As a business owner or customer support representative, one of the most important aspects of your job is providing excellent customer service. One way to achieve this is by setting up a comprehensive knowledge base within Desk365.
A knowledge base is a collection of information that is easily accessible to customers and support staff, enabling them to find answers to common questions and issues without needing to contact support directly.
Setting up a knowledge base in your helpdesk can greatly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your customer support team. You should ideally cover all aspects of your product or service which your customers will be looking for in your knowledge base.
For example, if you’re an SAAS product, you can have detailed help center articles that would probably cover product features, billing and payment related questions, FAQs, and more.
Before you start setting up your knowledge base, it is important to determine what you want it to achieve. Do you want to reduce the number of support enquiries by providing self-service options to customers? Do you want to provide a resource for your support team to refer to when answering customer enquiries? Or do you want to do both?
Identifying the purpose of your knowledge base will help you to determine the content that you need to include and how to structure it.
The next step is to gather the content that you will include in your knowledge base. This can include information about your products or services, FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and instructions for common tasks.
Organizing your content in a coherent and user-friendly structure holds significant importance. To assist end-users in finding the information they seek, it is possible to have various categories with their corresponding articles.
Make sure that your customers and support staff are aware of your knowledge base by promoting it through various channels. You can include a link to the knowledge base in your email signature, on your website, and in your support emails. You can also consider promoting it through social media and other marketing channels.
This help center article will guide you through the process of setting up a knowledge base in Desk365.
Creating a Knowledge Base in Desk365
Desk365 allows you to create and manage your knowledge base. These are steps to follow to create a knowledge base in Desk365.
1. Navigate to Knowledge Base > Categories in Desk365.
2. Here, related solution articles can be organized into Categories. Categories make it easy for users to read similar articles and other possible solutions to the problems they’re facing in your product or service.
For example, you could combine solutions related to ‘Payment Cycle’ and ‘Payment Methods’ under the ‘Payments & Billing’ folder.
Creating a category
The first step in setting up your knowledge base is creating categories. Categories are the main topics that your knowledge base will cover. To create categories, navigate to the ‘Knowledge Base’ section of your Desk365 dashboard and click on the ‘New Category’ button. From there, you can create new categories and assign articles to them.
These are steps to follow to create a category in Knowledge base in Desk365.
1. Click on the ‘New Category’ button at the top.
2. Provide a suitable name and description for the category. You can also choose the visibility settings for this category. You’ve two different sections i.e., Support Portal and Agent Portal with a range of options to choose from:
– Not visible in the Support Portal
– All visitors to the Support Portal
– Only signed in users of the Support Portal
– Support Portal signed in users from specific companies
– All agents
– All agents in my group(s)
Let’s understand each of these below.
Not visible in the Support Portal: Selecting this option will make the category not appear in the Support Portal.
All visitors to the Support Portal: Selecting this option will make the category of articles visible to all the visitors of the Support Portal whether they’re logged in or not.
Only signed in users of the Support Portal: Selecting this option will make the help center articles visible to only the signed-in users of the Support Portal.
Support Portal signed in users from specific companies: Selecting this option will make the category visible only for the companies that you’ve selected in the choices for which you want to display these articles.
All agents: Selecting this option will make the category visible to all the agents in the Agent Portal.
All agents in my group(s): Selecting this option will make the category visible only to all the agents in a specific group(s).
You can choose to make the category visible to all, only to signed-in users or not visible at all depending on your requirements. You can also make it only visible to specific companies by entering their names and selecting them from the dropdown.
3. Click the ‘Save’ button to save the category. You can also choose to edit a Category name by hovering over it and clicking on the Edit icon.
4. Similarly, you can drag and drop to change the ‘Categories’ order if needed.
Creating an article
Once you have created a Knowledge Base Category, you can start creating Knowledge Base Articles. Articles are individual pieces of content that provide information to your customers. When creating articles, it’s important to keep them clear, concise, and easy to understand.
To create a new article, go to the Knowledge Base section of your Desk365 dashboard and click ‘New Article’ button. From there, you can create new articles and assign them to the correct category.
These are steps to follow to create an article and assign them to a category in Desk365.
1. Click the ‘New Article’ button at the top.
2. Provide a suitable title and enter the Description for the article you are going to create. Choose the appropriate folder from the ‘Articles Properties’ dropdown menu located in the right side under which you want to add this solution article.
When creating a Knowledge Base Article, it is important to keep in mind that your customers are looking for clear and concise information. Use simple language and avoid technical jargon as much as possible. You can also use images and videos to make your articles more engaging and easier to understand.
If necessary, you can also choose to include attachments with a knowledge base article.
3. Click on the ‘Save as Draft’ button.
4. Once you ‘Save’ the article, it will move into your Drafts folder. Now the article will be saved as a ‘Draft’ and will be available in your drafts folder.
You can view your drafts by going to the required category where you’ve created the article as ‘Draft’.
Drafts enable you to handle an offline version of your solution articles without getting published. It also helps to review the solution article with your team to understand if you’re missing any important information in the article or if there are any mistakes which need to be removed from the article.
When writing content for your solution articles, you can choose to save them as drafts and publish them later after discussing it with your team.
5. In this example, you’ll notice the draft here: Knowledge Base > Categories > Reporting & Dashboards
6. Click on ‘Publish’ once it’s good to go and the solution article is now published ‘live’.
7. Once the article is created, and you notice some minor changes to be made in the article, you can select the article and it opens. Inside the article, you can click on the ‘Edit’ button and you can make the required changes and press the ‘Save’ button to save these changes.
8. Sometimes, you might want to make edits to the published version of an article that you would like your team to review. In this case, you can make the article go back to ‘Drafts’ again by clicking on the ‘Unpublish’ button present at the top instead of completely deleting the article.
9. Now you’ll notice the article appears as ‘Draft’ again. You can click on the ‘Publish’ button once again to publish these new changes over the existing published version once your team approves of the new changes suggested by them.
10. You can also share the Knowledge Base articles straightaway with your agents as well as to your end-users using the ‘Share URL’ option, as shown below.
Once you click on the ‘Share URL’ button, you have two options: one for sharing with your agents and the other for sharing with your end-users. These links will guide agents to the article within the Agent Portal and direct end-users to the article within the Support Portal.
11. Once you have several articles in a particular category and you want to have a proper structure, you can simply drag and drop by changing the article order in which you want them to appear.
Finally, you can see the solution articles appear in a nice structure in the Support Portal.
Setting up Knowledge Base Articles in Desk365 is a simple and effective way to provide your customers with the information they need to use your products or services more effectively. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can create high-quality articles that are easy to find and understand.
