How to Structure Your Customer Knowledge Base - The Ultimate Guide

We recommend putting more effort into each article than into the folder tree. A Gartner survey of 5,728 customers found that only 14% of customer service issues are fully resolved in self-service, and the most common reason, in 43% of cases, was that customers could not find content relevant to their issue. Search and links from support replies take customers straight to one article, so an article cannot lean on its neighbors. Build the tree from your tickets and search reports, then make every article say what it covers, who it applies to and what to read next.

What to include in your customer knowledge base

• What should a new user of your product know? Group the getting started guides in one section to help new users get to know your product.
• What do users ask most? Check your customer tickets for the questions your agents answer again and again, and write those answers first, so agents can focus their time on more complex inquiries.
• Where do users get stuck? Use your product usage analytics or a tool like FullStory to find the bottlenecks. Beyond improving your UI, consider adding tooltips that link to the relevant knowledge base articles.
• What do users search for? Look at your search reports for topics that users often search for but that have no article yet.

How to structure your customer knowledge base

Add a Getting Started section with content divided by roles

Put a Getting Started section at the top of your help center, with the core information a first-time user needs to get going. Write separate guides for different roles (for example admin, normal user and read-only user), so each reader concentrates on what matters most to them.

Separate topics by part of the product

After Getting Started, go deeper into each core element of your product. Sample topics:

• Integrations
• Different core features
• Managing users and access rights
• User settings

Order the topics by how often customers contact support about them, and revisit the order when your ticket mix changes.

Need some inspiration? See how we structure our own Kipwise Help Center.

Best practices when writing your knowledge base articles

Write every article to be read alone

Customers meet an article through search results or a link in a support reply, not by walking your folders, so an article cannot rely on its neighbors. Open each one by saying what it covers and which plan, role or version it applies to. Repeat the one prerequisite step instead of writing “as described above”, and end with a link to the article that comes next. An article that stands alone still works when a search result shows only a piece of it.

Use numbered headings and subheadings

Divide each article with headings and subheadings, and number them (for example add “A, B, C…” in front of Heading 1s and “1, 2, 3…” in front of Heading 2s). Structured headings make an article easy to scan, and numbers let you direct a customer to a specific point when answering a ticket (for example, “check point A2 of this help desk article”).

If you are using Kipwise to house your help articles, we will automatically generate a table of contents based on your headings and you can link to a specific heading easily to help your customers more efficiently.

Add visuals to your content

Screenshots, GIFs and short video tutorials show how something works faster than text. Awesome Screenshot captures both screenshots and screencasts.

Include keywords to optimize search

Use the words your customers type, including error messages exactly as they appear on screen. When a customer searches for a term and finds nothing, add that term to the article that should have answered. If you use Kipwise to house your help articles, we provide search terms analytics to help you improve your knowledge base articles.

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