A well-conceived knowledge base can act as a useful virtual self-service portal for your customers.

You’ll find many takers if you have a comprehensive and strategic knowledge base integrated into your website or chatbot. In this blog, we will understand what it takes to create an impactful knowledge base–complete with tips, strategies, and hacks–that are equal parts educative, convenient, and useful for the customers.

How to Effectively Draft Knowledge Base Content

Let’s start by understanding the steps you need to do to create an insightful and actionable knowledge base content:

Step 1: Think About the End Goal of Your Content

Will your knowledge base be instruction-driven, or is it there to address the basic FAQ-type questions that your customers are facing on a daily basis? Do you need to include product-driven demos and how-to videos, or will PDF-type documentation suffice?

You can answer all these questions and more once you have the end goal/strategy/purpose of the knowledge base nailed down. So collaboratively think about why you need a knowledge base in the first place before you start working on the content.

Step 2: Speak to Your Customer Service Team to Understand What Kind of Content to Cover

As a rule of thumb, get your marketing, and sales teams involved when brainstorming about the kind of content to include within your knowledge base-from the range of topics to the content format.

Step 3: Have a Proper Structure and Layout in Place 

Once you have the list of topics in place, you can think about the kind of structure and layout your knowledge base should showcase. There are thousands of layouts you can play with. However, the trick lies in building an intuitive, organized, and logical structure. Try to group similar information together so that your customers can easily find what they’re looking for in one place.

Step 4: Look at the Existing Forms of Content

 

You don’t always need to start from scratch when building a knowledge base. Chances are that you already have content to choose from. This includes FAQs on your website, internal documentation such as policies, etc., customer guides, live chat interactions, social media posts, product images, etc. that you can draw inspiration from and use for your knowledge base content. Just make sure to reword the content, keeping it as up to date and relevant as possible.

Step 5: Create New Content Consistently

Once you have a clear blueprint of the content forms, structure, layout, and type, all you need to do is work on creating new content. This ensures that your knowledge base is always current and addresses the user’s needs in real-time. Make your knowledge base content SEO-optimized by using the right keywords. You can also use terms and phrases that your customers use often in relation to your brand to ensure that the content feels familiar and relevant to the reader.

Next, let’s look at some of the most important factors you should consider when creating a knowledge base from a general perspective:

• Update and refresh the content on a timely basis: As mentioned earlier, if your knowledge base contains outdated information, it’ll create a negative brand effect. So make sure to keep revisiting the content and promote topics that are most current.
• Create a dedicated team/person who will be responsible for making changes and owning the knowledge base.
• Use proper formatting–complete with bullets, related links, sub-headings, bold and italics, and short paragraphs–to boost visibility and readability.
• Avoid any unnecessary distractions and place the most important information first. Chronology is extremely important.
• As a gold standard, comb through your customer interactions to use catchphrases and terms that your customers use most often. The idea is to ‘get into the customer’s mindset’ and use their words/language to boost content readability.
• Promote your knowledge base in-app or on specific pages on the website (such as Product page, Checkout page, etc.) by using specific tools.
• Always include a Search bar to make it easier for customers to find the information instantly and easily.

Finally, let’s look at some of the most critical challenges that you might face when building a knowledge base:

• Your knowledge base goals might not align with what the users want. For instance, you may have a worded FAQ section in place when users really want to see how to use your product, especially if it is complicated to use in the first place. Hence, time and care should be taken to narrow down on the right goals and strategies that genuinely address the user’s needs.
• The content included might be inaccurate or worse, irrelevant. This often happens with knowledge bases that focus deeply on the product features but not enough on how the product will benefit the reader. The content needs to be user-centric and should demonstrate user benefits at all times.
• Issues of team coordination and collaboration can lead to a disjointed knowledge base that feels (and reads) incomplete. This will further leave the reader confused and frustrated. In such a case, you should always include a Contact section at the end of every page to allow users to get their queries addressed instantly.

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