Knowledge Base benefits

Maintaining a comprehensive and up-to-date Knowledge Base is a valuable investment that saves agents time and improves the support experience in several ways:

1. Faster, more consistent responses: Instead of writing a new explanation for each user, agents can share a link to a relevant KnowledgeBase article. This reduces response time and helps ensure answers are clear, accurate, and consistent. Sending a troubleshooting guide can also reduce the number of follow-up messages required to resolve an issue.

2. Improved efficiency with AI tools: You can configure your Knowledge Base as an AI data source, allowing Deskpro’s AI agent tools and chatbot to use your content. This helps agents work more efficiently and enables users to find answers through automated assistance.

3. Ticket deflection and self-service: Users may find the information they need before submitting a ticket by searching the Knowledge Base or through Deskpro’s ticket deflection feature, which suggests relevant articles based on the subject entered in the contact form.

Starting a Knowledge Base

Starting a Knowledge Base from scratch can feel overwhelming, but it does not need to be. Instead of trying to design a complete category structure upfront, focus on creating your first 20 articles. Once those articles are in place, it becomes much easier to see how they naturally group into categories.

When creating categories, think from the user’s perspective. Avoid using internal company structures or technical jargon that may be unfamiliar to users. Instead, organize content around the products you offer or the stages of the user journey, such as Delivery, Setup, Troubleshooting, or Maintenance.

Your existing tickets are one of the best sources for identifying new Knowledge Base articles. Using Deskpro’s full-text search, you can quickly identify frequently recurring topics in past tickets.

When a ticket contains information that would be useful to others, you can turn it into an article using the Pending Article option in the ticket More menu. To speed up content creation, you can also use Deskpro’s Write article with AI feature to generate a draft in seconds. 

Not every ticket needs its own article. Focus on issues that occur frequently or are likely to recur over time. One effective approach is to train agents to apply a label such as Recurring to tickets that relate to common problems. You can then review these labelled tickets regularly to ensure each topic is covered by a Knowledge Base article.

Knowledge Base articles are also useful for addressing pre-sales questions, not just issues raised by existing customers. Speak with your sales team to identify common questions, misconceptions, or use cases that potential customers frequently raise, and consider documenting these in articles.

Search data can also help you identify gaps in your Knowledge Base. Review the search terms users enter when visiting your website and look for common queries that could be resolved with an article. It is also useful to monitor external forums, Q&A sites, user reviews, and social media to understand the issues users are discussing.

Finally, make sure your Knowledge Base is easy to find when users need help. Link to it from relevant pages on your website and include it in emails you send to users. Where appropriate, feature the Knowledge Base URL on delivery slips, instruction manuals, or other customer-facing materials.

Sharing the workload

Consider how responsibility for writing articles will be shared, while ensuring content remains consistent in presentation and style.

If multiple agents contribute to the Knowledge Base, it is important to standardise how articles are created. You can do this by using the publish template system, which allows you to create a standard template that agents can base their articles on.

Improving the experience

As you create articles, you can use the following features to improve the user experience in the Help Center:

• Use the Glossary feature to define technical jargon or terms specific to your products or services. The first time a term appears in an article, it is underlined, and its definition is shown in a pop-up on hover.

• Link related articles together using the Related Content tab to help users find additional relevant information.

Maintaining your Knowledgebase

When your products or services change, make sure you have a process in place to update all relevant Knowledge Base articles.

It is also good practice to review content regularly. Deskpro allows you to set a review date on each article. Once this date is reached, the article appears in the Requires Review folder in the publish section of the agent interface, helping you keep content accurate and up to date.

You can even automatically unpublish content when it reaches review date if you wish. This can be configured in Admin > Help Center > Knowledge Base > Settings

You can also use reports to find articles that have been rated poorly by users. 

The query below will give you a list of your articles ordered by lowest rated to highest:

SELECT articles.title, articles.id, articles.total_rating
FROM articles
ORDER BY articles.total_rating ASC 

To use this code:

1. Go to Reports > Stats

2. Click Create Statistic.

3. Add a title

4. Click on the RAW DPQL tab

5. Paste in the code

6. Hit save

This will render as below allowing you to easily identify poorly received articles.

Test how users are likely to search for common problems and check that the most relevant articles appear near the top of search results. If they do not, add appropriate search keywords to the articles to improve their visibility.

Archive articles that relate to obsolete products or features. Archived articles remain available at the same URL for reference, but are no longer visible when users browse the Knowledge Base.

You can install the Deskpro Google Analytics app to identify your highest-traffic articles. Keep in mind that some visits may come from general web searches rather than existing users. However, high traffic can also indicate common issues or information that users need to refer to frequently. You can also search for an article’s URL in your tickets to see how often agents share it with users.

If some articles receive little or no traffic, investigate why. Review your tickets to determine whether the issues covered no longer occur, the content is out of date, or the article is difficult to find. It is also worth checking whether agents are aware the article exists and know when to use it.