These days, many companies offer a knowledge base for their customers to use. The self-service aspect of knowledge bases makes them natural time-savers for users and businesses alike.
But a knowledge base – or, as we call it here at Intercom, a help center – shouldn’t stand alone as your only support option. Nor should it be viewed as a detour on the way to talking to a human being. It should be part of a larger toolset aimed at developing customer success and helping your users achieve their goals.
Show your customers you care about their success by providing a well-managed knowledge base – one that solves problems, saves them time, and ultimately reduces the risk of churn. Here are some of the best practices we use here at Intercom to run our help center.
Knowledge base best practices: 5 tips for customer success
So how do you create a great knowledge base that develops customer success? The best knowledge bases don’t just offer great content; they actively help users find answers. By following a few knowledge base best practices for your content and site experience, you’ll make a big impact on how your customers find and use information in their time of need.
1. Start with accurate and up-to-date articles
Customers prefer using an online help center, but finding incorrect, out-of-date, or even misleading information can sour the experience.
Update and publish help articles as soon as you launch new features. It’s immediately after a feature release that your customers will be most curious, and therefore have the most questions. Ultimately, publishing timely how-to articles and best practice guides will greatly improve your feature adoption rates.
To produce and maintain articles that meet your customers’ needs, work closely with your product management (PM), product marketing (PMM) and customer support (CS) teams.
Our Product Education team strives to maintain an encyclopedic knowledge of our products. But true encyclopedic knowledge is never static. So we stay close to the source of knowledge at all times: our product managers. As their teams plan, build, and release in six-week cycles, we sync with them three to five times each cycle to understand the upcoming changes and prepare for these releases with new help center articles.
Understanding why something is being built is especially important, as it’ll allow you to explain why customers need a certain feature. As the cycle progresses, we’ll try out new features, document its functionality, and develop best practices for it. Finally, when we’re closer to a release, we’ll write and share a draft of the knowledge base article so they can review its accuracy and help us fine-tune the smaller details.
2. Make your help articles easy to follow
Large blocks of text will likely make your users’ eyes glaze over. Help them easily find the info they need in your articles by using bullet points and lists, images (including GIFs and emoji), and videos to explain tricky concepts and break up space.
Consider breaking your help center articles into smaller, “bite-sized” chunks of information. Not every detail about a certain aspect of your product or service needs to live on the same page: you can create a “how to set up” article, “how to customize,” “how to integrate,” and so on.
Along with being easier for existing customers to read and digest, this approach can help you rank highly in searches for specific phrases, helping you attract new customers. For example, ProfitWell’s knowledge base article on understanding delinquent churn ranks highly in Google searches for phrases like “delinquent customer churn,” which leads prospects to their product.
By breaking down their knowledge base into multiple smaller articles, ProfitWell helps current and potential customers more easily find the exact information they need.
3. Define any new or potentially confusing terms
Before you publish a new knowledge base article, look it over for any confusing terms, industry-specific terms, and acronyms. Explain the meaning of special terms or spell out acronyms the first time you use them, even if you think your audience already knows what they mean. You could also dedicate some space at the start of the article to defining common terms, or link to a glossary – like our own Intercom Glossary – where you’ve defined these phrases in detail.
“Take a look at conversations you’ve had with your customers in the past to see what they had questions about”
When you know something inside and out, identifying what others may find confusing can be a challenge. Take a look at conversations you’ve had with your customers in the past to see what they had questions about. Additionally, if you had beta testers for your product, they may have provided direct feedback on in-app language they found confusing, so don’t forget to look over their thoughts, too.
4. Make navigating your knowledge base easy
You may have a hundred useful articles, but if customers can’t find what they need, they’re likely to get frustrated.
Internal search, breadcrumb navigation, links to related articles, and consistent on-page navigation options (like menus or back and forward links) are all ways that you can improve your help center’s navigation.
Additionally, if you have a lot of articles, breaking down your content into logical groupings – like areas of your product, or the different jobs people will be doing with it – can help you further organize it in a sensible way in menus. Many support teams use a card sorting exercise to guide this process.
Article collections in Intercom’s Help Center
5. Distribute your articles everywhere
One final thing to think about: one of the biggest mistakes a company can make is creating incredibly useful knowledge base content and linking to it from a single spot in their website header or footer. While you definitely want your help center to live in its own special location, you don’t want the content to be so siloed that your team forgets the articles exist and customers never use them.
Look for opportunities to surface your knowledge base articles at relevant times and locations. These include in-app tooltips or UI prompts, links from relevant landing pages or blog posts, drip email campaigns to new or upgrading users, and even conversations with your support team.
It’s even easier to surface the information inside your knowledge base if you’re using Intercom. You can:
Use customer behavior to link to specific Articles – for example, if they’re viewing a feature in-app for the first time, or looking at a page on your site for more than a minute.
Allow customers to search Articles directly from the Messenger.
Quickly share Articles in customer conversations, directly answering questions and resolving common issues.
With Intercom’s Messenger and Articles working together, your customers can effortlessly find the info they need, no matter where they are in your product.
The business impact of a great knowledge base
Customers need online knowledge bases to find answers to questions, to learn more about your product, or to make the process of teaching someone else (like a teammate) a little easier. The benefit of these knowledge repositories isn’t just on the customer side, though.
1. Self-help methods reduce costs
A well-built knowledge base allows you to keep your support team lean, even as you scale. Research shows that automated support interactions – like help centers and chatbots – can cost pennies whereas support interactions that require input from a human – like phone or email support – can cost more than $13 per interaction.
“Your support team can spend more of their time helping customers with complex issues”
This data shouldn’t deter you from providing human support, which has plenty of benefits. What it really highlights is just how much money you can save by pairing human support with a self-service knowledge base as well. You won’t have to hire additional team members to answer basic questions, and your support team can spend more of their time helping customers with complex issues, sharing feedback with product teams, or creating true customer delight.
2. Knowledge bases reduce churn
Difficulty understanding how to use and find success with a product is a top reason for churn. You should do everything in your power to address this potential for churn, and that includes creating and updating a knowledge base.
The guidance found in your help center unblocks confused or struggling users, making them less likely to abandon your product for a different solution. Your articles also turn novice users into knowledgeable pros who feel confident continuing to use your product, even if they face new questions or challenges. By giving customers the information they need to become expert users of your product, a knowledge base becomes a critical retention tool.
Your knowledge base isn’t a deflection tool
You might be wondering, why offer other support options if customers can self-serve through a knowledge base?
It might seem counter-intuitive, but our user testing actually shows if customers know they can get help when they need it – via phone, email, live chat, and so on – they’re more willing to look for an answer on their own first.
“The best way to think about a knowledge base is as one part of your support ecosystem”
So the best way to think about a knowledge base is as one part of your support ecosystem. Your articles may not have all the answers a customer needs, or may not be easily accessible to all visitors. Linking from your knowledge base to the rest of your ecosystem, like your help desk and live chat, allows customers to get the help they need when they need it.
Analytics app Baremetrics does this well, allowing their knowledge base visitors to immediately click over to live chat if they can’t find what they need or if they have a complex question that needs a human touch.
By using Intercom, Baremetrics puts multiple support options – like their knowledge base articles and live chat – right within reach.
Making other support options easily accessible from your knowledge base ultimately reassures your customers that you have their best interests at heart.
How to manage your knowledge base efficiently
If your product’s constantly changing, it might seem near impossible to keep your help articles up to date. But you don’t need to staff a large team to upkeep your knowledge base. Try implementing these best practices to help you quickly identify changes needed and efficiently make updates.
1. Create templates for common topics
Your support team members shouldn’t have to build every new article from scratch. With multiple people working on your team – especially as your company grows – you might start spotting inconsistencies between your documentation that have a real impact on the customer experience.
Building a template for your knowledge base documentation – even if it’s just a simple sketch or document – will help your team understand what a successful article should look like. A sample template might look something like this:
2. Create a feedback loop with your support team
Even with a team of writers, broken articles will nearly always be noticed first by the people reading them – your customers. They’ll notice if an article is out of date, if it doesn’t explain a process clearly enough, or if there’s a knowledge gap in your help center.
“Keeping your ears close to your customers is one of the most impactful ways you can keep your help center fresh”
How do you get feedback from thousands of eyes instead of dozens? By building a feedback loop with your support team. Keeping your ears close to your customers is one of the most impactful ways you can keep your help center fresh. If you create a feedback loop with your customer support team and implement your customers’ suggestions, your help center will become a much more valuable resource in a matter of weeks.
If a customer finds something out of date on Intercom’s Help Center, our support reps can easily contact our team through the Messenger. Reps are asked to send a link to the article, a screenshot of the specific issue, a brief description of the problem, and a solution. Our education team reviews their request, gathers any missing information, and makes the update.
A feedback loop allows our team to quickly surface – and resolve – issues with our knowledge-base docs.
Many of the updates we make to our articles are surfaced by our Customer Support team. Our close relationship with them is crucial to keeping our Help Center as accurate as it can be. Instead of relying solely on our own audits, we can instead utilize our customers’ valuable feedback through this channel and gather quality feedback at scale.
3. Prompt your customers for feedback
Of course, the key to a successful feedback loop is input from your customers. If customers don’t know how to give your support team feedback on your help center, or if that feedback option is too hard to use, they won’t be able to point out anything that’s broken or unhelpful.
For example, one of our customers, Productboard, allows their customers to rate each article in their knowledge base. If a customer adds a negative rating to an article, a bot will immediately send a message letting the customer know that they can ask a human for help.
If a customer doesn’t get the information they need from the Productboard knowledge base, the Intercom task bot will immediately connect that customer with the support team.
When you ask, you might find that you only need to make small improvements to truly help your customers succeed. So don’t be afraid: getting this honest feedback will tell you what needs to be changed, where, and how you can help more people long term, and it will ultimately take a bigger load off of your support team.
4. Prioritize your updates
Managing help articles is a process of constant prioritization. Depending on how often your product teams ship new features, you might have to be comfortable with a certain level of out-of-date material while you focus on the most important changes.
“A greater level of prioritization will help you keep your knowledge base articles helpful”
Not all inaccuracies in your knowledge base are created equal. If you’ve changed the color or style of a button, but it’s still in the same place and does the same thing, there’s probably not an urgent need to update the screenshots in your docs. But if the button has changed locations, or there are now three buttons instead of one, make it a priority to update those images.
If you’re having trouble deciding what to update, and when, ask your yourself: Is this article fundamentally broken, and is it confusing customers? Or is the inaccuracy cosmetic, and one that doesn’t harm customers’ understanding of the product? If you’re in a company with a high volume of product changes, a greater level of prioritization will help you keep your knowledge base articles helpful.
A strong knowledge base is just one piece of the customer support puzzle
An easily accessible, searchable, and readable knowledge base tells your users that you care about their success. To make it as impactful as possible, consider how well it fits into your full support offering. Ideally, your prospects, trial users, and paying customers should all be able to flow from one support channel to another with zero difficulty finding the information they need.
As long as your knowledge base fits neatly into that whole puzzle – and makes it just as easy for customers to jump in and find information as it is to start a live chat session for more help – you’ll keep your churn risk low and customer happiness high.
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