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Knowledge Base Management Best Practices

The only way to do that is to cater to best practices in a knowledge base. And to do that, we need to get back to the fundamental question:

purpose of a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is how you communicate with customers. It’s understanding your customer’s pain and analyzing their capability of using your product. A knowledge base guides your customer towards a solution through documentation.
The goal is to create documentation so good that your customers don’t need to contact your support team. The way you support your product is as important as the product itself.
This is especially important for complex products that customers will get to know over time.
As technical products and Software as a Service (SaaS) have become common, the business support strategy has evolved to encompass a long-term relationship with customers.
A killer knowledge base is key to your customer support strategy. It’s anticipating problems and questions before they happen. It’s not a wall to keep your customers away from support.

1. What’s your knowledge base format and style?

Our first stop is your knowledge base content.
Knowledge base formats and style have come a long way since the software first became available.
Avoid dry, overly technical articles that will have your customers itching to email your support team.

Be proud of your documentation

As a documentation writer, you are as professional as any content marketer, copywriter or blogger. Your style will make or break the effectiveness of your knowledge base.
A knowledge base style guide goes beyond basic grammar. It arranges the format and content so you can communicate with customers in the way they want.
Here are some fantastic style guides to provide you with inspiration:

Know your audience

To better understand who you are writing for, liaise with your marketing team. Knowing your audience helps you to set the tone and style of your articles to speak to customers in the way they want.
It takes really strong, smart, and organized documentation to build and keep a strong customer base.
Who is your customer and how do they want to receive the documentation? Discover how they want to learn about your product by formatting your knowledge base content to cater for customers who prefer to read, listen or watch with multimedia content.

Best practices for building, structuring and organizing a knowledge base:-

Information architecture

Information architecture (IA) helps you make sense of the information you’re facing. It encompasses a field all its own but you can take the principles and apply them to your knowledge base. It’s what differentiates your knowledge base from a simple FAQs.
IA is for everyone. Abby Covert is an information architect who provides lots of helpful and clear resources on her website.

Navigating your knowledge base

As a documentation writer, it’s your job to make sure customers can navigate your knowledge base. This means having a broad overview of the structure and organization of your knowledge base.
The key factor in your IA isn’t the sophistication of your system but consistency in telling your users what to expect. It’s predictability presenting your content to make your knowledge base usable and reliable.
“Get to know your users, and address their needs as directly as possible. We leverage specific archetypes to guide content creation (e.g. tutorial vs. troubleshooting content). They keep things consistent without being too rigid.

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