5 Must-Include Components in your Knowledge Base Portal

Posted by CRMJetty on November 13th, 2020

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 Zapierand 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.