A knowledge base is an online library of resources containing tutorials, guides, or answers about a topic, product, or service. They contain an organization’s external or internal data and are easily accessible to customers and workers. A good knowledge base is important for both customers and companies because they help solve problems proactively. This results in higher customer satisfaction because customers are empowered to find solutions themselves without calling customer service agents.
A solid knowledge base allows employees of a company to provide a more consistent service. When every worker can easily refer to the same reference material, there’ll be less confusion about a business’s best practices. Also, a good knowledge base helps you save money and time that would have been spent on customer service inquiries. It’ll allow your customer service team to become more productive as they’d have fewer generic inquiries to respond to.
Your knowledge base should be effective in helping you achieve your business goals. Here are 5 crucial tips for creating a knowledge base for your software product.
Table of Contents
Stay Within your Brand
When creating a knowledge base for your software product, choose a specific voice and design, and stick to it. The voice and style should align with your brand to ensure there’s consistency. This is crucial because your knowledge base will not just tell customers about the product you’re offering but about your business and what they should expect from you.
To help you stay within your brand, create a style guide that is consistent with your entire company brand. Include writing guidelines and specific formatting for your articles. That way, there’ll be uniformity regardless of who’s creating pieces for your knowledge base or updating them.
Incorporate Video Where Possible
Videos are great for a knowledge base because they are more appealing to customers and offer them practical learning experiences. Incorporate videos when what you’re explaining is better shown than described through texts. For example, if you’re explaining a complex task or process involving a long list of steps, customers will follow easily with a video guide. Also, using a video when introducing a new software product will let your customers see how easy it is to use the product. A free screen recorder can let you create videos for your knowledge base, share them, and track their performance by showing how long people watched them.
Make it Accessible
No matter how informative a knowledge base is, it won’t help you achieve your business goals if it’s not accessible. Your software product knowledge should be available on your company’s website. When providing other forms of support, feature links to your knowledge base. That way, your customers can easily find your content and benefit from them.
Also, check that your knowledge base is mobile-friendly and optimized for search engines to allow potential customers using the internet to find you easily. When using images and videos, add alt text (alternative texts) to facilitate search engine optimization. Also, use clear backgrounds so that your content won’t be challenging to read. Include hyperlinks in your tables of contents so that readers interested in specific parts of your knowledge base can easily navigate long articles.
Check its Effectiveness
After creating a knowledge base for your software product, check its effectiveness to know if you’re achieving your company’s goals and meeting customers’ needs. Provide a means (e.g., email address) for customers to leave feedback and ask questions to enable you to know if you’re getting it right. Alternatively, include a single-question feedback survey at the end of your article, asking your customers if they found your material helpful.
You can also leverage an analytics system to measure the amount of traffic to your knowledge base. This lets you know the number of people using your knowledge base. You can run this assessment weekly or monthly.
Keep Updating your Knowledge Base
Regularly review and update your software product knowledge base. Using data from an analytics system and customer feedback, you can know the areas that need improvement and updating. As a rule of thumb, never share outdated articles with your audience. Find out if there are newer ways to fix or use things and include them in your content.
Also, if there were changes to your company or software product, ensure that they’re reflected in your knowledge base. Don’t leave your customers guessing why certain features in your software have changed or how to use them. Tell them about the changes beforehand through your knowledge base.
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