[Blog] Best practices to write knowledge articles
Knowledge articles play a crucial role and remain as the backbone of every successful organization that provides great customer service.
When users have a question that can range from solutions to common issues, product or feature documentation, answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), product briefs, and more, they expect an answer quickly. This fact certainly hasn't changed in the world of customer service, but one thing has— how we communicate.
The knowledge articles have been a key enabler of the self-service that can address any number of issues your users encounter while using your organization's product or services and users continue to expect quick access to information.
In this post, you are going to see the best practices on how to write a great knowledge article. Writing a KB article certainly demands a lot of time and know that your substantial writing effort will pay off.
Know your audience:
Your knowledge article is all about helping your users help themselves. Assume your users know nothing, so every action or piece of advice you give them needs to be spelled out and explained.
This doesn’t mean you fill every article with extraneous information. They should be well organized, short but sweet and written in a user-friendly tone.
In most cases, you can use acronyms within your industry – For example, using the acronym "ITSM" as oppose to writing Information Technology Service Management.
Keep your instructions to the point:
Your articles need to be easy to understand in just one read. The title and subtitles should cover what you are trying to say. Make your contents look good by personalizing the design.
Develop a template for consistency:
Templates can greatly help to be consistent with the usage of headings and lists with the proper format to make the article easy to scan.
Write with Clarity:
It’s always ideal to write a knowledge article in a style that is suitable for your audience. In most cases, this means using clear and direct language without too much technical detail. While writing articles, assume as if you are assisting a user. The content should be resonating as if a conversation is taking place.
Include visuals, go beyond text-based answers:
Use videos, screenshots, GIFs, charts in your articles. Encourage your readers to learn more by including related articles and Push readers towards other knowledge base articles and links or other similar titles that help them get more information. Your readers will appreciate you for including these!
Capture readers' feedback:
It’s great to have a knowledge base, but in order to understand but let readers tell you how useful your answers are. This may be as simple as asking "Was this answer helpful?" and offering "Yes" and "No" buttons for users to respond.
Once you start to collect feedback, you can quickly identify which articles are the most helpful to readers and which articles need improvements.
Keep your knowledge articles fresh with new content:
Your Knowledge articles should always reflect the questions being frequently asked in this moment. This may mean removing questions that readers are suddenly asking less frequently. And it certainly means introducing the new ones they've begun to ask.
Final Thoughts:
Always look for room for improving your knowledge articles. There's really no downside in investing time to creating knowledge articles for your users. It empowers your users to get an in-depth resource to help themselves and also frees up your support resources for bigger issues rather than handling the same questions and issues over and over.