Creating Knowledge Base Content to Help Customers

Customers will stay loyal if you give them a good experience.

Or they will go to your competitors, with more than half of customers switching companies because of poor customer service.

With customer service playing a big part in brand loyalty and business success.

Businesses know they have to scale their service as their customer base grows.

But with more customers to manage, it becomes hard to maintain a high-quality service. 

That’s where a knowledge base helps take the pressure off agents and customers by helping customers find solutions to their problems.

So in this blog post, we will learn the best steps to create knowledge base articles.

Let’s dive right in.

Creating Knowledge Base Content

All knowledge bases aren’t the same but the following steps will help you improve your knowledge base:

Content strategy

First plan your knowledge base content as much as you can by answering the following:

• What your customers need to know
• Your customers’ most common pain points
• The best way to answer different customer queries or problems
• How customers will navigate your knowledge base
• Where your knowledge base fits in your broad customer service strategies

These answers will help build a framework for your knowledge base content.

Giving you an idea of:

• The issues or topics you need to cover
• The type of content needed to address each subject

For example, a troubleshooting guide can address common product issues but an FAQ page is better for answering questions about your services.

Readers’ perspective

Create your knowledge base content for the target reader by knowing who wants to read it and how they want to consume it.

Do this by putting yourself in your customers shoes and determining how they feel when they look for help.

Are they frustrated by a problem with your product or are they confused about your service feature?

Then use the answers to correctly position each content, showing your customers that you understand their needs and want to help them.

Doing so will prevents:

• Customers leaving your company if they don’t feel you care about them
• Writer bias from damaging your content

Writer bias is when you assume your readers understand a topic like you and don’t explain things as clearly as needed.

This targets your content at more advanced users who don’t need help from your knowledge base content.

Offer valuable solutions

Remember the purpose of your knowledge base content. 

They aren’t marketing content so don’t use them to explain the benefits of your product. 

Instead your content must offer real solutions to readers, always answering questions or issues customers are experiencing.

This shows that you understand the customer’s problem and are helping them solve it.

Real-world context

Make sure your content is relevant to readers by showing customers the success your product or service brings.

This includes case studies showing how people or businesses use your product or service features to accomplish goals.

But remember, you’re not selling with your customer support content.

So don’t include an example or case study if it doesn’t answer a reader’s question.

Formatting & features

Taking your knowledge base seriously with the style and appearance of its content.

Try using different content formats to appeal to different consumers, like:

• Video Tutorials
• Infographics
• Step-by-Step Guides
• How-To Guides
• Glossaries of Words and Phrases

Visual elements in your content can help get the information across to users.

For example, screenshots, graphs and other features can help customers who prefer learning visually rather than from text.

Formatting support content like marketing pages like using action-oriented headlines to help readers find relevant information pages. 

Also step-by-step lists and bullet points help customers scan content efficiently and robust structures give pages better reader experience.

Easy access

Customers want answers to questions quickly so add a search bar so users can search articles by topic or keywords.

Also use links between support content to help people research related issues.

Remember to pay attention to your content’s searchability to help customers find articles when searching your website or Google.

Do this by doing keyword research to know how people search for your content, then work phrases used to find your content into page elements:

• Article Titles: Short, action-oriented titles with a primary keyword
• Metadata: Phrases used by customers in page descriptions
• Content Body: Naturally add keywords to the content body
• Anchor Text: Link between knowledge base articles, use keywords in anchor text, not ‘click here’ or something similar

Update, adapt & improve

Creating knowledge base content is an ongoing process, you need to continually update, adapt and improve it.

Customers don’t want to find support articles and answers that are out of date.

So check your knowledge base and replace or edit content that needs current information.

Also collecting customer feedback will help improve your published content.

Conclusion

The best knowledge base content helps and informs customers.

So create your guides and other content for your target customers by following the steps mentioned above.

And for more Knowledge base information, read about customer self-service.

Now it’s over to you.

Tell me the steps you take when creating knowledge base content to help customers?

Let me know in the comment section below.