5 Must-Include Components in your Knowledge Base Portal

While talking about the knowledge base, everyone knows its benefits, but how to avail those always remained a question. But it won’t be for a long time.

Are you wondering what to include in your Knowledge Base Portal?

Here’s a quick guide.

Before going through the components of a knowledge management portal, make sure that the knowledge base meets your customer needs, is easy to navigate, and has SEO optimized content.

Alright! Let’s start!

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQs are a list of commonly asked questions and answers. It doesn’t require much technical support or expertise. The benefit of including it in your knowledge base portal is that your staff will be free of answering repetitive questions. Instead, they can simply redirect customers to the respective FAQ section. FAQs will also increase the visibility of your website on Google and other search engines.

The best example to understand the effectiveness of FAQs is a bank website. Customers have several queries related to account details, personal details, debit, credit, shares, etc. And it’s not feasible for bank employees to explain to every customer about the procedure to update their bank details, so FAQs.

Tutorials and How-to Guides

Sometimes, your customers want more than the FAQs or say, FAQs couldn’t solve their problems. They want a detailed guide of the solution/service. That’s when tutorials and how-to-guides come for the rescue.

How-to-Guides act as a mini-guide to explain a procedure or an action. For example, how to register for the XYZ service? They help to get acquainted with the basic system or service.

On the other hand, tutorials include a detailed guide about a topic and other related processes. Slack set the best example. They have tutorials for almost everything.

So make sure to include both the formats in your knowledge base portal. Also, make the instructions clear, and don’t forget to include GIFs, images, diagrams, and videos, wherever necessary.

Pro tip: Try to create a separate tutorial section like that of FAQs.

Community Section

Provide functional community space for the community to interact and help one another. We might think about what would be its benefit for our business and our knowledge management portal. Firstly, users generate content by writing tutorials, discussing issues, and providing detailed answers. All this reduces the load of your content creation team. Secondly, in need of help, users can help one another, reducing the customer support team’s work stress. Last but not least, the community can help you promote your knowledge base and product.

News and Update Section

Do you have a separate section for announcements and updates or add it to your blog section? If no, that’s fine! However, having a separate space for community announcements, product updates, new version releases, issues, and bugs would help your customers keep up with them easily. These announcements, if mixed with blogs, can get lost somewhere in between dozens of articles.

Some companies, like Asana, even try to keep their news section and update section separate. They don’t want customers to keep searching; instead, know what’s going around.

Reference Documentation

These documents target the technical audience, such as software developers. They are useful in new software, APIs, or retrieving information about the command-line interface, drivers, or file formats. Examples include Zapier and Docker.

Reference docs are not limited to software. Even gadgets or other electronics could benefit from it.

Conclusion

Every company today has a knowledge base, internal or external. And meeting customers’ demands through it might look like a challenge and these components, a not-so-sure topic. But try including FAQs, Community Section, Documentation, and others on the list. It will surely help you grow.

4 Tips for Knowledge Base Content

Just bookmark it, is the new just-write-it-down. But we do both. We use Post-its, handwritten to-do lists, scribbled notes, and many such things. Digital bookmarks and dozens of browser open tabs. Anyone who tries to get any personal information organized and accessible at the moment knows that it can be challenging and unproductive.

Product knowledge base provides customers with the information they need in a less challenging way. It is not as complicated as you think. You can create, curate, and share effective knowledge base articles. You can easily do it if you have the right guidance and tools like a knowledge management portal.

Best practices for knowledge base articles:

By providing a knowledge base to your customers, you are enabling them to find quick solutions and reduce inefficient call center performance. Knowledge base requires proper planning and design actually to be able to help. Otherwise, it will not serve your agents or customers and create chaos, not to mention your customers will leave with even more problems than they came with.

We all want to provide our customers with informative, engaging, and clear content; these best practices can work wonders.

Create level-based content:

Does your knowledge management portal provide customers everything they need? Think from the perspective of all kinds of users, from beginners to experts. Yes, even experts have something to learn from the knowledgebase. Start from how-tos and step specific instructions for beginners and go from there.

Experienced users ignore those to get the information they need. If one article does not work for both user types, you can also split the information according to the topic/problem into different articles and then link all of them to the original one. This way you are creating a series that takes the user through a journey of the product or service.

Anchor links:

Putting links inside articles in your enterprise knowledge portal is a great way to allude to something that you might not want to fully explain in the article but is necessary. Use relevant keywords for the links instead of saying ‘click here’. The user should be able to know why there is a link there and what it leads to before they click on it. These links are useful in lengthy articles so people can click on them and jump to the exact information.

Create simple content:

BY 2025, 3/4 number of people are expected to come online via their smartphone. Take a look at the style and UI/UX of your article and content and the knowledge management portal as a whole. Make sure it is smart phone friendly. Look at it from a formatting POV, big blocks of text in small paragraphs, bullets, numbered lists and callouts, CTAs. These things will make your content more approachable.

Short articles are a good choice for knowledge base articles. People need these articles to answer questions in the moment rather than spend time reading long forms. Keep the language simple and approachable. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes to choose topics based on pain points. Two good sources of titles are recent support tickets and customer search terms.

Finally, images, GIFs, and explanation videos are strong ways to reinforce your support articles. They also help you provide your audience with pauses between paragraphs and an excellent way to engage them.

Structure the articles properly:

Treat each article like a mini onboarding process. For example: start by using simple words to describe a problem, and then use an example to show customers how to solve it. Solution articles are to help, even though it might be tempting to use them to sell, keep the focus on the instructions and the features that each article is about.

Create content that adapts to the customer’s workflow. Take them on a journey from one point to the other based on the natural flow of your product. Give people easy solutions first as often they work the best. Keep things moving, and don’t give alternative solutions as that can confuse them. Place related content with each article or video so the user can quickly get to those.

Conclusion:

Technology has made companies more accessible to customers, and now they are used to getting all the answers immediately. It has also helped companies scale much faster. With fierce competition in products, customer happiness has become a factor in measuring a company’s success. And self-service via portals helps with that a great deal.

7 Benefits of Online Knowledge Portal

Content is ever-evolving and here to stay.

We are surrounded by it and constantly consume it in some or the other form.

It is important for companies like you to understand their customers and provide important information about your products, services or the industry upfront.

Today customers want to have full knowledge of your products before they invest. Also, they want to find out answers on their own. They don’t want to interact with your customer support team through different mediums unless and until it’s something big.

In such situations, an online knowledge portal is your answer. It becomes your visitors’ go-to medium to find answers and understand your product/service. Besides that, there many other benefits of integrating an online knowledge portal to your website.

So, let’s look at some other benefits of having an online knowledge sharing portal:

Decrease in the number of support tickets:

Having a knowledge portal will help you maintain all the necessary information about your products in one place. This makes it easy for your customers to know your products in-depth without having to make efforts to put together scattered information from all over the web.

Thus, if your customers make an informed decision, this will directly reduce the generation of support tickets. Even your employees will have more time for research, improving conversion rates, and providing premium support to customers who might have major issues.

Marketing resources:

Knowledge portals make pitching your products/services easy for your marketing as well as the sales department. Not only that but you can also run the marketing campaigns inside the software to upsell or cross-sell your products. This will be a more targeted approach with better conversion rates than anything you will achieve from normal platforms. The reason being these customers already trust your brand and are willing to invest more in you and your products. You can also use this channel to notify your customers about any discount offers.

Knowledge portal makes it easy for your customers to come online, check the new offers or coupons if any are available on your products. These things make it easy for you to provide the best of your services in a very cost-effective manner.

Provide support anytime & anywhere:

As a company, many a time you will need to update your product manuals, documents, terms, and conditions, etc.

Let’s say if you roll out any feature in your product then you will need to make the necessary changes in your user manual as well. This is when having a knowledge portal becomes a boon. With the help of it, you can easily make necessary changes in the manual or the documents and simply upload it. With that, you can just set up a notification that alerts your portal users about the new feature and redirects them to the updated document. And if they have any questions, they can always type in their query, look for answers, or submit a support ticket.

This way, you can easily be there for your customers anytime and anywhere.

Benefits of Cloud Based Solution:

Developing these portals and then storing huge amounts of data on a server can turn out to be a costly affair. This is why a cloud-based portal solution can be a cleverer as well as a cost-effective choice here. How? Because for such a solution, you pay as per the usage of space. No extra headache of setting up a server, daily maintenance cost, etc. This way you can lower down the cost of customer support while providing them with high-quality 24*7 support on the go.

Security:

Portals help your customers to securely access CRM data based on the accessibility provided to them from the backend. Customers will be given credentials using which they can securely login and have access to your portal.

As a company you will be having thousands of users’ data, authorized documents, etc. and to keep this data secure is your responsibility. To keep this data secure and its sharing more secure, you need to make sure that you are using the latest encryption techniques.

Using the latest techniques ensures that data is secured, away from the reach of hackers or unauthorized persons.

Integration with AI:

There is no field today which Artificial Intelligence (AI) has not touched. Be it healthcare, automobiles, banking, or our day-to-day lives. It is present everywhere and is rapidly becoming part of our lives.

In fact, many companies have started using AI to provide better customer service.

How?

By integrating Artificial Intelligence with their knowledge or web portals.

Properly crafted customer journey, conversational AI, and chatbots, by having these three things in your knowledge portal, you can provide exceptional customer service in different time zones 24*7*365 days. This means no more waiting for days for a call back or a reply for customers and good word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

Additionally, it helps your sales and support team. The benefits of AI are beyond our imagination regardless of its application or industry.

Increased customer satisfaction:

Online knowledge portals help you be there for your customers when they need you the most. This directly affects their opinion about your organization and can make them your promoters too, if all went well. This lessens the burden of your support team whilst keeping your customers happy and in your sales funnel.

And we all know what’s the result of happy customers; business and revenue growth.

Final words:

Knowledge sharing portals are here to disrupt the customer support and service industry especially with the proper application of Artificial Intelligence. Your customers are evolving and so are their needs. To keep up, businesses need to adapt the new, effortless, and quicker ways to interact with their customers.

If you don’t want to go for a pre-defined portal solution, you can always get in touch with a custom portal solution provider for your company. The advantage of having a custom portal is that you can add features according to your requirements and your business logic.