Why a Knowledge Base Matters

How do your customers get the help they need? Some will opt to work directly with your team via email or live chat support. Others will prefer finding the answers on their own at anytime without needing to contact you. 
By taking the time to build out a detailed, organized help center (or knowledge base), you will empower your customers who seek answers to their own questions as quickly as possible, whenever and wherever they need it.

If you haven’t thought about building a help center before and are just starting out, here are some questions to think about:
  • 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. 

To boost its usefulness, it may also be helpful for anyone visiting your website to access knowledge base articles right from any page.

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

Based on the types of questions you’ve already received in your inbox or the knowledge base articles you notice them visiting, you likely have a good hunch of common questions customers have and what articles they’ll likely find most useful.

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!

Leverage AI tools to enhance the way you provide help

Do you need to use AI if you’ve already carefully built your knowledge base? In Help Scout, AI tools and your knowledge base are closely connected and using both tools can help your team as well as your customers get the best help. 
Does your team receive frequently asked questions, or are people asking questions that you have help articles written for? Your team might be well used to manually typing out their replies, and you may have created saved replies for frequently needed responses. An AI tool can then supplement the work your team is already doing in the inbox. 
Help Scout has a feature that can craft a reply that your team can feel confident in. Help Scout’s AI Drafts feature learns from the Docs articles you’ve written (as well as your team’s previous email responses) to generate replies. This can be a useful time-saver, as your team can generate a quick draft on-demand that has been created based on prior information you’ve already written.
Some people who may prefer getting help as quickly as possible might find an AI-based bot useful. This allows for asking their questions in a way that mimics live chat, even if your team is offline. Help Scout has a feature called AI Answers, which is an AI powered chatbot-like option right within Beacon. This gives your customers opportunity to ask their questions to an AI assistant, and the answers they receive are sourced directly from the help articles you’ve written.  

Other Resources

Explore more of Help Scout's self service options with Docs, Beacon, and AI.

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