Why a Knowledge Base Matters
- Who is your audience?
- What type of help do you want to offer?
- Are you planning to give straightforward definitions of features and how-to instructions?
- What are the most common questions that your customers currently contact you with? How frequently are you getting those same questions?
- What questions do you get in your inbox that you wish people didn’t need to ask about?
For more advice on how to get started creating your knowledge base, check out: Tips & Templates for Writing Great Knowledge Base Articles
Put your knowledge base to work for you
So you have your knowledge base created, now what? How can you help your customers find the articles that you’ve written?
A knowledge base on its own is helpful as long as people know where to visit it. This might look like setting up an auto reply from your team’s inbox and including a link to your knowledge base in it, so that those who write to your inbox will be encouraged to visit it while they await a reply.
Also when replying to incoming email, you could include links to related help articles, which may motivate your user to reference the help center site in the future.
All of these options are available to you within Help Scout:
- Help Scout calls the knowledge base feature Docs. Creating a Docs knowledge base gives your customers a clear place that they can visit to search for help and read your help articles.
- Help Scout also has a feature called Beacon which is an embeddable widget that can be added to your website or app. Along with being a way for people to contact your team, it can also be paired up with your Docs site and serve your knowledge base articles right from any page on your website.
Showcase articles that will be most helpful to improve self-service
In Help Scout, you can put that insight to use by setting up your Beacon to highlight particular articles, and even customizing which articles to showcase depending on what page your website visitors are on. This allows you to anticipate what help people likely need and suggest the best articles to them immediately - they won’t even need to ask!
Check out: Customize Content Suggestions in Beacon
Leverage AI tools to enhance the way you provide help
Other Resources
Explore more of Help Scout's self service options with Docs, Beacon, and AI.