs of customer support.

A practical knowledge base simplifies everything. Users can self-diagnose their problems and even solve issues without the need for human interaction. Moreover, they can learn more about the new features of your product straight from your website.

Furthermore, when customers call for support, your employees can use the same tool to give fast, accurate answers on the spot. There’s no need for a transfer to another department or a second call to solve simple issues.

Joint problems, bugs, updates that go wrong — these things happen often. Best knowledge base tools in place can minimise the effects that small errors have on your business.

As customers find their answers in your knowledge base, you reduce the high volume of interactions between your staff and clients while providing consistent service. You give standard solutions to common questions, so all your customers can benefit from the same quality of the information they receive.

On the other hand, your employees will spend less time solving simple issues. So, they can focus on different aspects of their jobs — creative tasks or resolving complex issues for customers.

You get to reduce the time from opening a ticket to closing it. You increase productivity and solve your customers’ problems faster.

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Knowledge Base Tools to Improve Communication Inside the Company

Internal communication is vital for the efficiency of your business. Employees must have active communication channels to stay updated on new projects and changes in the company’s strategy.  

Poor communication is one of the most common causes of workplace demotivation. Employees who spend too much time trying to find the information they need for work are more likely to be exhausted, confused, and frustrated about their jobs.

The best knowledge base tools don’t serve only your customers, but your employees as well. A knowledge base software can help you create a useful toolkit for information sharing between all departments inside your company.

As your business grows and you get to develop multiple projects at the same time, having all the data in one place keeps information flows intact — which means increased efficiency and better results for the company.

When your employees know where to look for updated information, they can complete their tasks in less time and meet deadlines. Better yet, everybody gets access to the single, most recent version of your company data. This way, there’s less room for communication errors and misunderstandings.

Your Knowledge Base is a Useful Resource for your Staff

When your employees receive consistent guidance, you create a friendly working environment, where everyone feels confident about performing tasks, and less supervision is required for new hires.

With an informative internal knowledge base software, you can create a platform for your staff only. Your employees can find all the information they need to perform daily activities and increase productivity.

Face-to-face communication is important inside the company, but an online tool can create those bridges that your employees need to become more efficient. You’ll have fewer employees emailing questions and looking for solutions in various departments.

You’ll also get to reduce the number of meetings necessary to keep everybody in the loop about projects.

You Can Use Knowledge Base Tools to Train Your Employees

Knowledge base tools can become an essential resource for your HR department as well, especially for training employees.

It makes things simple and efficient, as everyone can access the information and learn at their own rhythm, without stress and frustration.

Two out of three UK workers have left their jobs because of a lack of training and development opportunities. Training is a key area in a company’s development, and ongoing education is vital for improving employee retention.

Organising classrooms is a challenge, especially when you have to train staff from several departments, with different schedules and learning abilities. Your company can spend thousands of dollars, and your employees waste a significant number of working hours going to classes. Often, the results fail to meet expectations.

When you use a knowledge base software to educate your employees, you cut down costs and get better results. Your staff can learn at comfortable hours, that suit their availability. No one is left behind because they can’t keep up with the rest of the team.

And if you collaborate with people from different parts of the world, you don’t have to worry about time zones.

Another advantage comes from the fact that you can use the same content over and over, every time you need to train a new group of employees. Even better, you can perform updates without having to rewrite courses from scratch whenever needed.

Other Ways to Benefit from Knowledge Base Tools

Besides training your employees, your HR department can use your knowledge base software in other ways to increase efficiency:

• Introducing new hires to the company’s documentation
• Distributing messages across departments
• Sharing updates on the company policies
• Discussing vacation schedules, pay schedules, and other administrative issues

An internal knowledge base is a modern tool to train employees and make communication easier. It’s also a tool that gives your company kudos — you look up-to-date and modern — the kind of place everyone wants to work for.

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You Get Valuable Feedback from Your Customers

A knowledge base can give you in-depth information about the way in which your customers interact with your product and feel about your brand.

The best knowledge base software integrates analytics that provides you with valuable data about your users. It’s an excellent tool to measure your performances in the market and the quality of your services.

With every question your customers ask and every problem they manage to solve by themselves, you’re one step closer to understanding your users and their current needs.

Built-in analytics allow you to track your reader’s journey through your knowledge base. Use this tool to identify users’ questions and problems and to provide your audience with the best answers.

This way, you develop a knowledge base tool that meets your customers’ expectations and adds value to your public.

Based on what users are searching for in your knowledge base, you can identify trends and hot topics in your industry that you can use to improve your content strategy.

When you create fresh, valuable content that solves problems, you’re more likely to attract new visitors to your website, get more leads, and increase conversion rates.

Learn to read between the lines and to get the most from the data provided by analytics. Focus on the motivation behind each query in your knowledge base to understand what generates the need for customer support. Ask yourself:

What is the user trying to accomplish with each question?

When you find the reason behind the search, you can identify pain points and gaps in the market.

The information that you gather using a knowledge base software is the best starting point for developing new, better products or for introducing additional features to your existing software.

You Give a Boost to Your SEO Strategy

A knowledge base has immense marketing potential. It keeps your current customers satisfied and can hook new clients looking for SaaS companies that include robust knowledge base tools with their product.

Better yet, your knowledge base can boost your SEO and enhance your content strategy in more ways than one.

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Here’s how you can use your knowledge base for SEO purposes:

• Good articles increase the time your visitors spend on your website. The time visitors spend on your page (dwell time) is an important ranking element for search engines. The more time visitors spend on your site, the better for your SERP ranking.
• Your knowledge base can also influence other metrics, such as bounce rate and engagement. This depends on how your visitors interact with your website.
• The high-quality content you publish in your knowledge base makes you an authority in your industry. When people trust you and come to your website for answers, so will search engines.
• The words that your visitors use to find information inside your knowledge base can help you identify new, more specific keywords to target. This way, you can optimise your content to reach an audience that has a real interest in your product.
• When you optimise your knowledge base for SEO, you increase your organic reach as well as Google ranks websites that provide visitors with excellent user experience higher in search results.

When you include your knowledge base in your content strategy, you make it a powerful marketing tool that can help you improve brand awareness and brand recognition among a broader audience.

Wrapping It Up

There are so many ways in which knowledge base tools can increase efficiency and improve your business relationship with your clients.

Depending on your activity, company size, and industry, you can use your knowledge base for internal purposes, self-service customer support, or both.

From providing useful feedback from your customers to improving your digital marketing strategy, you can use your knowledge base in various ways to increase efficiency and enhance communication within your firm.

Also, the flexibility of a knowledge base system allows you to train employees. This also gives them easy access to your documentation from any device.

Knowledge base tools contribute to helping make your company an excellent working environment and a modern business partner for companies of all shapes and sizes.

Now that you know the different uses of a knowledge base tool, you might be looking for a reliable knowledge base software solution.

Why not give Document360 a try? Document360 is knowledge base software tailored at improving your user experience and help you reduce your customer churn rate.

The post Top 5 Uses of Best Knowledge Base Tools for SaaS Product appeared first on Document360.

Your knowledge base is an essential tool since it allows you to help more customers at the same time, without increasing costs or lowering quality.

Every article should give readers what they need, want, and crave! Anything less, and all the resources you’ve put into creating your knowledge base articles will go to waste.

That’s why it’s crucial that you deliver your readers accurate, valuable information. After all, your knowledge base is the most legitimate source of information about your software and its features.

You need to provide trustworthy, well-organised content, in easy-to-read chunks.

Here’s a simple guide to creating a knowledge base that sets the standard for information in your industry.

The Anatomy of a Usable Knowledge Base

Your purpose when creating a knowledge base is to satisfy your audience–which means you have to give them what they want when they want it.

31 percent of customers are looking for instant online help, while 40 percent of them expect to receive assistance in less than five minutes.

People expect to find everything they need on your website, with minimum effort and within minutes.

So, your knowledge base should be:

• Well-organised – it should make sense as a whole.
• Intuitive and easy to navigate – readers should be able to find the articles they need fast.
• Highly informative – it provides relevant information for a specific goal.

Think About Your Users’ Goals

When it comes to your users’ goals, you need to start with the question, “What do my readers need to achieve their goal?”. Then, focus on providing your audience with the right tools to solve their problems themselves.

You must provide all the information needed. At the same time, the articles should stay relevant and be easy to scan through and read. If a customer has to go through 3,000 words to learn how to change settings for an account, you’re providing a poor customer experience.

The way you present the information is more important than the information itself.

Even the best articles will get zero engagement if people need half an hour to find an answer in a long list of items.

Information architecture (IA) is the way of structuring and organising your content to help your audience know where they are as users and how to find what they’re looking for.

How can you practice information architecture to increase the usability of your knowledge base?

Here are a few tips:

• Divide your content into categories and organise articles by topics, themes, and sub-themes. Each piece should treat one question (or problem) only.
• Make navigation easy by linking related articles to guide your readers on a logical path.
• Design a user-friendly menu that allows readers to know where they are and gives them an easy way to get to another category. 
• Implement a killer search engine to help readers find what they need.
• Use visual design and colours to help people differentiate the content.
• Break the information into small chunks to allow your readers to assimilate what they read.
• Guide users with solid UX techniques to lower the time they spend looking for information

Create your knowledge base with your public in mind–your employees for an internal company knowledge base or your customers if you’re looking to provide self-service support.

Simple and intuitive knowledge base software for your business needs

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MailChimp as an Example

MailChimp, has an easy-to-navigate menu that helps you go through their knowledge base without getting lost.

The first thing you see are four main categories, illustrated with simple elements of visual design: “New to MailChimp? Start here”, “Pricing”, “E-Commerce”, and “Email Templates”.

Note how there’s a logical order for these four main categories, which follows the customers’ journey as they become more familiar with the product and its features.

Right under these four categories, you get a short video and some of the most popular topics that users search for inside the knowledge base. This way, users can instantly see the most important articles, which makes for higher usability.

Scrolling down the page, you get access to specific categories, from Lists and Emails to Templates and Google Remarketing Ads.

Again, the order in which the knowledge base lists the categories is logical and follows the path that users take when learning how to use the software.

On top of everything else, you can find the Search function–large, easy to see and use. If you don’t have time to navigate the knowledge base, you just type in your keywords and get quick answers to your questions.

The more organised and stable your structure, the higher the chances of improving the user experience.

However, there’s no ideal structure for a knowledge base software. As you have to build a customer-centred product, you need to test versions of your service and optimise based on users’ feedback.

That’s why you need a knowledge base software that scales with your product and allows you to perform changes as your business grows.

The Importance of Minimalist Design

Your knowledge base system should educate and help solve problems. This type of content isn’t meant to entertain, so stick to the point and keep things simple.

Let’s go back to the MailChimp example. When you access the Support menu from their website, you get something similar to a traditional home page, but for customer support.

Colours and fonts stay consistent with the brand, and there’s even a small logo on the left side of the screen. But that’s pretty much all you get.

The design is clean and intuitive. There’s a prominent Search bar, and right under it, you see the main topic categories.

There’s nothing on the page to distract you from your task.

When you open the article, you still have the Search bar on top, in case the piece doesn’t answer your question.

On the left side of the page, you have a Table of contents, for quick navigation. As you scroll down, the section you read gets highlighted in the table. This is a great way of letting you know where you are as a user on the page.

On the right side, MailChimp guides users to either related articles or to getting direct help through email and chat support.

This second option is highlighted as well, using a different colour. This feature is meant to let users know that there’s more in there for them than some simple instructions.

The article is well-organised as well:

• Paragraphs are short (maximum of four sentences)
• There are plenty of line breaks and white spaces
• Tables and bulleted lists make information easier to read and digest
• There are links to other pages and articles for users to get more information on a related topic

Long pages are a nightmare to read without organisation. Internet users today lose their concentration after eight seconds. So break the information into chunks that users can read without getting a headache!

Structure your articles for the average user. Keep paragraphs short. Bold the vital information to underline its importance.

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Knowledge Base Design Best Practices

1. Optimise for all devices. Two thirds of global traffic come from mobile devices. So, look for knowledge base solutions that allow you to provide excellent customer support on smartphones, tablets, and desktop.
2. Make your Search bar visible. It should catch your visitors’ attention from the first moment they land on your page. (Don’t hide it in the corner!)
3. Add quick links to hot topics and frequently asked questions to improve navigation. Also include links to related articles, for people who need to learn more about a specific topic.  
4. Use colours to differentiate the main categories and topics. Consider calming and relaxing colours, like blue, green, or yellow. Excessively bright colours aren’t going to calm down an already stressed user!
5. Introduce a Table of Contents for long articles. This way, users can jump to the section they’re interested in and save time.
6. Use white space to make the content easier to follow.
7. Insert visuals to break up the long paragraphs – screenshots, videos, graphics, or any other tool that can help readers better understand what they’ve read. Images add interest and clarity and help the eye and the brain to take a rest from the text.  
8. Highlight the section where users can get more help. It’s essential for users to see that they can contact you when self-service alone fails to give them accurate answers.

Writing Optimised Knowledge Base Articles

A practical knowledge base provides value. You need to create lasting, strong content to satisfy your users, whether you address your employees in an internal knowledge base or your customers.

In our guide “How to Write an Incredible Knowledge Base Article”, we explain how to craft professional, but friendly content for all your users, based on thorough research about your public and their goals.

Keep this question in mind when writing:

“How will my content positively affect my audience?”

Every article you publish in your knowledge base should give relevant information only. Cut all the fluff. If a paragraph doesn’t influence or change the user experience, remove it.

Back up your articles with facts that can be trusted, and update the information on a regular basis. Users don’t need to read about an old version of your software if they’re already working with a more recent one.

Titles Improve Navigability

Your titles and headlines must speak for themselves.

SEO is important for a knowledge base, but here even more than on your business blog, you’re not writing for search engines and SERPs.  

Write for humans. In some cases, angry, frustrated users need to dig through your website to find answers. They don’t want to call for help. So make their experience on your site as positive as possible.

You don’t need to hook them, or draw attention. Your mission is to improve usability and navigation. When users click a title or headline, they should get to the article or paragraph they expect based on the information in that title.

Excellent headlines allow users to scan the document and read the parts they need without missing any vital information.

Keep things clear and use simple wording to express what the article is about. Add keywords in the titles and headlines to make the information easy to find with a simple search.

Use the previous questions people have asked in your Search bar to write better titles and headlines. This way, you can write in the same words that people use to search for answers in your internal knowledge base.

Organise Your Ideas

Besides breaking the text into short paragraphs, you need to deliver the information in the right order for your readers to understand it.

Article templates can help you organise your ideas, but they alone can’t do the job for you.

Different types of articles require for different writing techniques–it depends on the purpose of each piece you publish in your knowledge base tool.

When you want to explain a new product:

• Start with basic information and build up to more complicated instructions towards the end.
• Include video tutorials that show users how to install, setup, and use the software.
• Under the video, include a script where users who don’t have the time to watch can find the information they need.

When you write a how-to guide:

• Use chronological order to explain each step of the process
• For every new action, give clear instructions. Don’t make assumptions. Your users don’t know the product as well as you do. What seems like an obvious intermediate step for you may be unknown to a beginner.
• Include screenshots to explain menus, categories, and buttons that users should click to get to the right result.

When you give short answers to frequently asked questions:

• Skip the intro to keep visitors focused on their task.
• Give clear instructions, with links to the pages they need to access to solve their issue.
• Don’t use video to solve problems. Users need quick answers. If they can get them with a quick scan of a 2-minute text, they won’t sit and watch a 3-minute video.

Choose the Right Topics

Your knowledge base should include benefit-focused content only. Simple as that.

Instead of writing a hundred articles that you think might help, focus on your audience’s needs.

Research before you start writing:

• What do people look for online related to your industry?
• What do your competitors write in their knowledge bases?
• Problems that your current customers have?
• Which issues show up the most often in tickets from customer support?
• What do your employees need to increase productivity?
• How can you teach your employees new skills?
• How can you educate your clients to improve the customer experience?

Trends in the industry and your customers are also excellent sources to get topic ideas that could make your knowledge base more successful.  

Solve problems and prevent further issues. This is what your customers want and deserve.

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Choosing the Right Knowledge Base Software

The best thing about a knowledge base is that it is simple to put together once you have the right tools.

If you use WordPress, it’s easy to implement some free knowledge base solutions as plugins. When using a WordPress site as your knowledge base, there are some benefits of using a free tool, as well as limitations that come with it.

If your business is growing and you want to improve customer support, you need scalability and flexibility. For these features, you need a company knowledge base software that allows you to customise your knowledge base to meet your expectations.

When choosing the knowledge base solution, you should consider these essential elements:

• Excellent readability – users should be able to focus on your content only.
• Killer search function – it’s vital for quick and effortless navigation.
• Mobile friendly – with most users accessing information from their smartphones, you need to make your knowledge base available from any device.
• Cost-effective – you should calculate costs try to get the best value for your money.
• Analytics – this feature helps you gather valuable data about your users and their habits. This way, you can improve your service based on your public’s preferences.
• Feedback collection – your customers should be able to evaluate your content.
• Integration – the perfect knowledge base software should be easy to integrate with all the other tools you use to grow your business (Google Ads, Intercom, Segment, Olark).
• Quick setup – the less time you need to install and update the software, the better. This way, you can focus on creative tasks rather than technical details.
• Excellent customer support – just as you’re looking to provide your customers with the best services, you should search for a partner that can hold your hand when you’re in trouble!

Final Thoughts on Knowledge Base Organisation and Structuring

Knowledge base organisation and structuring takes time and effort. You need to put your ideas in order and find a reliable partner to help you with the technical details.

The way you deliver the information is what makes the difference between mediocre and excellent service. From the content you create to the way you break it into categories, everything should be customer-focused.

You need to have high usability, easy navigation, user-friendly features, and an optimised design to satisfy your users and increase efficiency.

Follow this beginner’s guide to knowledge base organization and structuring and you’ll be able to deliver customers what they want.

Are you ready to start organizing and structuring your company knowledge base? At Document360, we’ve got the tools and expertise to help you on your way!

The post Beginners Guide to Knowledge Base Organisation in a Structured Way appeared first on Document360.

Every positive experience you offer your customers generates new opportunities and helps you build long-term business relationships while increasing customer retention.

As part of your customer support strategy, your knowledge base should be a top priority and involve more than one department inside the company.

An efficient knowledge base content strategy is the result of collaboration between your marketing, sales, and customer support teams.

By working together, you can create intuitive content that meets your clients’ needs and stays in line with your marketing strategy.

6 Essential Steps to Build Knowledge Base Content Strategy

Step 1: Know your audience

Just as you build buyer personas for content marketing, you need to identify customer personas to create a knowledge base content strategy.

This approach allows you to learn as much as possible about the target audience of your knowledge base—your clients.

Building customer personas is easier than creating buyer personas since you don’t have to make suppositions about who your public is.

The people who read the articles in your knowledge base are the customers who have bought your product and use it for personal or professional purposes.

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To build your personas, find accurate data about your customers, including:

Demographics

• Age
• Location
• Education
• Company size

Professional History

• Position inside the company
• How often they interact with your product
• How familiar they are with your software

Expectations

• What motivated them to buy your product
• Their needs regarding your product
• How these needs change over time

To gather all this data, your marketing and sales people need to work together.

When you know your audience well, you can craft better knowledge base articles, based on pain points and topics of interest for your customers.

The more you know about your target public, the higher your chances of providing your knowledge base readers with an excellent customer experience.

They can find all the information they need directly on your website–which means fewer calls and tickets to solve.

Step 2: Understand how customers use your product to build the right knowledge base content strategy

Once you have a complete profile of your knowledge base users, you need to analyse how your customers interact with your product.

Customer touch points allow you to understand what your clients buy from you and how they use your product. This is essential information when building the knowledge base content strategy.

Consider the entire experience your customers have with your product, from the moment they learn about it to the pages they visit on your company website.

There are various methods to learn more about customer behaviour:

• Monitor online reviews and industry forums
• Track trends and specific customer behaviour in the industry
• Ask your customers for feedback
• Conduct a series of focus groups with some of your customers
• Use customer surveys to learn more about their preferences  

Sales and customer support can also give you crucial insights from their interactions with clients to help you understand how users benefit from using your product.  

When you know how your product helps your customers, you’re more likely to publish relevant information in your knowledge base.

If your customers only work with a limited number of features from your package, for example, you should start by publishing content focused on these characteristics rather than wasting resources on articles about features no one uses.

Alternatively, if you want to build awareness for a new product or feature, add a section in your knowledge base software, in which you explain how users can benefit from it.  

Step 3: Identify possible problems for clients

Your customers want you to solve their problems when they have them. Not come back to them later.

Research shows that companies should focus on reducing their clients’ efforts in looking for solutions to their service issues.

So you need to make sure that you:

• Anticipate problems and prevent more issues from happening
• Improve self-service channels to minimise the customers’ need to call or send a message after reading your knowledge base
• Listen to your customers to understand what causes their problems
• Focus on problem-solving rather than new marketing solutions

Better yet, happy customers become advocates for your brand, which means higher sales and higher revenues, among other benefits.

To achieve all these results, you need to identify any possible problem before it occurs and discuss it in your knowledge base.

If you manage to give complete answers and accurate solutions, your customers will have their problems solved on the first contact.

You provide efficient customer support, with minimum costs, and without human interaction. (Remember that most of your customers don’t want to call for help).

To maximise results, it’s vital that you use the same words that your customers would use to describe the problem.

Step 4: Organise your knowledge base structure

Knowing what to write and for whom gives you plenty of article ideas. With all this information in mind, you’re ready to create a structure for your knowledge base.

The way you organise the information is equally important as the quality of your articles.

Information architecture allows you to deliver the best article structure to improve user experience and guide your readers to get what they need fast and with little or no effort.

Make sure you design your knowledge base with your customers in mind. Create clear categories for your main topics and separate articles by type and purpose.

Facebook Business, for example, organises its articles into five main categories: Ads, Pages, Inspiration, Success Stories, and News, each one with subtopics. Furthermore, every subtopic contains a series of articles that talk about related themes.

Besides these categories, you should have fast access to common topics, such as Billing and Payments or Account Settings.

Again, each of these main categories should include a series of short articles and answers that are meant to solve users’ problems fast.

Each article addresses one problem only, to keep things clear and easy to follow.

Besides these categories, your platform should offer shortcuts to the top questions to facilitate navigation.

The structure of your knowledge base should be logical and make sense to your customers. If you have doubts about your choices, test more versions until you get positive feedback from your visitors.

Focus on easy navigation and discoverability, to create a user-friendly knowledge base, where your customers can benefit from your support with minimum effort.

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Step 5: Write a style guide for your knowledge base articles

When you have more than one person writing your knowledge base articles, it’s easy to get lost in multiple styles.

This can create confusion among users who need to read more than one article to find solutions to their problems.

A style guide can help you keep a united voice across all your knowledge base articles.

You can use your style guide from your content marketing strategy, as well. In fact, it’s an excellent starting point for creating a style guide for your knowledge base articles.

Here are the essential elements to include in your style guide:

• How to write article titles
• General guidelines regarding punctuation, sentence and paragraph length, and use of verbs
• Rules for using technical jargon – there should be only one term to describe each feature of your software to avoid confusion
• How to write each type of article: step-by-step guides, “how to” posts, tutorials, etc.
• Formatting details, such as whether writers can use bullet lists, or bold and italic formatting to underline specific information
• Indications for how to add links and external sources
• Rules for choosing the right images for each article
• A list of accepted abbreviations

Creating article templates can also help your team to write faster and maintain quality standards for all articles.

Step 6: Integrate your knowledge base content strategy

The knowledge base content strategy should be part of your marketing strategy. The way you support your customers after their purchase is more important than how you market to them.

Keep your knowledge base updated and relevant to your audience, just as you do with your website and blog.

Use feedback to improve your current articles and to come up with new topics of interest to your audience.

Maintaining a relevant knowledge base is a constant activity and a challenge, because customers have increasing expectations from self-service support.

So be sure to invest in a professional tool for creating your knowledge base to improve the usability of your support pages for the best customer experience.  

Final Thoughts

The knowledge base content strategy is vital to creating a practical tool that your customers can use to solve their problems by themselves.

The more you focus on planning and organising, the higher your chances of building a solid knowledge base that your target public can benefit from.

These six steps are all vital to building a useful knowledge base content strategy. From knowing your customers and their problems to the design of your support pages, all these elements will help you deliver a customised product, built around your clients and their needs.

Are you ready to get started with your knowledge base? Document360 can help you create and publish a best-in-class knowledge base with ease. Sign up for free today!

The post 6 Simple Steps to Build Perfect Knowledge Base Content Strategy appeared first on Document360.

When your customers have access to instant help and accurate answers to their questions right on your website, you’re more likely to keep them happy.

And when they’re happy, customers buy more, and even become advocates for your brand. They also spend more time on your website–a vital factor for search engines and their algorithms.

Millennials and Gen-Z don’t like to call for support. Instead, they prefer to use a company’s website to get answers.

If you needed any further convincing, by 2020, 85 percent of all customer support will occur without human interaction!

But you need to let people know about your post-sale support. When you optimize your knowledge base and increase its usability, you improve user experience and are more likely to grow your audience.

Here are seven ways to optimise your knowledge base content to get more visitors and provide them with superior self-service support.

1. Optimize your knowledge base content for SEO

SEO is essential for your knowledge base website, just as it is for your website. There’s no better way of getting more visitors than writing and organizing your content to rank high in search results.

93 percent of online experiences start with a search engine — in most cases, Google. And, as much as 60 percent of all clicks go to the first three results.

If your company’s knowledge base is accessible and easy to find through Google, you’re more likely to draw the attention of your customers, as well as new prospects.

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When you have a solid knowledge base, you drive more traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, attract more people into your sales funnel and boost conversions.

There are several tactics to follow when optimizing your knowledge base through SEO.

Among SEO tactics to optimize your knowledge base, you can also consider:

• Keyword optimization–targeting the right keywords makes you more visible online and puts you where your customers are looking.
• An XML sitemap for your knowledge base–this allows search engines to rank pages from your website.
• Metadata optimization–use keyword phrases in your URLs, titles, meta descriptions, and image alt attributes.
• Canonical links–these help you to avoid duplicate content (when you target the same keywords for both your main website and knowledge base, for example).

Most knowledge base software has a wide series of features to help you benefit from technical SEO. Use them to make your content more appealing to search engines and your pages will be present in SERPs.

Also, be sure to optimise for all devices. Like your website, your knowledge base online portal should be accessible from any smartphone to reach broader audiences.

2. Optimize site speed

The numbers speak for themselves: 47 percent of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds or less–and 40 percent of them abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

Site speed is more than an SEO element. It’s crucial when you’re looking to provide your visitors with an optimal customer experience.

Moreover, according to Econsultancy, slow-loading websites cost retailers about £1.73 billion each year in lost sales.

If your page doesn’t load in two second or less, visitors and customers will go away and look for answers somewhere else.

Maybe they’ll call for customer support or find useful information on your competitors’ websites. Either way, you’ve failed and potentially missed a sale.

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You can evaluate your page speed with a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how well your knowledge base performs.

Google makes a series of recommendations to help you increase page speed for improved customer experience, such as:

• Enable and test gzip compression support on your web server
• Reduce your server response time to under 200ms
• Minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources
• Reduce redirects
• Optimise images

Mostly, it’s about decluttering and organising your website. Get rid of large images, useless data in your HTML and CSS files, unused components, and unoptimised scripts.

3. Publish relevant content only

It may sound a little cliche, but ‘content is king’–for your marketing strategy, business growth and the success of your knowledge base software.

Excellent content adds value captures and retains your visitors’ attention. It’s the heart of an effective knowledge base, where people come for quick answers.

Even more than on your blog and website, the content in your knowledge base should be:

• Accurate – most customers visit your knowledge base to get support, which means that they have a problem and no time to waste guessing how much of your information is updated.  
• Relevant – your posts should treat one topic at a time, based on your visitors’ need. Stick to the point and make sure your articles offer the guidance and information promised in the title.
• Easy to scan – visitors read an average of 20 percent of a web page. They don’t have time to read more, so make sure you use titles and subtitles to show people where they can find the information they need.

Add visuals and videos to support the information in your articles. Screenshots, infographics, tutorials–anything that makes it easier for your visitors.

When you make information easy to follow and understand, your customers and prospects are more likely to share it on social media and recommend it to people with similar problems.

4. Curate the structure of your knowledge base

The structure is the foundation you need for a successful knowledge base. It’s like building a home. You can’t have a solid house without the right foundation.

Besides incredible knowledge base articles, visitors also need an easy way to navigate your website to get the information they’re looking for.

Information architecture allows you to organise your content better, to make navigation easier.

So set up the articles inside your knowledge base by topic or purpose. Posts that solve similar problems should stay in the same category, to help your users find them as fast as possible.

People who are looking to solve an emergency don’t have time to sift through tons of articles to find answers. They need solutions now.

Your knowledge base documentation should give them that. Otherwise, you’ll deliver a poor user experience, lose customers and miss out on business opportunities.

You can organise information by making it more visual–images, screenshots, white spaces, and specific titles. Everything should be customer-centric.

5. Make sure you have a killer search engine

Together with your information architecture, an effective Search engine can improve user experience and help you get more visitors.

Google processes an average of 40,000 search queries every second, making fast and easy search vital.

So, make sure you have an impressive Search bar that people can see and use easily.

Use analytics to see what keywords people are using to find information in your knowledge base. Then optimise your content for them and make sure that each keyword shows relevant search results.

Choose a knowledge base software with a Search function that recognises misspelt words or incomplete product names.

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This way, even if your customers don’t ask the right question at first, they’ll still get some information from your knowledge base to help them move on with their queries.

You can also use suggestions on searches so that you can help your visitors find answers quickly and reach the right article on the first attempt.

6. Give your visitors the chance to get more help

Your knowledge base application should provide your visitors with everything they need. This includes contact information if, for any reason, they have to call customer support.

Make sure all your articles include a section where visitors can get more information on the same topic–in the form of an FAQ page or a list of related articles.

Some visitors need guidance finding information to make the most out of using your software.

Give them that, and you’ll have happy customers that are more likely to become advocates for your brand. This means higher reach and more chances of attracting new visitors.

Make sure that every page in your knowledge base has your contact information in sight. People should always know that there’s always an option for more help.

About 44 percent of internet users consider contact information crucial for establishing trust and credibility.

So give your visitors multiple ways of communicating with your brand in the way they feel more comfortable. That could be social media channels, phone numbers, or live chat directly on your website.

When you encourage interactive communication each time your customers need it, word of mouth will work in your favour.

7. Use feedback to improve user experience

In the digital era, trends change faster than ever before. What was new and engaging last year doesn’t attract visitors today.

The new generation of customers has different preferences when it comes to content and how they consume it.

If you want to attract more visitors, keep up with the trends and get your content ready for Gen-Z. That includes your knowledge base.

Encourage visitors to leave feedback. Ask them to evaluate your current articles and, based on their answers, update the pieces that get negative reactions.

Surveys can also help you find out what your customers expect to find in your knowledge base to improve your content strategy. Your employees can be an excellent source for new content ideas, as well.

Test various types of content and formats to see which ones work better for your audience. This way, you’ll improve your knowledge base and make it more appealing.

Final Thoughts

A successful knowledge base is an on-going project. You have to improve its content permanently to attract new visitors and have them coming back for more information.

It’s a dynamic environment: Google changes its algorithms on a regular basis, and customers increase their expectations regarding support and access to information.

Your content should be valuable and shareable. It’s the best way to make your knowledge base appealing to people as well as search engines.

Make a content strategy for your knowledge base so that you can organize your content to make navigation easier and keep it relevant to your audience.

Finally, be sure to use feedback to improve your knowledge base regularly. And keep an eye on your competitors to make sure you’re not missing any new trend in the industry!

Is it time you implemented your knowledge base? Document 360 can help you drive traffic, increase customer retention, and boost your business! Contact us today!

The post 7 Ways to Optimize Your Knowledge Base Content to Get More Visitors appeared first on Document360.

All completed transactions are the beginning of a business relationship that can bring in continued profit. So, after the point of sale, it’s very important to continue to communicate with your customers on a regular basis.

Winning over a new customer can cost anywhere between five and 25 times more than retaining an existing one. So, as part of your marketing strategy, your customer service and support must meet their expectations.

Building and maintaining a consistent knowledge base is an effective way of providing high-quality post-sale service to your customers.

When you give your clients access to a library of documents and tools that explain everything about your product, you encourage them to help themselves and to use your product in the best way possible. This will help to ensure that they stay with your business.

What is a Good Knowledge Base?

A good knowledge base is a self-serve customer service library that contains information about a product, service, or topic. It retrieves the appropriate collection of data or information for the customer’s search query.

But there are plenty of benefits with a knowledge base where your customers can rely on when they need support. Check them out:

1. A good knowledge base keeps your customers happy

The most cost-effective way of growing your business is by focusing your efforts on achieving customer success.

You should aim to exceed their expectations by creating a positive customer experience.

A knowledge base gives your customers the chance of solving their problems without your help. You get to answer any questions before they even have to ask!

This is no longer a nice additional idea–it’s just what your customers expect.

Consumers today don’t like to call for support. Most of them prefer self-service over the human interaction.

Implement a knowledge base system today and reduce your customer support cost by 67%

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A comprehensive knowledge base can significantly reduce the number of phone calls your customers have to make to find answers to their problems.

Give them more free time, and you’ll have more satisfied clients, who are loyal to your brand and more likely to recommend you to their friends and family.

Satisfied clients also buy more often and are even ready to spend more for your services. And better than that? They become advocates for your brand.

In our connected world, word-of-mouth is an excellent marketing tool that can help you increase brand awareness and improve your reputation both online and off.  

2. A good knowledge base increases customer retention

When your customers are happy, retention rates increase, and that means long-term business success, consistent sales, and higher revenue.

According to Salesforce, customer retention rate (CRR) is vital to your growth. For example:

• If you increase CRR by 5 percent, you can raise your profits by as much as 25 to 95 percent
• It’s easier to convert an existing buyer into a repeat customer than to turn a lead into a client
• Loyal customers are worth ten times more than a new acquisition

These are the major benefits that a knowledge base can help you achieve, by simply improving your customer retention. It’s a simple, but efficient, way of meeting your customers’ expectations.

3. You deliver more consistent customer support

The core benefit of having a knowledge base is its 24/7 availability. Your customers can access information when they need it, from any device. They don’t have to wait until the morning to call for support to solve a problem they could have fixed with two clicks.  

If you have an international audience over different time zones, you can provide all your customers with consistent help at any time of day or night.

Even better, every client in your database receives the same high-quality service fast, and without having to explain their problem to operators.  

A knowledge base allows you to hold your customer’s hand even when you sell hundreds of thousands of products every year. Without one, offering high-quality support to every user becomes impossible.

Your brand is your identity. Carry your brand identity into your knowledge base

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When you have how-to guides, tutorials, FAQs, or infographics that guide your customers on using your product, you can provide buyers with all the assistance they need.

According to SmartInsights’ 2018 search engine statistics, more than half of all internet traffic worldwide is mobile. With so many people connected to their smartphones, accessing your website in search of answers should be lightweight and instantaneous.

A mobile-friendly knowledge base brings you closer to your customers and can even exceed their expectations. Customers feel appreciated and respected when they get valuable advice and quick answers when and where they need them.

4. Manage your customers’ problems in a proactive manner

Reactive customer service is no longer enough to earn loyalty and good reviews. Customers want more than just someone who solves their existing problems.

You need to go from being reactive to being proactive.

To make your business successful, anticipate your customers’ needs and come up with innovative ways of helping them reach their goals.

You must work to grow with your customers.

Try to anticipate problems and solve them before they get noticed by your customers.

You also need to add value and teach your clients how to use your product to get the most out of every interaction.

A solid knowledge base that provides information and guides readers to learn more about specific features is an excellent way of bringing more value to the table.

Your clients can interactively learn new features by watching videos or following step-by-step guides. Better than that, they manage to do everything by themselves.

Make information easy to find in your knowledge base application, and both your customers and staff will thank you.

If your employees don’t have to spend time on every client that doesn’t know how to install a new feature, they can focus on more critical tasks. They can help to solve other tickets and provide more people with a positive customer experience, in less time.

5. A knowledge base can help you reduce phone calls

More than half of the people who call to get support have visited the company’s website first. In most cases, a well-documented knowledge base can help you to avoid this situation.

When you take the time to organize your knowledge base and increase its usability, the number of calls decreases significantly.

But for this to happen, you need to organize your articles into categories and subcategories, to make navigation easier.

You also need a killer search function that can recognise misspelt words or partial names of your products.

And, more importantly, you need to give accurate answers and keep your articles updated, to reflect the features of the latest version of your product.

If your customers can find all their answers online, they won’t need to waste precious minutes waiting to be connected to an operator.

You get less calls, which means fewer tickets.

You can cut down your costs while improving your customer support, all by implementing modern communication techniques.

6. It helps you become an authority in your niche

Authority online can bring you more sales opportunities. It’s a sign that you’re trustworthy and shows that you know your business.

When you have authority, search engines prioritize your site, your website ranks higher in search results, and your traffic increases.

You build brand recognition that generates trust and makes people buy.

If you invest in creating an accurate and exhaustive knowledge base software, you’re more likely to become an authority in your industry – the company that customers and even competitors look to for answers.

Self Service Knowledge base software for your documentation needs

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Like HubSpot for inbound marketing or Neil Patel for SEO.

But it’s not something you can achieve overnight. You need to collect feedback, improve your knowledge base articles regularly, keep all the information relevant, and come up with new and innovative content.

Brand authority is a vital sales tool long after you’ve gained your position in the market.

7. You have all your useful information in one place

A solid knowledge base is a useful resource for your employees, as well as your customers.

You gather all the documentation your staff needs when learning about your product in a single place.

Training new employees become faster and cheaper than sending them to a traditional classroom. This is because you can give them direct access to all the information with a single login.

Even your existing employees can go through guides and tutorials as often as they need to solve tickets or to deal with bugs in the system.

A knowledge base is a flexible tool that anyone can use to document old problems or to implement new processes in the company.

Everyone has quick access to information, saving resources and increasing productivity at work.

Final Thoughts

The ultimate benefit of having a knowledge base is that it saves both your customers and customer support team a lot of headaches.

Customers get what they want, when they want, with no need for human interaction.

And your employees have fewer calls to take, spend less time dealing with repetitive tasks and can focus on more important issues.

Cut down your support tickets by 50% or even less with an effective knowledge base

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It’s a win-win situation, in which you get to create positive interactions between your customers and your brand while keeping your employees working on creative tasks.

In the end, you get all the benefits of knowledge base: you spend less (thanks to fewer tickets and phone calls) while increasing your revenues (thanks to higher conversion and customer satisfaction).

Are you ready to make use of these benefits of the knowledge base in your business? Get started with Document360 now! Let us show you how!

The post 7 Benefits of Having a Good Knowledge Base appeared first on Document360.

Putting things in the right place is the key to better self-service in customer care. That means you should deliver valuable content, in small chunks, using accessible terminology.

Learning to create helpful knowledge base articles takes time and practice. You need to develop your skills to write content that’s engaging, clear, and informative at the same time.

Every article should be easy to follow, to make things as comfortable as possible for your users, no matter how familiar they are with your product.

Your knowledge base article should also be written in the right tone of voice—professional, but friendly.

The only way to achieve the best results is by mixing a relevant message with sharp writing techniques. And that’s not something you can craft overnight. You need to test your content and improve it on a regular basis.

That’s why we’ve put together the ultimate guide on how to write a knowledge base article to improve customer support.

Before you start writing a knowledge base article

Write a knowledge base article to reflect your objectives: you need to provide your clients with an excellent customer experience on your website, increase traffic, and improve customer retention.  

To make things easier, you need a strategy in place. What you do at this stage is vital for how you develop your content.

1. Fundamentals

Define the basics: How your knowledge base fits into your customer support and how you’ll develop it in time.

What topics are you going to cover in your articles?

How to write a knowledge base article better to outshine your competitors?

Defining the scope of your project can help you build a solid foundation for it. As you set a budget and some realistic objectives, you create a picture that gets clearer with every new detail. And, your ideas for quality content become easier.

2. Priorities

Write a knowledge base article with a balanced mix between your expertise and what the audience needs. You must go beyond your competencies and see how to put your knowledge to work.

You’re the expert, but what the customer wants to hear is equally crucial to the success of your knowledge base software.

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When you prioritize, you decide what articles to write first, based on the problems your customers deal with on a regular basis. You choose the topic area that makes a difference for your users, and build content on subjects of interest.

3. Audience

Write a knowledge base article with your public in mind – the people who use your software.

As with marketing, you should build a persona – your average client. This way, you get to know the people you’re really speaking to.

When you write a knowledge base article, remember, you’re talking to a public that already knows you. You don’t have to describe your products. Your mission is to teach your clients how to get the most out of what they purchased.

Build a content plan

Getting ideas for incredible articles is the hardest part of writing. That’s why you need to plan your content ahead. This method helps you to create content on a regular basis and makes sure you cover all the essential topics.

A content plan puts your ideas in order: topics to include and subjects to develop at every step of the project.  

How do you know what to start with?

Google can be a helpful guide. Search for the hot topics in the industry and see which results perform the best.

You can also use previous discussions with your clients and tickets you’ve solved in the past, to identify interesting topics for a truly comprehensive knowledge base solution.

Create a different article for every pain point you identify. This way, you’ll give accurate answers to your users, without getting lost in too many details.

Use specific titles

The titles you give your articles should be specific — what question you answer or what problem you solve.

You don’t use your company’s knowledge base to sell, so focus on usability, not drawing attention or hooking new clients.

The title doesn’t have to be eye-catching. It must tell your public what’s in your article. Facebook’s Help Center, for example, uses four types of titles:

• Closed questions: “Can I like or share videos on the Facebook video for TV app?” or “What are my privacy shortcuts?“
• Problems: “I can’t add a video.” or “My privacy settings are not working correctly.“
• How questions: “How do I view my information on Facebook?” or “How do I choose what I get notifications about?“
• Descriptive title (the exact phrase of the process you describe): “Cost per optimization event” or “Friending.“

These titles are optimised, making navigation easy for any user, new or already used to your knowledge base.

There are many more options than these four types of titles. Google Support, for example, has adopted the word “About” for many of the articles in its knowledge base: “About manual CPC bidding“, or “About campaign budgets“.

You can also work with words such as “Setting up“, “Creating“, “Getting started“, or “Using“, depending on your activity.

Here are some examples from MailChimp: “Set Up MailChimp Subscribe for iPad“, “Create a landing page“, or “Use Button Content Blocks“.

The “How to” title can also be a smart choice. It explains what each article is about with minimum words.

Keep intros short

It’s always tricky to craft the perfect introduction, especially when you have to draw attention and to convince the reader to keep reading. But that’s not the case when you write a knowledge base article.

Here, simplicity is key – say things as if you were talking to someone. You don’t have to create intrigue.

Think about what brings the readers to the article in the first place. Do they need to learn more about your product? Are they looking for an easy and quick solution to a problem?

Your readers are going to keep reading because they need answers. Otherwise, they’ll have to call for support. So, make sure you deliver what they need, and no one will notice your intro.

Make your knowledge base easily searchable on the internet

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The sooner you start talking about the topic, the better. If you need to explain a feature of your product, start your article with what that feature does. Simple as that!

One or two paragraphs are enough to enter into any topic. Just put three to five short sentences together, in which you explain what the article is covering.

Make sure your intro answers fundamental questions:

• What is the article about? — a function, feature, problem
• Who can act? — Premium users, all users, admins
• Where can the users access it? — what devices, what internet connection
• When will the feature be available? (if necessary)

When creating your internal knowledge base, some articles may be short (less than 100 words). In this case, get right into the answer. It helps your customers save time and provides a better experience.  

Write step-by-step guides

Most articles in your knowledge base should provide an in-depth answer to “How?”, as they guide your customers through various processes.

Your instructions should be enough to provide your readers with all the details they need to get the most out of your product or fix their problem.

Highlight every step (with numbers, bold text, headings, or subheadings) to make them visible.

Don’t make assumptions. You’re an expert, but your audience has less knowledge on the topic. What seems obvious to you isn’t always self-evident for a new customer.

When you direct your users to a specific page or section, add a link to it. Some users feel more comfortable when you hold their hands a little.

When you furnish your articles with links and helpful details, you provide your customers with everything they need and they won’t have to call for support.

Avoid ambiguity, by being as precise as you can. Give examples to clear doubts, when you feel this could add value to your readers.

Follow the workflow

To write a knowledge base article, start with building a structure. It will help you put your ideas in order.

First, note down the main thoughts, then develop each one with the necessary details.

Organize your article logically – from the first step to the last one, in exact chronological order. And before writing the article, go through the process yourself. This way, you’ll make sure you don’t miss any actions or steps.

If any problem can occur while performing a step, make sure you mention it when you describe the stage. If your customer uses your instructions to get things started, this information will be useful.

When following a sequence isn’t necessary, start with the most simple notions and leave the complicated concepts for the second half of the article.

To make the article easy to follow, break the content into short paragraphs, organised into sections and subsections.

Use lists, bullets, and tables to express your ideas. The fewer words you use, the more comfortable the reading for your customers.

Illustrate your knowledge base article with relevant visuals

People are more likely to remember technical details with coloured images, which increase a reader’s attention by 82 percent.

Adding relevant images when you write a knowledge base article can help you explain notions better. Plus, they save you and your readers a headache.

Using screenshots allows you to show every step, instead of describing them in long paragraphs. Communication becomes faster, more comfortable, and efficient.  

Using a screenshot tool, you can capture the right image for every step of the process and back up every instruction with the perfect visual.

To provide clear instructions, you can also add graphic elements to your images, such as directional arrows or circles, to guide your reader’s attention towards the subject of interest.

Place the image after the text that contains the instruction. This approach allows the user to understand the information easier. Placing the image first can create confusion, if the reader doesn’t understand what’s illustrated in it.

Insert videos to improve the user experience

When people can choose between video and text to learn about a product, most of them go for the video.

This type of content can help to create a knowledge base article more engaging and more appealing to your customers.

To make useful videos, you need software for screen capture and editing. And to host your videos, you can use platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or Loom.

Using videos can help you in optimizing your knowledge base SEO efforts. However, your knowledge base isn’t your business blog. So, use video content only when it allows you to add value to your readers.

Your brand is your identity. Carry your brand identity into your knowledge base

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A video is a good fit for tutorials, tips, descriptions of your product’s latest features, and summaries of white papers, and other similar complex documentation.

To increase the usability of your knowledge base, you should backup your videos with text — an optimized transcript of the visual content added to the same page.

You can also use video to start your topic and continue with written instructions that are easier to follow. It can help users who want to apply in real time to what they read.

Google uses this approach to provide its users with more information about complex topics.

Videos are less useful when you’re guiding visitors to solve problems and errors. In these situations, your users are looking for quick solutions.

A well-organised text is easy to scan for answers, unlike video, which users need to watch from beginning to end to capture the information they need.

Place the video at the beginning of the article or at the top of a new section. If you post it in the middle of a text, you risk distracting your readers and losing their attention.

Create a table of contents for longer articles

There’s no optimal word count for a knowledge base article.  From less than 100 words to more than 1,500. The ideal size allows you to cover the topic area from all angles.

As a rule of thumb, the shorter, the better. Too many unnecessary words will make readers lose their patience. They’ll stop reading and call for support to get quick answers.

When the topic requires more words, break the text up to make the article easy to browse. Cut the material into small paragraphs using headings and subheadings.

To facilitate navigation, you could create a Table of Contents. This way, users who don’t need to go through the entire article can jump directly to the part they’re interested in.

MailChimp places a table of contents on the left side of the screen with the title “In this article:“. As you read the article, the table highlights the section you’re currently on. If you want to go back or forth inside the text, you can do so by clicking the specific part in the table of contents.  

Include further reading suggestions

Your knowledge base software should be a network of excellent articles that complete each other. This way you give your users all the information they need to draw more benefits from using your product.

At the end of each article in your knowledge base, you can include a section for further reading, where you list articles on similar topics. You can name it using “You May Also Like” (Evernote), “Related Links” (Google), “Related Articles” (Facebook Help Centre), or other similar titles.

Providing additional information helps your readers find all the details they need without effort. Plus, you increase the time users spend on your site, which is a good sign for Google, and can help you improve your SEO.

Ask for feedback

An incredible self-service knowledge base article is updated on a regular basis. You need to keep every piece of content in your knowledge base relevant to your public.

The first step to improving articles is getting feedback from your users. So, at the bottom of each article in your knowledge base, ask your audience to evaluate the content.

Popular knowledge bases, like Google Support or Facebook Help Centre, use a straightforward system. They end their articles with a question like “Was this information helpful?“.

Users can choose from two options – Yes and No. It’s quick, comfortable, and efficient.

When your article doesn’t get good ratings, it’s time to make some changes and improve usability.

10 more tips for crafting engaging knowledge base articles

1. Keep a conversational tone. Write as you speak, to make sure your readers understand what you say.
2. Don’t use advanced terminology. Your knowledge base should be accessible to all your customers, regardless of their educational background or area of expertise. Avoid slang and jargon, as well.
3. Check your grammar. Errors and misspelt words draw attention and suggest poor quality content.
4. Optimise for targeted keywords. This way, your articles will be easy to find with the Search function.
5. Never add sales copy. People who access your knowledge base have already bought your product. Now they’re looking for help and extra information. Fail to give them that, and you’ll lose them instead of selling more.
6. Link to other pages when you think another article can provide more details on a topic. This way, people who aren’t in the right place can easily find what they’re looking for.
7. When covering significant problems, you can add a FAQs section at the bottom of the article. Here, you can give short answers to possible questions that a user may have after reading the text.
8. If you can’t quit on all technical terminology, consider adding a glossary that users can refer to when they don’t understand a term.
9. Keep a unique voice in all your articles. When you coordinate an entire team of technical writers, make sure they all respect the same guidelines.
10. Use a single term for every concept across all your articles, to avoid confusion. This way, users who read more material to look for answers won’t end up wondering if you’re talking about the same issue.

Final thoughts

Writing an incredible knowledge base article takes effort. You need to express many technical details in easy-to-read content, to make it available for users with basic knowledge in your area of expertise.

By following these guidelines, you can manage to create valuable articles and provide your audience with consistent content, to help them help themselves.

To make your knowledge base article creation easier, you could use a knowledge base software like Document360. Asides from improving the writing process through it’s simplified WYSIWYG markdown editor, it also makes it easier to improve your knowledge base’s information architecture.

Have you ever had trouble creating top-notch knowledge base articles? Did you use any of the above-mentioned practices? Let us know in the comments section below.

Are you ready to get started with your knowledge base? Why not give Document360 a try? With an uncompromised authoring experience, you’ll be writing incredible knowledge base articles in no time.

The post How to Write an Incredible Knowledge Base Article appeared first on Document360.

Millennials are unsurprisingly obsessed with smartphones and technology. They’re mobile and expect immediacy and efficiency from the brands they interact with.

But if there’s one thing millennials hate, it’s using their phones to call for support.

According to a Salesforce survey, almost:

These numbers speak for themselves. You must provide your customers with excellent support with minimal human interaction to keep them hooked on your product.

You need to give them clear instructions, easy-to-follow user manuals, and an exhaustive collection of FAQs — all wrapped in a modern and intuitive product.

In other words, your customers must have access to a user-friendly knowledge base, where they can find their answers fast, with no need for external help.

Implementing Self-service support is a must for a generation that grew up surrounded by digital devices. Millennials have high expectations from brands, whether they’re looking for information for personal purposes or work.

This approach can help you increase customer retention across all generations, including Baby Boomers and Generation Z.

And here are some more statistics that underline the importance of creating a knowledge base.

People want instant help

Fact: no one likes to dial numbers guided by a recorded message, hoping to get in touch with a human.

A customer service test made back in 2009 by the BBC showed that customers had to wait up to 24 minutes to access the customer service line of some of the biggest communication companies in the UK.

Today, these numbers would be unthinkable for a business that wants to improve customer retention.

Calling or writing long emails is not a good fit for modern customers. Whatever software you’re selling, you need to give people immediate access to information.

To meet such high expectations, you need an intuitive knowledge base, built with your customers in mind.

Creating FAQ pages can provide easy access to customers or users from any device. Furthermore, visitors should be able to navigate through various topics alone, to get the answers they’re looking for.

You must create knowledge base portal, where customers get a personalised experience, based on their history with your brand.

Simple and intuitive knowledge base software for your business needs

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Your knowledge base should have built-in insights that allow you to analyse previous interactions. Use this data to give accurate answers to all possible questions and to improve the customer experience.

This way, your customers won’t have to come back for a second interaction with your brand to solve a problem.

Statistics to Support

This is bad for business. If your clients have to call for technical support after visiting your website, you risk losing them to your competitors.

Building a company knowledge base is the first step towards better customer service. But you need to update content on a regular basis, to remain relevant.

Do keyword research to see what your customers are looking for in your knowledge base. This way, you can optimise your content to help users navigate faster through your website.

Simply uploading content is not enough to provide an excellent customer experience. 

Many companies encourage their customers to check their spelling or to use more specific keywords to make searching easier.

This approach kind of leaves the responsibility on the customer and isn’t going to improve the user experience.

Make things easier for them by delivering a killer search engine that can provide results even when your customers introduce misspelt words or forget the exact name of your product.

Customers prefer using the knowledge base to get their answers

And the number is growing as new technologies help to create knowledge base more interactive and easy to use.

The quality of the service is vital. Create a knowledge base as a well-organised helpful tool, available 24/7, from anywhere.

Your customers can access technical support at any hour, straight from their smartphone. This is a massive advantage if you’re a global company, with customers in different time zones.

Most clients just like their privacy. Or they don’t want to look stupid asking questions.

Sometimes, previous experiences with bored or rude call centre operators (not necessarily from your company) keep people from calling for help.

Create a knowledge base that gives you the chance to provide your customers with answers using a channel where they’re in the driving seat.

This way, people feel confident with using your products, and you gain their trust, as well.

A knowledge base software means faster customer service. Period.

People get their answers when they need it, with no time wasted looking for contact information, calling or emailing.

If you focus your efforts on improving your product to meet your customers’ expectations, you’re more likely to have happy customers.

Knowledge base takes your business to the next level

Many problems your customers have can be solved by explaining things in 300 words or less.

And, once you write the answer, all customers dealing with the same issue can get their instructions online.

This way, you reduce the number of tickets, which means you get to cut down costs and increase efficiency.

By transforming your old FAQ section into a modern knowledge base, you keep up with your competitors (or even step ahead of them).   

An optimised knowledge base can boost your SEO, as more people come to find their answers directly on your site.

If you provide users with high-quality content, they won’t be looking for answers somewhere else. They’ll spend their time on your website, looking to learn more about their topics of interest.

This customer behaviour means lower bounce rates and increased time spent on page, which are indicators to Google that your website is a reliable source of information.

Customer service is vital when you’re looking to keep hold of your clients.

The more you give them, the higher the chances of creating a long-term relationship. So create knowledge base a valuable source of information.

How to Improve Strength to Your Knowledge Base

Publish “how-to” articles, white papers, e-books, and case studies to support your customers with relevant, updated information.

Use all types of content to make sure you draw attention — infographics, video tutorials and also the screenshots that illustrate how your product works.

The trend is clear: as a knowledge base is a cost-effective way of providing high-quality customer support, more companies are going to invest in improving their old Help Centres.

So if you want to keep up with the market, first of all you must create internal knowledge base that encourages high usability.

The Knowledge Base Software that scales with your Product

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With fewer customers willing to pick up the phone to call technical support, you have to provide an efficient alternative.

There is no question that today’s clients are technologically savvy and would like rapid solutions to their difficulties rather than waiting for a support representative to assist them.

People nowadays seek to address their problems quickly by using a self-service knowledge base. With an excellent knowledge base, you can give fast solutions to your clients’ commonly asked questions. This aids in the reduction of customer support requests, the reduction of customer support expenses, and the improvement of customer happiness.

AI customer service is revolutionizing how businesses serve the people who support them, collaborating with human employees to deliver rapid, convenient, and personalised assistance.

Also Read : 100+ Customer Service Statistics You Should Know

Final thoughts

All these statistics show that people are ready for self-service customer support. In fact, they prefer it to the old-fashioned methods of getting customer care.

Your clients are looking for faster ways to deal with difficulties. They want answers at the same time when they need them, and can’t afford to waste hours having their problems fixed. Not when they can solve everything by reading one or two articles online.

Don’t quit on your call centre just yet. But, you should use it for more serious problems, not for giving the same answer to four different customers on the same day. You can use your knowledge base for that.

Creating a self-service knowledge base can help you increase customer satisfaction and retention rates, which will in turn increase your profits. Better yet, you get to cut costs by assisting your customers more efficiently.

In simple words, you get to give your customers what they want, while increasing efficiency all around.

Finally convinced about the importance of a knowledge base for your website? Why not give Document360 a try? It’s simple, effective, and ready to implement — contact us today!

The post 16 Knowledge Base Trends & Statistics To Consider in 2024 appeared first on Document360.

Your documentation is a valuable source of information for both your staff and your clients. Every tutorial, “how-to” article and guide that you curate and share can improve the user experience and customer relationship.

In this digital era when everybody wants answers instantly with little or no human interaction, a solid knowledge base software puts you ahead of your competitors.

When your clients can solve their issues without the old annoying calls to technical support, you’re more likely to keep customer retention rates high and onboard new ones more easily.

So, your technical content is an excellent resource for marketing, as well as customer service.

That’s why you should include your knowledge base articles in your content strategy, and make the most of every document and data that you share.

And if you want to create the best product documentation that your customers are searching for, you’ll need to keep a few things in mind.

Let’s take a closer look.

Why you need to track where customers are visiting

What your clients do with the information you share gives you important clues about their expectations regarding your content.

This becomes the starting point for developing a customer-centric content strategy, which is 100 percent focused on your customers’ actual needs.

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If you manage to accelerate and simplify interactions with your clients, you can increase your win rate by as much as 40 percent. And having a solid internal knowledge base can improve your technical support significantly.

When you track your clients’ behaviour inside your knowledge base, you get useful data. This data will help you develop your content strategy in two directions:

You can focus on the topics that are important for your clients to build a fulfilling knowledge base

If you build a chaotic knowledge base, where you try to give exhaustive details on everything, there’s a higher chance of providing poor quality.

You deliver sub-par content with a high volume of data to process, and you fail to offer your customers the quality assistance they need. This approach can lead to customers having to ask for additional support on the phone. That’s the very thing you’re trying to avoid.

On the other hand, when you know what your clients are searching for, you can understand their problems and deliver custom-made solutions in your documentation.

You can concentrate on the topics that can make a difference for your users, and provide detailed technical reports, user manuals, or extensive guides that help them get the most out of your products and services.

You can rethink your content strategy to deliver customized content to your target
public

Based on your clients’ content consumption habits, you can identify possible topics for your business blog. Additionally, it can also help you in generating ideas for your knowledge base content.

This way, you can improve your content strategy, by passing from general issues, to specific pain points of your customers.

This method can help you drive more traffic to your website, reduce bounce rates, and transform you into an authority in your niche. You’ll also identify stronger keywords for SEO purposes.

When your business blog answers precise questions, you’re more likely to target qualified traffic – people who have a real interest in your specific products and are more likely to buy from you.

Better still, you’ll catch the attention of decision-makers, and the people inside companies whose opinion matters the most.

You’ll attract more prospects into your sales funnel, get more leads, and increase conversion rates, as well!

That doesn’t mean you have to transfer your knowledge base to your blog, though. You just have to use some of that info to create knowledge base content that attracts new audiences.

If you engagingly rewrite your technical data, with no sensitive data and no in-house terminology, your blog will become a valuable resource far and wide.

Here are a few ways to understand what your customers are searching for in your documentation:

Ask Your Customers for Feedback

Asking your customers for feedback is the easiest way to understand what they are looking for in your documentation. In the other way how useful your knowledge base is to them.

To evaluate the user experience, you can create a rating system for your content. Or you can encourage users to share their opinions in the comment section, depending on how many customers you have and how extensive your documentation is.

In both cases, you get first-hand information right from your customers.

Google’s support desk uses a straightforward system to check out customer satisfaction. At the end of each of their technical support articles, you can find the question “Was this article helpful?”, with two possible answers: Yes and No.

Facebook’s help center has implemented the same system as well. Articles published in the Help Center are followed by the question “Was this information helpful?”. Again, users can choose between Yes and No to evaluate the quality of each article.

The system is easy to implement and doesn’t require too much interaction with your clients. It’s comfortable for your users, who are reading your knowledge base for work, so they don’t have too much time to waste writing out their opinion.

If your content gets an excellent rating, you can display your customers’ satisfaction rate on your website. Social proof can help you to gain more trust and improve your online image, among other important benefits.

The only drawback with such a simple rating system is that it gives you little information about how you can improve your content, to make it more useful for your customers.

You get to know the article wasn’t helpful, but that’s pretty much all. It doesn’t tell you what the client was looking for in your knowledge base.

Solution to this Problem

A solution to counter this problem is to gather information from more sources. You can encourage customers to leave comments, for example, for the articles that are usually rated not helpful.

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You can ask your employees and contributors to test your knowledge base solutions and come up with possible scenarios.  They can also consider their previous interactions with clients for this purpose.

Analytics Has All the Answers

Built-in analytics can give you detailed reports about what users look for inside your knowledge base. This tool can provide you with significant information about your customers’ behaviour.

You can use analytics for more than just identifying your most popular topics read by visitors. It also helps seeing how many customers got support through your knowledge base.

Knowing how many searches you had in a month is important than knowing just page views and number of visitors.

You can get in-depth information about what your customers are looking for in your documentation, and whether they found the solutions they needed.

You can track every customer’s journey in your company knowledge base and see how each article helped them solve their problems.

These metrics tell you exactly what your strong points are and what you need to improve. In other words, they give you all the data you need to know what’s missing from your knowledge base.

Every question or keyword that didn’t provide an answer is a new idea for a future article or How-to guide.

This way, you get to curate your content and make new documentation accessible to improve the customer experience. No more guessing or putting yourself in your customer’s shoes – unless you want to anticipate their needs!

Besides that, analytics can show you how you can improve your entire service. If many customers ask for a specific feature, you can try to implement it in your product to increase satisfaction.

Use Surveys to Learn More About Your Clients’ Needs

Surveys can help you improve your business relationship with your existing clients.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Surveys help you obtain useful feedback from your partners. The more specific your questions, the higher the chances of getting helpful information about how you can improve your knowledge base.

You can use satisfaction questions, where possible answers go on a rating scale from satisfied (on a scale of 5) and somewhat satisfied to somewhat dissatisfied, and insufficient experience to evaluate (rating scale of 1).

Or, you can use statements, in which case your respondents can agree or disagree (or choose a neutral option, in the case of not enough experience).

Depending on your clients, you can try to include open questions. Respondents can write their answers and give you suggestions on how you can improve your knowledge base.

The most efficient way of getting answers is by emailing the survey to your business partners. This way, they can decide when to answer, depending on their availability.

Include various clients in your survey, to make sure you cover a wide range audience.

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Closing Comments

Your documentation has enormous marketing potential as it allows you to provide your clients with advanced customer support.

A solid knowledge base that your business partners can use whenever they’re in need is a commanding advantage over the competition.

Every time you provide efficient technical support online, without phone calls or human interaction, you improve the user experience and increase customer retention rates.

Better yet, when you track your clients’ searches in your knowledge base, you learn more about,

1. How they think
2. How they use your products

This data is vital when looking to improve your service and your reputation in the industry – which means more clients and higher revenues in the long run.

Are you looking for a knowledge base software with built-in analytics to help you understand what customers are searching for? Contact us for your free trial!

The post How to Understand What Your Customers are Searching for in Your Documentation appeared first on Document360.