But unless you have a full-time team dedicated to interviewing your customers, it can be hard to figure out exactly how your customers feel about your brand.

That’s what Net Promoter Score, also known by its acronym NPS, aims to fix. It’s a simple customer feedback survey designed to give you “the one number you need to grow,” in the words of its creator Frederick Reichheld.

Whether you’re a major corporation or a small business, you can start sending the Net Promoter Score survey to figure out how your customers feel about your brand.

In this post – I’ll give you everything you need to get started with Net Promoter Score. I’ll tell you what it is, how it works, and some real tips based on my experience measuring Net Promoter Score at my previous company.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

What Is The Net Promoter Score Survey

In a nutshell, Net Promoter Score is a two question survey designed to give you a single number that measures how loyal your customers are.

Because it’s such a basic survey, it’s:

• Simple for you to implement
• Easy for your customers to quickly answer

As simple as it is, it’s wildly popular and used by huge companies like Apple and GE.

And better yet – it’s actually helpful. While Net Promoter Score can’t necessarily tell you what to do to improve your customer loyalty, it can tell you whether or not the things you try are actually working.

The Net Promoter Score Question Is Pretty Simple…

The core Net Promoter Score question is deceptively simple. This is all it is…

How likely is it that you would recommend [COMPANY] to a friend or colleague?

Customers can then rate their likelihood on a scale from 1-10:

After the rating, most implementations of Net Promoter Score also ask a follow-up along the lines of:

What’s the most important reason for your rating?

Or

Why did you answer that way?

This second question isn’t required to calculate your score – but it does provide some helpful information.

Put together, you get both a:

• Quantitative piece of data in the form of the score
• Qualitative piece of data in the form of the answer

The Net Promoter Score Calculation Formula

So what is the actual Net Promoter Score calculation formula? Again, it’s pretty simple.

First, you break up respondents into three separate groups depending on the score that they gave:

• 0-6: Detractors (these people aren’t very loyal)
• 7-8: Passives (these people are neither loyal nor disloyal)
• 9-10: Promoters (these are the loyal customers that actively promote your brand)

To calculate your actual Net Promoter Score, all you do is subtract the number of detractors from the number of promoters:

Promoters – Detractors = Net Promoter Score

For example, if you had 100 respondents like this:

• 25 Detractors
• 35 Passive
• 40 Promoters

Then your Net Promoter Score would be 15 (40 Promoters – 25 Detractors).

Best Tools To Help You Send Net Promoter Score Surveys

The popularity of Net Promoter Score has led to a number of tools popping up that make it easy to send Net Promoter Score surveys to your customers. While you could always code something yourself, these tools greatly simplify the process.

Plus, many of them offer free plans that should work for smaller businesses.

Here are some of the best Net Promoter Score tools:

• Zonka Feedback: AI driven NPS software to automate feedback collection and increase customer loyalty.
• HubSpot Service Hub: a great customer feedback tool with built-in NPS, CES, and CSAT surveys.
• Wootric: this is the tool that I eventually chose for my company. It has a helpful backend interface and is easy for developers to customize as needed.
• Nicereply: this is a great NPS tool that integrates with a lot of apps you are probably already using.
• Retently: another quality tool that helps you send NPS surveys, but only via email.
• Delighted: a neat tool that even lets you send NPS surveys via SMS (as well as via email and web).

Once you pick your tool, you shouldn’t just start firing off Net Promoter Score surveys, though. Take some time to make sure you do things right…

5 Tips For Accurately Gathering Your Net Promoter Score

If spending a few months sending NPS surveys taught me one thing, it’s this:

It’s incredibly easy to fudge the numbers.

That is, if you want to get a good NPS number, it’s not hard to structure your survey mechanisms to do that.

If you want an accurate NPS number, though, things get much more difficult.

From research and my own personal experience, these tips will help you gather an accurate NPS number…

1. Choose Between Email Or In-App And Stick With It

There are two common approaches to sending Net Promoter Score surveys:

• In-app surveys – these are displayed inside your website or app while the visitor is actively using your website.
• Email surveys – these are sent to the user’s email, which means they may not have recently used your site.

Both approaches have positives and negatives.

Though email surveys will lower your response rate, they have the advantage of eliminating the confounding factor of how a customer feels in the heat of the moment. That is, you're more likely to capture how your customer feels in general than how they were feeling at a specific moment (like you would with in-app surveying).

The most important thing is this:

Once you pick a method – stick with that method. You can’t accurately compare numbers gathered from different methods because each method is measuring a slightly different thing.

2. Don’t Bias Your Score In The Survey Introduction

One of the nice things about Net Promoter Score is that there’s no variation in the survey. Users always get asked the exact same question so, as far as the actual survey goes, you don’t have to worry about biasing their responses.

But where you can bias your responses is when you introduce the survey to your customers.

Most of the Net Promoter Score survey tools that I listed give you pre-configured messages that are designed not to bias your score – when in doubt, I recommend sticking with the default option.

3. Define And Segment Customer Groups Carefully

This won’t apply to every business – but if you’re running a business with different “tiers”, it helps to put some thought into the types of customers you’ll be surveying.

Let’s say you have a service or product with three tiers (this should apply to many SaaS and software products, like WordPress plugins):

• Free
• Pro
• Enterprise

It doesn’t necessarily make sense to lump all three customers into the same bucket for Net Promoter Score purposes. There are a couple reasons for this:

• Some customer types will respond differently. For example, you’re most likely to find unhappy customers in the free group because people who like your product enough to pay for it are usually at least a little happier with it.
• You might care more about certain groups’ scores. While I’m sure you want all your customers to be happy, you’re probably a bit more concerned with unhappy enterprise clients than people on your free tier.

Define which groups you want to segment and then be consistent about maintaining those segments so that you can get an accurate look at each distinct customer group.

4. Always Survey At The Same Point In Their Journey

Beyond segmenting customer groups, another way to ensure more accurate results is to always ask the Net Promoter Score at the same point in a customer’s journey.

Again, this helps avoid bias by ensuring that your customers have either:

• All experienced a certain feature in your product.
• All used your product for the same length of time.

There are two main triggers you can send Net Promoter Score surveys on:

• Action – send your survey when a customer has completed a specific action (or sequence of actions). This could be using a certain feature, launching X campaigns, spending $X, etc.
• Time – send your survey X days after a customer signs up. This is a bit simpler to implement, but you can’t guarantee that everyone you survey has experienced your product to the same degree.

Again – the important part here is consistency. Once you pick a method, don’t assume that you’ll be able to accurately compare the number that you gather via that method to other situations.

5. Don’t Over-Survey Customers – Give Them A Break In Between

The Net Promoter Score survey is so simple that it can be tempting to over survey your customers.

Don’t do that.

Sending the Net Promoter Score survey too often:

• Can annoy your customers.
• Doesn’t leave enough time for you to do anything to dramatically change their score, anyway

So how often should you send the survey?

The standard approach is to send it quarterly. That gives you enough data to see trends, while still leaving enough time for the changes that you make to take effect.

Net Promoter Score Benchmarks: What Are They?

Once you start surveying people, you’re probably going to start asking, “what is a good net promoter score?”

It makes sense – you want to see how your business stacks up to your competitors!

But here’s the thing about Net Promoter Score benchmarks:

They’re not very helpful for comparing yourself to other companies.

As I hopefully made clear in the sections above, there are far too many confounding factors to compare Net Promoter Scores on a 1:1 basis.

But there is one helpful set of Net Promoter Score benchmarks that you should look at:

Your own scores over time.

Assuming you keep a consistent survey methodology, looking at how your Net Promoter score changes over time is the best way to take the temperature of your company. If you see your score rising with a consistent survey methodology, that’s a good sign that your business is on the right track.

Here’s To More Loyal Customers

Net Promoter Score isn’t a panacea for your business woes. But it is a simple, yet powerful, way to gauge how loyal your customers are.

Here’s what you need to do to start benefitting from NPS:

• Pick an NPS tool to help you send surveys
• Develop a consistent methodology and follow good survey best practices
• Monitor how your score changes over time

Start doing it today and you’ll be on your way to more loyal customers!

The post Net Promoter Score: What It Is, Best Tools and Tips first appeared on HeroThemes.

After all, every team needs documentation to share information, retain knowledge, stay focused on goals, and simplify long processes.

While there’s no one standard way to create all this documentation, the fundamentals remain the same.

Let's take a look at them to improve your documentation writing skills.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

The State of Documentation Writing in 2026

Since the AI revolution Most brands are starting to use AI chat assistants to improve their customer experience on documentation.

It definitely helping with:

• Answering frequent questions and in a faster way
• Helping with the search
• Reducing customer tickets
• Personalizing the customer experience
• And of course, writing documentation

That said, you might wonder, “Can’t we just let ChatGPT write our docs?” Well, not so fast.

AI-generated text tends to be generic and lacks the nuanced context or opinionated clarity that human-written docs provide, which can easily backfire.

High-quality documentation requires deep understanding of context and thoughtful decisions—things AI struggles with.

Documentation is the process of figuring out what your users need and the best way to explain it. Skipping this step can result in content that doesn't actually help anyone.

The sweet spot is using AI as a helper, not a replacement.

What Is Documentation

Documentation is any material that explains or instructs. It can be text, images, even videos. Anything that helps someone understand something or get something done.

We often think of software manuals or developer docs, but documentation is everywhere in business:

• Marketing team has playbooks
• Support team has troubleshooting guides and FAQs
• Engineers have code comments and technical specs
• HR has process checklists
• Customers rely on user guides and knowledge base articles

The key point here is that documentation is a broad umbrella. If its information written down (or recorded) to help someone else do something or understand something, it counts as documentation.

Types of documentation you need to know before writing it

Since we're talking about writing documentation, I won't bore you with the different types, such as project documentation, technical documentation, and so on.

Instead, In his talk on the types of documentation, Daniele Procida or Divio AG categorizes documentation into four types:

• learning-oriented tutorials
• goal-oriented how-to guides
• understanding-oriented discussions
• information-oriented reference material

As you can understand from how he puts it, every piece of documentation has a different objective, and those responsible for the documentation must establish it each time they set out to create one.

Based on the different types of documentation shared above, you can create documentation that easily fulfills its objective.

• Knowledge base articles: Short how-to articles or FAQs on a help center. Great for customers seeking quick answers.
• User manuals and guides: Longer form documentation explaining features, often with screenshots and step-by-step instructions.
  Explore: Best User Manual Examples to Learn From
• Technical reference docs: Detailed info on APIs, SDKs, configuration, primarily for developers or IT professionals.
• Project documentation: Records of project plans, decisions, research, and progress (for internal team use).
• Process and policy manuals: Standard operating procedures, company policies, checklists for internal workflows that ensure consistency in how things are done.
• Code documentation: This includes inline code comments, README files in repositories, and auto-generated docs from code (like Javadoc or Swagger for APIs).
• Design docs and specs: Documents created during development to describe how a feature should work or how a system is designed.

From this you can easily guess how different types of documents should be written.

For example, user manuals would focus on goal-oriented, how-to guides, while design documents would focus on information-oriented reference material.

Why Good Documentation Is So Important (Benefits and Impact)

Good documentation pays off massively, often in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.

Below are some of the major benefits of quality documentation:

1. Saves Time and Money by Enabling Self-Service

Perhaps the most direct benefit is that documentation lets people help themselves instead of creating support tickets for every single query.

A knowledge base can easily answer the most common questions about your product or service, eliminating the need to reach out to a support agent.

This translates to real money: fewer support tickets mean lower support costs and faster response for the tickets that do come in.

2. Drives Product Adoption and Customer Success

When users understand your product better, they use it more and derive more value from it. If that’s the case, they’re more likely to stick around (higher retention) and even advocate for it.

Docs offer immediate value by showing people how to achieve something with your product, whereas marketing might just tell them about features.

3. Faster Onboarding and Training

Having solid documentation makes it much easier to bring new people up to speed.

For customers, a good “Getting Started Guide” can make the difference between them abandoning the trial versus becoming a power user.

New employees or developers joining a project can read the documentation to get context. Which is much better than tedious training sessions or bothering a teammate every 5 minutes with questions.

5. Fewer Errors and Faster Troubleshooting

When instructions are clear and knowledge is shared, people are less likely to do the wrong thing.

6. Consistency and Knowledge Preservation

People come and go, but documentation sticks around.

By writing things down, you decentralize knowledge and avoid single points of failure.

7. An Asset for Scale and Growth

Think long-term. If you ever want your project or product to scale, you personally cannot be the answer to every question.

Documentation is what allows you to grow beyond heroics and one-on-one hand-holding. It’s a force multiplier.

What Does Good Documentation Look Like?

In the past, we have reviewed hundreds of documentation examples, and even the best ones were missing something.

This is just a quick recap of it, I recommend that you check out the guide on the best documentation examples yourself.

1. Clarity and Simplicity: Good documentation speaks plain language. It’s as short as it can be while still being useful.
2. Know Your Audience (and Organize for Them): The best documentation is structured around the user’s needs and knowledge level. One size does not fit all.
3. Great Navigation and Search: Good docs are easy to navigate. Having a search bar, a logical hierarchy of topics, and a table of contents helps a lot.
4. Plenty of Examples and Visuals: Good documentation is concrete. It provides examples. These examples can be sample code, screenshots, or real-world scenarios.
5. Feedback Mechanisms: Documentation evolves based on user feedback. Without feedback, you're shooting arrows in the dark.
6. Comprehensiveness with Accessibility: Here comprehensive doesn’t mean writing a 500-page tome. It means covering the necessary ground so users don’t hit dead-ends.
7. Freshness (Up-to-date)

Here’s a concise table comparing the key qualities of Good vs. Bad Documentation:

How to Write Documentation That Truly Helps

We’ve covered a lot of ground to get you prepared for this step. Now, let’s cover some practical steps and mindset tips as you embark on writing documentation:

1. Decide What to Write

Because documentation can take so many forms, it’s essential to finalize a format before writing it.

For example, at HeroThemes, we use a mix of FAQs, installation tutorials, troubleshooting guides, lists of tips and tricks, and others for our customer-facing documentation. Most of our customers also use a similar composition.

Depending on the documentation you’re producing and for whom, you’ll need to know what all forms your documentation can take.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss talks in detail about these in What to write.

He explains how tutorials, topical guides, and reference material make up the bulk of documentation in most cases:

• Tutorials: Tutorials or how-tos are the most basic form of documentation. For our customer-facing documentation, tutorials are our how-to resources that our users use to add a knowledge base to their website with our plugin or populate it with articles.
• Topical guides: Topical guides tend to go a lot deeper than tutorials and cater to more specialized topics. For us, these are our guides on topics like translation and integrations. We loosely categorize these as advanced topics.
• Reference: In our customer-facing documentation context, this type has information on our integrations with our partners that our users might find helpful when setting up their integrations. Or links to any stuff they might find useful when implementing any of our HeroThemes solutions.

2. Start with an Outline

Just as you design a product (or work on a plan before starting a new project) before building it, design your documentation.

Jot down an outline or table of contents of what you plan to cover.

This helps ensure that you include all the necessary topics and organize them logically. It also serves as a skeletal structure to fill in.

To give you a better idea of what this looks like, here’s how most software README files are designed:

1. Quick product introduction
2. Glossary to explain complex terminology
3. Installation guide (Step-by-step)
4. Basic Usage (With some examples)
5. Frequently asked questions

Outlining also makes it easier to divide writing tasks among multiple contributors.

Here’s an outline template that I often use before writing any type of article or a guide.

3. Write in Small, Manageable Pieces

Tackle one article or section at a time. Perhaps start with a quick-start guide to help new users get started. Then expand into deeper reference material.

This incremental approach means you always have some useful docs even if the whole set isn’t complete yet.

4. Use a Conversational Tone (for appropriate audiences)

In general, I recommend using a friendly, conversational tone for user documentation and a straightforward, slightly more technical tone for developer documentation.

But never a robotic or patronizing tone.

Phrases like “now you’re ready to…”, “you might be wondering…” can make the text more engaging.

Being conversational also means anticipating questions.

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Show Personality (a Little)

If your brand voice allows, you can add small touches of personality, such as a light joke, an anecdote, or a tongue-in-cheek “Note:”

I once added a line in a troubleshooting doc: “If all else fails, try turning it off and on again—no, really 🙃.” Surprisingly, we got feedback that it made the doc more approachable.

Of course, use humor or personality sparingly and appropriately. The goal isn’t to entertain, but to make the experience less drudgerous.

6. Keep Paragraphs and Sentences Short

This is a simple writing hack for readability. Aim for paragraphs of 2-5 sentences.

In technical writing, clarity trumps literary flair. It’s perfectly fine to have a one-sentence paragraph if it contains a key point.

Also, use formatting to break things up:

• Bullet lists (like this one!)
• Numbered steps for procedures
• Tables for structured information

7. Make it Scannable

Most readers scan before they commit to reading.

• Use clear headings and subheadings that signal what each section is about
• Use bold text to highlight important terms or keywords
• Use call-out blocks for tips/warnings

A scannable doc means even if the user doesn’t read every word, they can still extract the steps or info they need by glancing.

8. Review and Test Your Docs

Reviewing is an essential part of the documentation process. It helps you ensure that your documentation actually works.

In his five-step documentation reviewing process, technical writer Tom Johnson says that the first stage is unmissable where you — the documentation writer — make “the product work” for yourself following the steps you’ve written.

Take the time to follow your own instructions as if you’re the user. This is the only way to catch missing steps or assumptions.

If possible, also do a peer review: another person (ideally similar profile to your intended reader) goes through it and gives feedback. They’ll point out confusing bits or typos you overlooked.

9. Set an Update Schedule

Documentation starts stalling as soon as it’s published. So you need an update schedule.

Your update frequency will depend on the documentation you’re looking at. For instance, your user-facing documentation will need updates only when you update your product.

Developer-facing documentation, and technical code documentation is forever ongoing (inline documentation).

Your internal work documentation, on the other hand, could use updating each time something changes.

For example, when you replace your current project management tool or even when you simply discover a more optimized way of doing some work. Tribal knowledge capturing and general knowledge capturing are some of the ongoing exercises in such documentation.

When it makes sense, maintain a change log in your documentation so that users don’t feel lost when they see an updated version.

Also, as part of updating your documentation, get rid of the obsolete and duplicate files. A search in your documentation should never return multiple versions of the same support content. Each topic should only take one resource.

10. Use Metrics to Improve

Use analytics to identify content gaps in your documentation and improve its overall quality.

• If an article has a high “no” in helpfulness, rework it.
• If certain search terms are trending, maybe create an article for that.
• If a forum thread or support ticket pattern emerges on a topic not covered in docs, document it.

Over time, your documentation becomes more robust and self-correcting through these feedback loops.

Remember, outdated docs can be worse than no docs, because they mislead.

Additionally, here are some writing tips to help improve the quality of your content:

Choose the Right Tools and Software for Documentation

Writing documentation isn’t just about the content; it’s also about where that content lives and how it’s delivered.

The tools or platform you use can make documentation easier to produce and more useful to consume.

Heroic Knowledge Base

If you’re documenting a product for end-users or customers, a knowledge base is ideal.

These are usually web-based portals with search, categories, and article pages.

A great option here is Heroic Knowledge Base. A plugin that lets you create a full-featured knowledge base site on WordPress.

Key Features:

• Easy to setup with built-in setup wizard
• Freedom with article layouts and customization
• Instant search suggestions
• Article feedback system, reports, and analytics
• ChatGPT based AI virtual assistant
• Fully customizable portal
• Content restriction feature to create internal knowledge base

There are also tons of other helpful features.

The best thing about the Heroic Knowledge Base is that it’s very affordable. The base plan starts at just $67 per year!

Furthermore, I recommend checking out the guide on the 13 best technical writing tools and software.

Wrapping it up

Documentation writing is a craft and an ongoing journey. What you write today will evolve tomorrow, and that's exactly how it should be.

Start with a solid foundation using the principles and practices we discussed.

Over time, iterate and improve.

Stay attuned to your readers and the shifting context of your product or project. When you adapt your writing to meet real user needs, your documentation remains a living resource that informs, guides, and delights.

The post How to Write Documentation: A Comprehensive Guide for 2026 first appeared on HeroThemes.

These best practices aren’t limited to software upgrades, they're about efficiently using help desk software, optimizing processes, training your support team, and making continuous improvements.

And it will work effectively whether you’re managing a small customer support center or trying to improve IT support in a large enterprise.

Let’s dive into some of the most important help desk practices you can implement today.

What Makes a Successful Help Desk?

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

Let’s first look at how a successful help desk looks like. This will give you an idea to aim for necessary improvements and what to expect from them.

1. Help desk that solves problems efficiently: You don’t have to go through multiple threads of responses; one simple response should be sufficient to answer a customer's question or solve a problem.
2. Streamlined processes: A help desk where agents know what to do when they log-in to their shift. They take a sip of coffee and jump on to solve customer issues, not to look for them.
3. Prioritizes customer satisfaction (a customer-centric mindset): A help desk job is not only to solve customer problems but also about retaining customers and improving their loyalty to the brand in order to attract new customers. Strong leadership and a culture that genuinely wants to help customers is essential.
   Explore: Top 12 Loyalty Email Subject Lines for VIP Rewards
   
4. Smart use of technology: Properly using tools and their features to streamline operations such as communication, collaboration, and automation.
5. Empower agents: Agents should have access to the right tools, resources, and training, as well as regular recognition for their contributions.
6. Data-driven decisions and continuous improvement: Use of metrics, feedback, and available knowledge to improve systems, processes, quality, and quantity.

Based on my experience working with a help desk team, this is what I believe a successful help desk should work.

I know this probably sounds like a fantasy to you right now, but over time, you'll be proud of your help desk experience.

Help Desk Best Practices

Let me be clear. You probably already know most of the practices listed in this guide. What sets this one guide apart are its real-world experience, examples, and plenty of actionable insights.

Make sure you start implementing them.

1. Choose the Right Help Desk Software and Tools

Having the right help desk software in place is the foundation for great support.

Don’t cheap out when it comes to selecting the right tools for facilitating awesome support.

You will never scale a quality support without proper tools. So stop trying to save a few bucks by using your own tools, at the end this will cost you a lot. Start using good help desk software.

Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier – Co-Founder, WP Media

A good help desk software lets you efficiently manage every support request without anything slipping through the cracks.

You don’t need fancy or expensive software to start with. I recommend you to try Heroic Inbox. It lets you build a help desk ticketing system based on shared inbox functionality, and includes the following features:

• Support for unlimited agents and tickets: Unlike SaaS help desk software, you are not limited with the number of users or running out of monthly ticket quota. This also greatly reduces the cost of scaling your help desk system.
• Collaboration features like team notes, reply drafting, and ticket assignment.
• Automation features for ticketing routing and canned responses.
• Integration with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and other tools.
• Collision detection.
• CRM features (Customer Relationship Management) to store customer details, track conversations, and record recurring questions.

While Heroic Inbox provides all the essential features needed to improve help desk support. It’s also:

• Easy to setup
• Easy to use
• Scalable as you grow
• Fit your budget

The yearly license of Heroic Inbox will cost you $199. Compared to similar SaaS help desk platforms like Help Scout, you can easily save 50-80% with Heroic Inbox.

2. Provide Multi-Channel Support for Customers

Don’t limit your customers to a single way of contacting you, especially since modern customers scatter all over the web like X, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Many customers seek support through social media, SMS, phone call, and live chat.

In fact as per a study, strong omnichannel strategies retain 89%¹ customers compared to 33% that not.

Having multi-channel support is a need of modern businesses, and many help desk software can help you manage multiple support channels through a unified dashboard (omnichannel).

You may not need to focus on multi-channel support at the start of your business, but as you grow, you definitely need to explore it.

For example, someone might find out about your product through LinkedIn and want to know if it offers a particular feature. Rather than spending days communicating with customer support via email, customers can quickly interact with brands by messaging them on social channels.

This improves the overall customer experience and increases conversions.

Explore: What Is Omnichannel Customer Service? The Beginner’s Guide

3. Build a Knowledge Base for Self-Service

One of the most effective ways to improve help desk support is to empower customers to help themselves.

A knowledge base or self-service portal is an online library of help articles, FAQs, how-to guides, and troubleshooting tips.

It’s your 24/7 customer service channel where customers can find answers to their questions even when your team is offline.

In truth, 67%² of customers prefer to find answers on their own.

A well-crafted knowledge base offers many benefits. It not only solves customer issues, but it also helps with internal processes:

• 24/7 self-service customer support option
• Reduces support tickets. Freeing agents to solve more complex issues
• Reduces customer support cost
• Faster response time
• Consistence information
• Help with internal knowledge sharing and retention
• SEO and brand visibility
• Opportunities for product or UX improvements
• Helps with scaling a growing number of customers

How Do You Create a Useful Knowledge Base?

Step 1: Create a knowledge base portal.

With the Heroic Knowledge Base WordPress plugin you can easily create a knowledge base that is accessible, customizable, scalable and affordable.

Simply download the plugin, install it on a WordPress website, complete the setup wizard, and start uploading your guides.

Heroic Knowledge Base provides you with the necessary functionality for creating and managing knowledge base. Features include:

• Setup assistant
• Powerful search bar and navigation system
• Post builder and FAQ builder
• User restriction
• Article ratings and feedback system
• Content categorization and tagging
• Article and category ordering
• Revision history
• Track popular and empty searches with reports and analytics
• Multilingual support
• AI help assistance

Note: By using Heroic Inbox and Heroic Knowledge Base WordPress plugins you can manage customer support requests and knowledge base from a one system.

Step 2: Start by collecting the most common questions or problems customers have.

For each one, write a clear knowledge base article that effectively explains or guides users to complete a specific task.

Here are some recommended guides to help along creating knowledge base articles:

• 8 Killer Knowledge Base Articles: Examples, Writing Tips
• Knowledge Base Article Template

Step 3: Organize the content into categories to make it searchable.

Place the starting guides at the top sections of the knowledge base, so users can easily find them. These are typically user guides designed to help onboard new users and teach them how to effectively use the software.

Group articles together based on their type. For example:

• General questions
• Account related questions
• FAQs
• Technical guides
• Troubleshooting guides
• Security, privacy and policy related topics

Step 4: Keep content up to date by reviewing old articles, and adding new guides based on detected issues and customer feedback.

A key to an effective knowledge base is constant learning and improvement.

You can easily find missing articles and outdated content by using the knowledge base software's reports, analytics, and feedback collection features.

4. Hire and Train the Right Help Desk Staff

The effectiveness of a tool depends on the person using it.

Meaning, no matter how good or costly your help desk software is, it will still produce poor results if it’s not used properly or by the right person with the right skills.

It’s crucial to hire support agents with the right mix of skills and attitude.

Choosing the right people to hire saves you a lot of hassle down the road. Here I have in mind both their technical and “empathy” skills.

Ionut Neagu – Founder, ThemeIsle

Look for team members who have:

• Great communication skills
• A knack for problem-solving and learning new tools and software.
• Plenty of patience
• Genuine empathy for customers.

Technical knowledge is important (especially for IT help desks), but soft skills often matter even more in customer service.

An agent who is friendly, calm, and patient enough to walk a user through a solution is worth their weight in gold.

Once you have the right people to manage the help desk, invest time in training them. Teach them about:

• The company's products, policies, and workflows
• How to effectively use help desk software and knowledge base
• Set clear and achievable expectations
• Customer service philosophy of your company
• Team hierarchy
• Ticket escalation process
• How to handle angry or frustrated customer

With proper training and support, agents feel confident and valued to tackle issues head-on with a calm and professional demeanor.

Explore: 15 Email Subject Lines for Hiring Top Talent

5. Empower Your Team With Effective Processes and Resources

Even the best agents need the right environment in order to perform at their best.

One best practice for managing a help desk is to establish clear processes:

• How tickets flow
• Prioritized (for example, by urgency or customer impact)
• Who handles what types of issues
• How to escalate a problem if it can’t be solved at the first level

Having such processes defined ensures consistency, and every request is handled in a reliable way. Nothing gets lost due to confusion or chaos.

While clear processes are important to improve help desk support, don’t forget to provide the resources and capacity your team needs.

1. Start with having enough team members to be efficient and meet your service goals.
2. Create an internal knowledge base or playbook for your agents. It could be a simple document or wiki where your team documents solutions, workarounds, and tips for uncommon issues.

Being able to quickly train new hires and get them up to speed is priceless. This implies that all the support processes are well documented.

Davor Altman – Happiness Engineer, Automattic

Documentation is essential for excellent product support, helping customers and staff understand your product. It’s a great way of communicating to a large audience and provides discovery and optimization benefits.

Finally, empower your team by giving them some autonomy and authority.

For example, front-line agents should have the ability to make minor exceptions. They should be able to offer discounts or free months of service to keep customers happy without needing multiple approvals.

This allows them to solve customer problems more quickly and smoothly, leading to higher satisfaction.

6. Foster a Customer-Centric Culture

At the heart of every help desk best practice is one simple principle: putting the customer first. This is a customer-centric culture.

To cultivate a customer-centric culture, ensure that every team member understands the company's goals. The main goal should be to satisfy customers.

A customer-centric culture isn’t focused on speed or cost-cutting; rather, it’s about respecting, empathizing with, and reassuring customers.

Encourage your agents to try getting in customer shoes (seeing things from the customer's perspective). What might be a small glitch to you could be a major headache for them.

By simply saying, “I understand how frustrating that must be. Let me get this sorted out for you,” and truly meaning it puts customers at ease, and it builds a long-lasting trust in your brand.

In fact, 65%³ of customers switch to different companies because of a poor support experience.

Don’t let your support interactions be the reason someone feels undervalued.

Here are a few things you can start doing from today to make customers feel more cared for:

• Start using customers' names and be friendlier rather than giving machine-like answers
• Apologize if the company made a mistake
• Thank the customer for their patience
• If it’s going to take time to fix customer issues, let them know and give a realistic timeframe
• Set a clear expectation from the start
• Follow up after resolving the issues

Explore: Knowledge Culture: Its Importance, Key Components & Examples

7. Set Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a promise. Often it is formalized as a policy that defines how quickly your help desk will respond to and resolve issues.

Setting SLAs for your help desk team is an excellent practice because it establishes clear goals and accountability.

For example, you might commit to answering all incoming help desk emails within one business day, or promise to resolve high-priority incidents within four hours.

Choose metrics that make sense for your business and customer expectations. For example:

Most help desk software let you set timers on tickets. These timers flag or escalate issues that are about to breach the SLA.

There are many benefits to implementing SLAs:

• It sets transparent expectations with customers
• It ensures critical issues get resolved quickly
• It lets you measure how well your team is doing against these goals

It’s a way of managing your help desk performance with concrete data.

SLAs are especially important when speed is critical for support, and customers often define “fast” in surprising ways.

According to a HubSpot study, 90% of customers say an immediate response is important, and 60% define “immediate” as 10 minutes or less.

You might not always hit a 10-minute reply time (especially for complex IT issues). Even so, this statistic shows how critical timely service and Service Level Agreements are.

Use SLAs to push your team towards faster responses without sacrificing quality. Even a quick acknowledgment like “We’ve received your request and are on it” can reassure customers.

8. Automate Repetitive Tasks

Automation is a big part of streamlining help desk tasks. It frees up lots of time for agents to focus on real issues instead of figuring out what to do.

The idea here is to automate repetitive help desk tasks using tools and software features. For example, you can easily automate the following help desk tasks:

• Assigning tickets to the right agent based on the context, and data collected with a support ticket form. For example, billing emails can go straight to the billing queue.
• Ticket confirmations. For example, sending a “We got your request” confirmation email with expected waiting time based on the average first reply time and holidays.
• Set notifications for deadlines. For example, reminding agents about last follow up, or when agents haven’t responded to a ticket after a certain amount of time.
• Use canned responses to answer routine inquiries with one click.
• Automate feedback collection after tickets closing.
• Weekly and monthly reports on team performance.
• AI chatbots or assistants to handle simple requests and help users find the necessary guides. AI-driven tools can handle basic questions and answers or gather initial information (like asking for a description of the issue and an account ID).

Help desk support mostly involves repetitive procedures and answering the same questions. This is one field where automation could be very beneficial.

The bottom line is: Use technology to eliminate busywork.

Just make sure to test your automation now and then. To ensure they’re working as intended.

Explore: Guide to Service Desk Automation

9. Measure Help Desk Performance and Gather Feedback

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. To ensure your help desk keeps getting better, do two things. Track key performance metrics, and listen to customer feedback.

Start by defining a few core metrics:

• First Response Time (FRT)
• Average Resolution Time: How long it takes on average to fully fix an issue.
• First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate: The percentage of issues solved in a single interaction.
• Ticket Volume and Backlog: How many new issues are coming in, and whether any are piling up unresolved.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Usually measured via a quick survey after a ticket is closed. E.g., “Are you satisfied with the support you received?”

These metrics can easily be tracked using software like Heroic Knowledge Base. Its built-in functionality allows you to track articles that are poorly performing. Metrics such as knowledge base article transfer rate (percentage of viewers requested human support from that article), nulled searches, and popular searches provide actionable insights.

Tracking these metrics provides a clear picture of your progress and identifies areas for improvement.

For example, if you notice high ticket volume on Mondays and longer wait times, you might need more staff on Mondays.

Similarly, if the first call resolution (FCR) rate is low for a particular type of issue, you can work with the team to collect more data. Improve the forms used to collect customer data, and create training programs around those types of issues to improve agent skills.

Additionally, pay close attention to customer feedback complaints and suggestions. They provide golden opportunities to fix underlying problems and improve your service. E.g. If multiple customers comment that your support emails are hard to understand, that’s a sign to simplify your language or provide clearer steps.

You can easily automate the feedback collection process:

• By sending a survey email after resolving tickets
• Periodically reach out to clients for input

Explore: Customer Feedback Surveys: Tools, Best Practices, Templates + More

When you combine metric data with real customer feedback, you get a 360-degree view of your help desk’s performance. Use this information to improve your help desk support by planning fixes and measuring changes during regular team meetings.

10. Continuously Improve and Adapt

The final (and perhaps most important) best practice is a mindset.

Improving your help desk is an ongoing journey, not a one-time project. This is especially true when technology and customer expectations are changing so rapidly. What I consider help desk best practices today might evolve tomorrow.

Continuous improvement is a key here and should be part of your help desk culture.

Be sure to keep your team updated with industry trends, practices, and tools.

For example, right now AI is shaping how companies offer customer support. Be it through chatbot, automation, or helping agents in the background. Be prepared to adapt your support offerings accordingly at any given time.

Here are a few ideas on how you can improve help desk support over time:

• Keep the knowledge base up to date with new guides on issues and features, and update old articles based on user feedback, and analytics. (learn how to audit knowledge base)
• Train your team before releasing new features. This will prepare them to answer new questions and handle the increased ticket load that typically occurs after a new release.
• Gather and act on feedback.
• Collect and improve old data. Knowledge retention is crucial for constantly improving processes. Make sure the knowledge gained over time doesn’t leave with your employees.
• Encourage a mindset of proactive improvement. Regularly train new and old employees.
• Create a culture of collaboration where everyone can talk freely about product, processes, and the industry.

Finally, remember that any improvements you implement should align with your broader business goals and your customer-centric culture.

Automation that speeds up response time for the loss of quality shouldn’t be called an improvement. Instead, look at how you can achieve both.

Final Words

By now, you should have plenty of help desk improvement ideas to put into action.

It might seem overwhelming, but start small.

First, invest into simple, quality software like Heroic Inbox and Heroic Knowledge Base. Use these tools to streamline your current processes by creating a knowledge base, collecting customer requests in one place, improving team collaboration, and gathering actionable feedback.

Second, begin training your team. Set up clear and achievable SLAs and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Measure performance and create a team hierarchy consisting of managers, agents, and trainees. Look into offering multi-channel support.

Third, scale your software and tools to have more advanced features. Look into improving support quality and efficiency. Foster customer-centric and collaborative culture, and improve on the available data.

These are some of the best practices I can suggest to improve your help desk support in 2025, without making your brain fry with 20+ same tips or hacks that only sound good on paper and make processes more complicated for everyone.

Do let me know how this article helped you or your opinion by commenting below.

Resources Mentioned in This Guide

1. Omnichannel statistics by wisernotify ↩︎
2. Self-service statistics by ZenDesk ↩︎
3. Customer service statistics of 2024 by khoros ↩︎

The post 10 Help Desk Best Practices for IT and Service Desk first appeared on HeroThemes.

Having a centralized repository of IT guides and tutorials (or knowledge base) will greatly help your support department to train new employees, and offer a self help support option from channels like knowledge base so customers can solve common IT problems on their own.

This will greatly improve the customer experience, reduce overall tickets and customer support cost.

But can an IT knowledge base help solve your problems?

Let’s find out! We will dive deep into the IT knowledge base and answer all your questions. Let’s get started.

What is IT Knowledge Base?

An IT knowledge base is a centralized repository of information that helps users solve common IT (information technology) problems and improves their technical, problem-solving, and business skills.

It can include guides to familiarize users with software UI, database, hardware usages, troubleshooting issues, project management, day-to-day communication, and adaptability.

Explore: What Is a Knowledge Base? Its Types, Benefits and More

What Is the Difference Between a Normal Knowledge Base and an IT Knowledge Base?

The main difference between normal and IT knowledge is the type of information provided.

In a normal knowledge base, you will find general information about products, FAQs, tips and tricks, and company information such as policies.

However, in an IT knowledge base you will mostly find technical guides, tutorials, and information related to information technology, such as troubleshooting guides, and detailed procedures.

Why Create an IT Knowledge Base

There are many reasons to create an IT Knowledge Base, for instance:

• It reduces IT support team workload by reducing total tickets
• Reduces cost of customer support and employee training
• Improves productivity and efficiency
• Helps with employees training
• Attracts new customers
• Standardizes IT knowledge and best practices
• Supports remote work environments

Let’s look at some of the benefits in more detail.

1. Reduces IT Support Team Workload and Cost

Knowledge base mostly used as a self-support channel, allowing customers to resolve issues without the need for an IT technician.

This greatly reduces the overall ticket generated for repetitive questions and issues.

2. Helps With Employees Training

Training new employees is always expensive. Especially when you have low technical jobs to offer, which in most cases is low paid or based on the employee’s efficiency.

For example, data entry work.

Such roles are only taken by freshers, employees that only have basic or no knowledge at all.

In such cases, having an IT knowledge base setup will help avoid training each employee manually, the need for expert trainers, and time-consuming processes.

3. Increases Productivity and Efficiency

As you already have most of the answers ready to help customers with. All you have to do is share them.

It reduces the overall time needed to answer the same questions and get senior help, allowing IT teams to focus on more complex issues.

4. Attracts New Customers

With an IT knowledge base, you are basically creating very relevant content to your product offerings.

You can attract business traffic from search engines using SEO techniques and gain new customers by pitching your products.

How To Create an IT Knowledge Base

Creating a good IT knowledge base might take a little bit of time. Depending on what kind of knowledge base software you are planning to use and the efficiency of your content team.

We have outlined some steps that will help you implement an IT knowledge base and make things easier and manageable.

Step 1: Define the purpose and audience

There are two types of IT knowledge bases:

1. Internal IT knowledge base: Contains guides and tutorials on tools, workflows, and troubleshooting for internal use.
2. Customer-facing knowledge base: To help customers resolve common IT issues such as rebooting a system, or clearing the cache.

For example, Kinsta’s knowledge base.

Kinsta’s knowledge base covers hundreds of guides and tutorials on issues that customers might face while using their hosting services.

Issues which might be caused by browser or other dependencies. And they also educate their customers with general IT knowledge, for example, creating guides on topics such as SSH, SSL, WordPress, cPanel, Cloud hosting, and so on.

Kinsta’s focus here is on:

• Providing self-service support
• Educating customers with in-depth information
• Attracting new customers with the search engine optimization
• Targeting guides to DIY (Do it yourself) users and developers

Your first step towards IT knowledge base should be:

• Understanding the need from your knowledge base
• Listing out goals, pros and, cons
• Researching about target audience
• Cost calculations
• Implementation and maintenance planning

Planning ahead before any project will help you make the right decision and avoid costly steps.

Step 2: Choose the Right IT knowledge Base Software

There are many types of knowledge base software solutions available on the market.

For example, SaaS solutions. Which come with hosting, a domain name, and are easy to set up, upgrade and maintain. But they are very costly.

Code-based solutions. Which are hard to set up, maintain, upgrade, and often require developers to make small changes. But are very flexible to use as a starting point if it's something you want.

And knowledge base CMS (content management system) solutions, which are not that hard to set up, maintain and upgrade, offer great flexibility, and are also very cost-effective as well.

We recommend Heroic Knowledge Base for IT needs. It’s a WordPress CMS based plugin. It offers all the necessary features to create an internal or external IT knowledge base. Features including:

• No code solution for non tech heavy users
• Setup wizard to import demo template
• User access controls. Including content management roles such as editor, subscriber, and administrator.
• Ajax based advanced search bar
• Customization options. Including typography, sidebars (or layouts), colors, or headlines.
• Built-in analytics, reporting and feedback collection system

How To Set Up an IT Knowledge Base with Heroic KB

1. Choose and purchase hosting and a domain name from any provider you like and based on your budget.

We recommend Kinsta for WordPress due to its ease of use and unmatched performance.

2. Install WordPress through your website management platform or cPanel.

Most hosting services offer easy to install WordPress setup wizard as it is a top choice for creating websites with.

SIDENOTE: Ask your hosting provider If you are not sure about this. I’m sure they'll be happy to set up WordPress for you.

3. Download and install Heroic KB plugin.

You can purchase Heroic KB from here, and download it from your account section,

To install Heroic KB:

1. Visit your WordPress website dashboard (you can access WordPress dashboard by adding /wp-admin/ after your domain name)
2. Plugins > Add New Plugin
3. Click on the Upload Plugin button
4. Choose the downloaded plugin file
5. Click on the Install Now button > Activate the plugin.
6. Follow the setup wizard or skip it if you don’t want to install the demo content.

Congratulations! 🎉Your IT knowledge base portal is ready for further customization and content addition.

Explore: How to a knowledge base with WordPress – step by step guide

Step 3: Writing Tips for IT Knowledge Base Articles

Now that you have a knowledge base portal ready. You can start uploading your content.

Here are some tips to help you write proper IT articles:

• Offer technical guidance. The main thing that makes IT articles stand out is their technical part. So make sure to decipher technical concepts through your guides.
• Use simple, non-technical language. Although IT articles are technical, don’t make them complicated. Avoid jargon, keep sentences short, and explain technical words.
• Create an outline before starting with any type of article. (Here's an outline template that we usually use for every article)
• Use a simple title and headings.
• Add visuals and videos if necessary. Screen shots, diagrams, videos, or custom images, use whatever you can to make guides easy to understand. But avoid stock images at all costs.
• Follow a consistent format or use templates.
• Make use of heading tags, lists, dividers, tabs, accordion, code block, blockquote, tables, and custom blocks to simplify content into sections.
• Optimize for search engines. You don't have to learn much here, just make sure to include keywords naturally in the title, headings, description, and content.
• Review it with IT colleagues or experts to make sure that guide is accurate, clear, error-free and follows guidelines.

Here’s how to publish your knowledge base articles If you have followed the step 2 tutorial on creating a knowledge base with WordPress and Heroic KB.

1. Visit your WordPress website dashboard
2. Hover over the Heroic KB and click on Add New Article

This will open up an article editor through which you can create visually pleasing knowledge base articles.

The good thing about creating articles with WordPress and Heroic KB is that:

• It’s easy to use and very flexible
• You don’t need to have coding knowledge. You can create grid or flex box type layouts with built-in blocks.
• Heroic KB provides extra blocks for FAQs, table of contents, and for adding callouts.
• You can have a different layout/template for different articles. For example, having no sidebar for one of the articles.
• Tons of premade templates, ability to create reusable blocks, and plugins (such as Mammoth .docx converter for importing documents) to speed up your work.

Step 4: Additional Changes

Here are some additional changes that will help you build a good IT knowledge base.

1. Organize Guides and Structure

Organize guides and tutorials in a way that the most needed stuff is in front of your users.

For example, you should put Getting Started (or Setup) guides before anything else. And group guides based on their content group, such as troubleshooting or maintenance guides.

Heroic KB provides you with features to group your content based on categories and tags, as well as change category and article order.

Plus you get to adjust knowledge base layouts, sidebar content, or any other sections through the Heroic KB settings.

2. Make Use of Tabs and Accordions

If your IT products are for many different hardware or operating systems, it’s best to use tabs and accordions to group guides to simplify things for readers.

Google Chrome documentation is a good example of the proper use of accordions and tabs in documentation.

Heroic KB also provides built-in blocks to create such engaging posts without the need of writing a single line of code.

3. Restrict Access to the Sensitive Content

The IT knowledge base is also used to train employees. You definitely don’t want someone from outside to peek into your business secrets.

For that you have to put some safety measures in place to avoid unnecessary user access and information leakage.

Heroic KB has a feature to restrict user access on a directory level or a page level.

4. Optimize Knowledge Base for Search Engines

You have a great opportunity to get new customers by optimizing your guides to rank in search engines if you are creating a public IT knowledge base.

Here are some tips to make your knowledge base SEO friendly:

• Create in-depth, high quality and engaging content
• Optimize the title and meta description of articles based on your targeted keywords and keep it simple.
• Use heading tags to divide content into sections (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
• Target articles for the search intent (how-to guide, list-type post, review, comparison, beginner or advanced guide)
• Properly resize and compress images, and add alt text and proper file names.
• Link related articles
• Make knowledge base responsive (mobile friendly)

Knowledge bases created with Heroic KB are by default responsive or mobile friendly, high performance, and SEO friendly. Furthermore, it integrates well with SEO plugins.

Step 5: Update Knowledge Base Regularly

Software UI, settings and functionalities often change in IT infrastructure. For that you have to constantly update your knowledge base as well.

Plus, if you keep your content updated, it will benefit your SEO efforts and increase customer satisfaction as well.

Here are some tips on when to update your knowledge base articles:

• When information becomes outdated or links are broken.
• When software used in the tutorial has updated its UI, settings, functionality, or removed features.
• When customers create support tickets even though you have a guide to solve that specific issue, or based on user feedback.
• Articles not getting indexed in search engines or do not rank well.
• You have some budget to spare to improve content with custom graphics and videos.

You have built-in analytics, reporting, and a feedback system with Heroic KB that allows you to:

• Check article performance (total views)
• Track article to support ticket transfers
• Track popular, nulled searches and measure search effectiveness
• Collect user feedback

Final Thoughts

If you have any IT product or service to offer, such as premium software, you should definitely invest in building an IT knowledge base.

It helps streamline processes, train new employees, provide customer support, and reduce overall costs.

But the most important benefit I can think of is its ability to bring in new customers.

You can include IT content into your existing content strategy and use software like WordPress and Heroic Knowledge Base to simplify content publishing and SEO.

That's it for this guide! Let us know if we missed anything or if you need more help by leaving a comment below.

The post IT Knowledge Base: What It Is and How to Create One first appeared on HeroThemes.

You spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to acquire new customers. But do you put the same effort into retaining the customers you already have?

Creating a killer knowledge base might not be sexy, but it will go a long way towards helping your paying customers get the most from your product. And the more value you can give your customers, the more likely they'll become return customers.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

Create a Knowledge Base - The Easy Way!

Build a knowledge base and help your customers help themselves.

Get the Theme

Knowledge Base Article Template

1. Choose a Title Your Customers Can Find

Let's start at the beginning – your title. A thought-out title is essential because it's how customers will actually find the answers to their problems.

The fact of the matter is this:

If your customers don't know the knowledge base article can solve their problem, it doesn't matter one lick how good the rest of the article is!

So make your title count. Avoid jargon. Explain the problem in simple English using the same terminology that you use in your interface.

Look how MailChimp's article titles are all simple and tied to interface items (e.g. “Email Beamer”):

Getting the title right is vital for search – most of the traffic to an article comes from a search – either from a Search Engine such as Google or your own site search. Ensure customers searching for help can quickly find relevant results rather than having to trawl through your entire knowledge base.

2. Start With the Problem

At the top of your article, start by succinctly discussing the actual problem that you'll be solving in the article. This lets readers know they're at the right place to find answers and properly sets their expectations for what they'll get from the article.

Look how Loco2, a train booking service, explains exactly what readers can expect in each article:

For specific topics, be specific. For example, if your article is about solving an error message, discuss the error message in the first paragraph. Quickly explain why your customer is receiving the error message before you jump into solving it.

Look how Yoast quickly explains exactly why an error is occurring:

3. Include a Table of Contents for Long Articles

If your article is especially long, it's a good idea to include a table of contents so that readers can skip to the exact section that they need. Whenever possible, it might even be a better idea to break up the article into separate, shorter articles.

But if long content is unavoidable, slap a table of contents on it. Check out how MailChimp does it, even on their shorter articles:

And if you've ever used the HeroThemes knowledge base, you might've noticed that we do something similar with our Table of Contents widget:

4. Write the Instructions – One Step, One Point

If you're familiar with your product, writing instructions can be surprisingly difficult. You know the ins and outs, so it's easy to forget that your readers lack the same level of expertise. Don't do that.

Keep your instructions simple. One step should only cover one point. What do I mean by that?

Look at how Dropbox writes instructions:

Isn't that simpler than writing: “1. Sign in to Dropbox, click on your name and choose Settings”? I think so.

Separating your instructions into clear points makes it easier for your readers to follow along.

Similarly, if you're writing FAQs instead of instructions, you should keep each question and answer to a specific topic.

Explore: How To Write Good Documentation: The Beginner’s Guide

5. Break Up Content With Headings

Use intelligent headings to break up your content into easily digestible chunks. If one article requires readers to complete two different sets of actions, it's a good idea to stick them underneath separate headings.

For example, look how Canva uses headings to break up different sets of instructions in the same article:

6. Use Proper Formatting for Asides and Notes

Sometimes you'll need to add more information to your instructions or FAQs. That's fine. It's unavoidable. But when you do add extra information, make sure you format it so readers know it's an aside.

For example, look how we use Heroic Shortcodes to style asides in our KnowAll knowledge base theme:

Readers can quickly distinguish between instructions and the additional information contained in asides.

Similarly, Asana uses bullet point icons and borders to differentiate their “Asana Tips” from regular instructions:

Properly formatting the different types of information in your knowledge base articles goes a long way towards enhancing your readers' comprehension.

Link Your Knowledge Base Articles Together

Here's what the best knowledge bases do:

They don't just solve the current problem a customer is facing. They also solve the next problem before the customer even knows they need help.

What do I mean? Look how Asana ends almost every article in their knowledge base:

If you click through to that article and scroll to the bottom, you'll find another link:

Asana knows that if they can push their customers to get the most value from Asana, then those customers will be more likely to stick around (and keep paying!). To accomplish that, they use the conclusion of their knowledge base articles to drive customers to learn even more about their product.

For instance, what if a customer didn't know it was possible to invite teammates
to Asana? Without the link at the conclusion of the article, they might never know about that essential function in Asana.

So, use your knowledge base articles to drive engagement and retention. Push people towards the next logical step so that you ensure your customers get the most value from your product.

7. Standardize Your Knowledge Base Article Template

Last but not least, you need to put these principles into developing a standardized template for your articles. Using the same template over and over allows your customers to develop cognitive fluency.

Essentially, it makes it easier for them to navigate your knowledge base because they're already familiar with how things work. They know that bullet icon means it's an aside, while that other bullet icon means it's an essential instruction point.

Tips for Writing Knowledge Base Articles

Ok – you know the template. But how about actually writing your knowledge base articles? Here are a few tips to start you off on the right track:

• Show Don't Tell – “A picture is worth a thousand words” might be a cliche at this point, but it is true for your knowledge base. Whenever possible, add screenshots, animated GIFs, or even videos to make it easier for readers to follow along.
• Start with the Easiest First – If readers need to complete multiple steps, always start with the easiest step first if possible. This allows readers to get at least one accomplishment under their belt before they move to the hard stuff.
• Use the Right Tone – Be straightforward and avoid jargon whenever possible. Remember, your main goal is to communicate information. And always consider your readers' moods – if you're writing an article on a frustrating error message, you probably shouldn't be cracking jokes.
• Avoid the Curse of Knowledge – I touched on this above – but always remember that your readers don't have the same depth of knowledge as you do. Try to put yourself in a beginner's shoes when writing knowledge base articles (You may want to check out some examples of effective knowledge base articles).

Knowledge Base Style Guide: Useful Tips and How To Create

Do Companies Actually Do This? Is a Knowledge Base Style Guide a Real Thing?

Ok, I’m going to tell you how to create your style guide in a second. But first, I want to lead with some examples of companies who are actually doing this. This accomplishes two goals:

• It shows you that I’m not just making things up to create more blog content 😉
• It gives you a real-life example you can pull from for your own style guide.

Let’s look at Mozilla knowledge base style guide first.

Mozilla has a whole entry on the style guide for their knowledge base. Because Mozilla is open source, it’s especially essential for them to have a style guide to, in their own words, “make the Firefox support Knowledge Base consistent, resulting in a knowledge base, that is easy to read and contribute to.”. Easy to read? That sounds like a good goal for your knowledge base, right?

The guide goes deep, taking you through everything from capitalization, to whitespace, to serial commas.

MailChimp’s Voice & Tone style guide is another worthwhile read. While it’s not 100% focused on knowledge bases, it does have a number of entries for both knowledge base and tutorial content:

Whereas Mozilla’s style guide is more focused on style and formatting, MailChimp opts to focus more on, well, voice and tone, than nitty-gritty formatting.

I tossed a couple examples at you, but I have yet to give you a process for actually creating your own knowledge base style guide. So let’s fix that!

1. Use a Consistent Person

Have you ever read an article where the author switched back and forth between “I” and “We”? I have, and we can tell you that it’s exceedingly confusing.

So, if you’re going to use the first person – pick one and be consistent about it. Even if you’re solo, you can still opt to use “we”. Up to you! Just use the same one.

Additionally, you don’t even need to use first person. You can opt to eschew “I” and “we” altogether.

There’s not really a right answer here – it’s just about consistency.

2. Standardize Your Formatting

You know that good knowledge bases use lots of instructions with small steps. And those instructions will, at some point, include language like:

Click on File.

So – is it:

• Click on File
• Click on “File”
• Click on File

And when you actually write your lists, is it:

• Step 1: Click this
• Step 2: Click that

Or is it like this:

• Click this
• Click that

Again – you can pick the one you like best – but whichever one you choose, use it consistently across your whole knowledge base.

There are other formatting choices you need to make as well – the Mozilla style guide gives you a good idea of everything to cover, but here are some starter ideas:

• Heading capitalization – will you use sentence case or Title Case?
• Numbers – is it 10 or ten?
• Abbreviations – don’t or do not?
• Acronyms – CDN or content delivery network?

If you’re using one of our knowledge base WordPress themes or plugins, our built-in shortcodes and formatting options can help you stay consistent when it comes to formatting

3. Get the Voice Right

Finally, you need to go beyond formatting and standardize your voice.

Are you your customer’s friend? Or are you Spock from Star Trek, dispassionately dispensing cold hard wisdom?

Within reason, either is fine. As long as it’s consistent.

In general, you should make sure to follow MailChimp’s knowledge base guide tips. I suggest them not only because MailChimp actually published their guide, but also because I think MailChimp has one of the best knowledge bases out there.

Their advice is this:

• Always make your first priority to answer questions and inform your readers. Jokes are ok sometimes, but not if they distract from that essential goal.
• Avoid speaking like a marketer – you’re just trying to help.

Wrapping Things Up

Creating templates for knowledge base articles will pay off in the form of a more easily comprehensible knowledge base.

Remember to follow this template:

• Choose an easy-to-find title
• Describe the problem and set expectations
• Keep your instructions and FAQs to specific points
• Use proper formatting for the table of contents, headers, and asides
• Push readers towards other knowledge base articles that help them get more value from your product

And then remember to use that same template for all of your knowledge base articles!

Need suggestions for your own knowledge base? Leave a comment below and I'll do my best to help out!

The post The Ultimate Knowledge Base Article Template With Examples first appeared on HeroThemes.

I think I know why:

Most companies invest in live workflow tools and on-site help widgets to help their users get onboard. These resources take care of the initial technical setup too.

But once the logistics are out of the way, customers are left with many questions like: “How can I use the X feature?” or “How do I integrate my tool with your solution?” and more.

Because users are increasingly preferring self-help channels¹ over traditional email and phone support to resolve such queries, step-by-step instructional posts become the most indispensable components of a knowledge base.

But not all knowledge base articles are created equal, most of them work, but there comes an information presentation, writing techniques, customer experience, branding, and upsells.

In this guide, I will teach you what makes knowledge base articles good with some quality examples out there. Let's start!

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What Is a Knowledge Base?

A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information designed to help users easily find answers to their questions. Created to provide self-service portal to customers or as an internal knowledge hub.

Knowledge base used to store various types of articles, including how-to guides, troubleshooting articles, FAQs, product documentation, policies and procedures, SOPs, and training materials.

Types of Knowledge Base Articles

Each type of knowledge base article serves a specific purpose depending on the user's needs. Whether it's for solving a problem, or learning about a product, or understanding company policies.

1. How-To Guides

How to-guides are the core of most knowledge bases. A carefully crafted step-by-step instructions that guides users through a specific task or workflow. Designed to be action-oriented.

For example:

• How to Change the WordPress Site Title and Tagline
• Upload YouTube videos

How-to articles created specifically for the knowledge base tend to be short (less than 500 words) and to the point. However, depending on the situation, such as technical articles are in-depth.

2. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

FAQs are used to quickly answer user questions, often in a sentence or two. These are the most common, recurring questions about the products or services you offer.

For example FAQ articles can be:

• Do you offer refund on purchases?
• Which payment methods are accepted?

Here's a pro tip:

• While concise, FAQ content should be thorough enough to fully address the question, and if you have a detailed guide on that question—link to it.
• Make sure FAQs are easy to find, for that add a powerful search bar to your knowledge base.
• You always don't need to create separate articles for FAQs. Group similar questions such as general questions or purchase-related questions.

3. Troubleshooting Articles

Troubleshooting articles focus on diagnosing and solving specific problems. They are often related to system and basic requirements for a specific product to run properly.

The most effective troubleshooting articles are structured logically, begin by outlining symptoms or error messages, followed by a series of potential causes and recommended solutions.

For example:

• How to Fix WordPress Fatal Error Allowed Memory Size

4. Product Documentation

Product documentation is all about introducing the product and it's features to the user. How to get started, available features, capabilities, limitations and use case.

Good product documentation is well organized (broken down into logical sections), technically accurate, and consistently updated with product changes. These articles are very useful for base and power users alike.

In fact, most knowledge bases list product documentation articles at the top. For example:

• How to download and install XYZ
• Getting started with XYZ-Product

5. Internal Knowledge Articles

Internal knowledge articles are created to retain knowledge, improve knowledge sharing, streamline processes, train employees, and to provide internal support.

These are the types of articles you will find in the internal knowledge base:

• Onboarding and training materials
• Team-Specific processes
• Company policies and compliance
• Workflows
• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
• Product and feature insights (Internal-Only)
• Decision logs and retrospectives
• Internal FAQs and troubleshooting guides
• Checklists
• Contact points

6. Glossaries

Glossary or reference articles are designed to define key terms, acronyms, or technical jargon that users may encounter in your product or service.

Explore: How To Create a WordPress Glossary

7. Release Notes and Changelogs

Release notes and changelogs to keep users informed about new features, updates, and bug fixes.

These articles are vital to providing transparency and gain user trust. Each release should clearly outline what has changed, why is important, and how it affects the user.

Most companies create well-designed pages for major updates and celebrate with discount offerings.

Explore: Free AI Changelog & Release Note Generator

Knowledge Base Article Writing Tips

The one test knowledge base articles need to pass to succeed

Does it *GET THE JOB DONE?*

No, seriously—this ridiculously simple test tells if a support content article is good. Because it’s only so when it gets the job done. Otherwise, it’s just outdated jargon.

Sounds too direct? Well, it shouldn’t. In fact, to someone like me who works with tens of tools each day (plus, has zero tech savviness), this is the only reasonable way to judge support content.

1. Understand the User’s Intent

Before drafting an article, consider what problem the user is trying to solve. Are they looking for a simple answer? Trying to complete a task? Can non-technical users follow this article? Learn how something works?

Answering these simple questions should give the article its structure, tone, and depth.

If it's something that can be answered with a simple sentence, why bother boring users with a lengthy jargon.

2. Focus on One Purpose Per Article

Knowledge base articles are always one-directional — focused on solving one problem at a time. Users often do not want to learn, they want to find answers directly from the knowledge base.

Keep the focus on your articles to one subject.

If the topic branches out into different scenarios, consider linking to separate articles. If it's really important, highlight it with a visual elements such as alert block.

3. Create and Follow Basic Content Writing Guidelines

Even though we all learned this at some point, when it comes down to implementation — we often forget it.

1. Use clear and concise language by using simple words, keeping sentences short, and using active voice.
2. Keep tone and style consistence. Web element designs, writing tone play a major role in providing a good user experience.
3. Define key terms, maintain naming conventions, and be consistent with terminology.
4. Structure your content logically by following a sensible sequence. Use headings to break down article into sections and lists to further break down sections.
5. Avoid grammar and spelling mistakes, trim unnecessary content, and if possible, get content reviewed by peers.

4. Add Visuals

Whenever possible, use screenshots, GIFs, diagrams, charts, videos (…not you stock images) to simplify complex stuff.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Very common sentence, but very true. Visuals reduce cognitive load and can make even the most technical articles accessible to a wider audience.

5. Create and Use Knowledge Base Article Template

Templates you will solve the problem of reinventing the wheel every time.

For example, create templates for common knowledge base articles such as how-to guides, FAQs, and SOPs. By following templates, writers can produce consistence results.

Here's a template I use for knowledge base articles here at HeroThemes:

8 Best Knowledge Base Articles to Learn From

In this post, I’ve rounded up 8 great examples of knowledge base articles, and based on my experience, here are a few things you can learn from them.

1. Knowledge Base How-to Guide Example by Slack

If you use Slack and Google Calendar (or any other business communication app), you probably don't open the calendar app to join meetings. Connect Slack to Google Calendar, get notified on Slack, and hope to join the meeting.

And this is not just limited to joining meetings, from slack you can create events, reschedule them or respond to events.

Many of us try to reduce app switch usages, and Slack understands this well and has created an easy-to-follow help article that teaches their users how they can integrate Google Calendar and perform various tasks.

What I like about the tutorial (other than the simple instructions) is that it uses sticky TOC (Table of Contents) to guide users to their preferred section, plus users get instructions based on their device settings.

Explore: Best WordPress Calendar Plugins

2. MailChimp Help Center Article Example

Other than the drag and drop design functionality, email marketing tools differ greatly. As I work with many of them, I end up reading TOO many of their tutorials, which makes me appreciate each time some support content is well planned.

MailChimp is extraordinary in this regard.

Their article on creating audience is a shining example of a knowledge base article that’s well thought out and structured.

Since the guide is a bit on the technical side and may not work based on the customer's plan, they added a video tutorial, in-depth information, and possible things users should know about.

Explore: 12 Best Help Center Examples and Designs for Inspiration

3. LastPass Knowledge Base Guide Example

All that password manager tools expect from their users is that they remember the ONE master password.

But what do they get? Well, they get customers like me – who simply can’t remember even one password.

I’ve forgotten and reset my LastPass master password twice using the listed support article.

The article has a serious tone. It links several articles user can check and try to recover their access.

The bold statements between content hints at the fact that their users perhaps ask them to email the forgotten passwords. (This STOPS more people from creating support tickets)

4. Hootsuite Help Article Example

Every tool has a set of power users. Users do more with the tool and need the tool’s advanced functionality.

Hootsuite, too, has its set of power users – those who explore features like the one that allows bulk scheduling.

This article that I’ve included not only gives clear directions for using the Bulk Scheduling feature, but it also draws the user’s attention to the “tricky” things.

For example, the author discusses the date format and asks users to be careful when specifying. This little detail saves headaches of many people because there's no universal date format. For example, I follow dd/mm/yyyy; you may be following mm/dd/yyyy.

5. Google Analytics Knowledge Base Article Example

Tools evolve all the time. They get fresh interfaces, new features / functionalities, and even complete revamps.

The latest version of Google Analytics, for example, is nothing like how it launched. But when tools update, their support content too should be updated. The best thing about Google’s help articles including the one I’ve selected is that they get frequent refreshes.

This tutorial, for example, uses the latest screenshots and terminology of the Google Analytics. This ensures that users find the settings right where the images or text instructions are telling. As a result, users don't feel lost.

6. Refund a course by Udemy

Every business gets refund requests. And so, every company needs a knowledge base article telling users how they can seek refunds.

Udemy has a no-nonsense refund help post. This tutorial gives easy text instructions followed by a GIF.

Now, we all know that all refunds can’t be allowed; some aren’t eligible. Udemy’s refund article factors in the cases of denied refunds. This additional information helps students decide if they’re fit to get a refund.

7. How to Connect OptinMonster with Campaign Monitor Article by OptinMonster

No matter how “perfect” and out-of-the-box integrations tools provide, users will still have questions.

OptinMonster integrates with many email marketing services, and in this article, OptinMonster gives a click-by-click method of its integration with Campaign Monitor.

What makes this tutorial interesting is that it estimates the buyer’s comfort with the tool rather accurately. You can tell it's written for absolute beginners. Information about the user's acquaintance with a tool helps in determining the level of detail a support doc should cover.

8. Product Documentation Article Example by Toggl

Solutions that come with dashboards also come with many ways of customizing them, and people always look for help with customization.

Take for example, Toggl, the time tracking tool. Toggl’s dashboard is customizable, and its instructional post on the topic gives thorough explanations of what the different customization fields mean. This helps the user in understanding what values they should input. A little more detail in the first step makes sure the user doesn't have to rework on it.

Final Thoughts

It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a new knowledge base articles or updating the old ones – the above insights WILL improve help you improve your support content.

Here's a one more tip: Don't aim to create a perfect knowledge base articles, try to make it useful.

To create something useful, you need constant feedback. Use knowledge base tools like Heroic Knowledge Base come with a feature set that allows you to get user feedback and helpful insights.

How do you decide if a knowledge base article is useful? And which are the most helpful knowledge base articles you’ve ever read? Do share in the comments!

Mentioned Resources in This Guide

1. Why customers prefer self-service support ↩︎

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

The post 8 Killer Knowledge Base Articles: Examples, Writing Tips first appeared on HeroThemes.

Well, there’s a reason pretty much every business has a knowledge base—they serve a very important role in helping you create a successful business.

The core of that role is helping you offer better support to your customers, but the benefits of a knowledge base can go beyond just support and also help you with sales, marketing, employee onboarding, and more.

Keep reading to learn more about knowledge base benefits.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

External Knowledge Base Benefits (For Customers)

When we talk about an external knowledge base, think of the help center on a website. The place customers go when they have a question or run into a problem.

A well-maintained external knowledge base delivers huge advantages for both your customers and your support team.

1. 24/7 Self-Service Support

Customers love getting answers fast. People expect to find solutions the moment they need them, even if it’s 2 AM on a Sunday.

A public knowledge base empowers your customers with 24/7 self-service. Which includes:

• Frequently asked questions
• How-to articles
• Getting started guide
• Troubleshooting guide

From a customer's perspective, this is a lifesaver. They can hop onto your site, search the knowledge base and find an immediate solution.

2. Faster Customer Onboarding

In product onboarding, there’s the idea of an “aha moment” or “eureka effect”. This is the moment when a customer first discovers the real value in your product and how it can help them improve their lives or businesses.

If you want your customers to stick around, you want to help them achieve the aha moment as fast as possible, because if they give up before reaching that moment, they have a high chance of churning or just never paying for your product.

A well-structured knowledge base can help customers reach that moment by providing focused getting started material that helps move customers from “no knowledge” to having enough knowledge to reach the aha moment.

For example, look at how Zapier’s getting started guide helps customers understand key concepts so that they can start quickly creating recipes (We have reviewed more knowledge base examples if you want to explore more):

3. Faster Problem Resolution

Similar to faster product onboarding, it helps reduce resolution times for common issues.

Instead of submitting a support ticket and waiting hours (or days) for a reply, customers can often solve their problem just following the knowledge base article.

From my own experience managing support, I saw how a good FAQ entry or how-to guide could resolve an issue faster than an agent.

4. Consistent and Accurate Information

Another benefit of having a knowledge base is consistency.

Humans are… well, human.

Support reps might give slightly different answers or explanations to customers, especially if information isn’t written down in one place.

A knowledge base serves as the single source of truth. Whatever answer a customer finds in your public FAQ is the official, verified answer.

This consistency is key for avoiding confusion.

5. Reduced Support Workload (Fewer Tickets and Lower Costs)

One of the biggest benefits of offering knowledge-centered support is that it can cut down on the direct support requests that you need to handle.

Instead of reaching out for answers to common questions, your customers can just get the answer directly from your knowledge base.

You can also easily direct customers to search the knowledge base for help, rather than having them create tickets.

This can lead to big savings in terms of money and time. the latter of which is especially helpful if you’re a solopreneur wearing multiple hats:

• Direct support requests: Cost scales as support requests increase (e.g. you need to hire more staff and/or pay staff to spend more time on support).
• Knowledge base article: One-time money/time investment to create knowledge base content. Infinitely scalable – there’s no real change in cost whether 100 people read the article or 10,000 people read the article.

Some knowledge base software will even let you track which articles lead to direct support requests so that you can optimize each article.

For example, with our Heroic Knowledge Base plugin, you’ll get built-in analytics to see how helpful your articles are and which resulted in the most support requests:

6. Improved Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty (and Lower Churn)

I could’ve put this one first because it’s probably the most important benefit of creating a knowledge base.

But given everything that I’ve covered so far, you could say that the main overriding benefit is that a knowledge base helps you create happier, more successful customers.

A well-serviced customer is a happy customer, and happy customers stick around.

Happier customers who can get value from your product are also much less likely to churn. You can keep customers longer and increase your customer lifetime value.

7. Attract Traffic Via Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When you create a knowledge base, it’s easy to think of it exclusively as a help channel.

Don’t get me wrong—it is primarily a help channel. But it can also be a useful marketing tool because all the knowledge base content that you’re creating is like catnip for search engines such as Google.

For example, let’s say you have a SaaS tool that makes it easier for people to accept payments via PayPal.

You might have a knowledge base article on “How to find the PayPal IPN URL”, which is an important part of configuring PayPal to work with a website.

That kind of specific article could rank for a long-tail keyword search like “where to find the PayPal IPN URL.”

“We've had a lot of success with this approach, says David who works for an Australian SEO agency”.

For more details, check out our guide on how to optimize your knowledge base for SEO or using Yoast SEO with Heroic Knowledge Base.

8. Valuable Pre-Sales Resource

In addition to boosting your marketing via SEO, a good knowledge base can also act as a valuable pre-sales resource for potential customers who are on the fence about your product.

A detailed knowledge base accomplishes two things here:

1. It gives customers insight into the nitty-gritty details of how your product works.
2. It provides shoppers with confidence that you’re going to be there to help them when they need it.

We even include a special pre-sales questions category in our knowledge base here at HeroThemes:

Internal Knowledge Base Benefits (For Employees)

Now let’s look at the internal knowledge base benefits.

An internal knowledge base is usually only accessible to your employees and is often secured behind a login or within your intranet.

It may contain the following types of documents or articles:

• Company policies and procedures
• Process docs
• Troubleshooting guides for support agents
• Engineering wikis
• Onboarding and offboarding materials
• Training material
• Frequently asked questions
• HR information

Essentially, it’s the collective know-how of your team in one central hub.

Explore: Free AI HR Document Generator Tool

1. Faster Onboarding and Training of New Employees

Bringing new hires up to speed quickly is a challenge every organization faces.

Instead of relying solely on days of live training sessions and fire-hose information dumps, you can direct new team members to a well-structured knowledge base where they can learn at their own pace.

For example, when I onboard a new support agent or employee at HeroThemes, I give them access to our internal wiki, which contains product manuals, company policies, access to tools, SOPs, guides on how to handle ticket escalations, and so on.

They could refer to these resources anytime, which dramatically cut down the time it took for them to get comfortable in the role.

2. Increased Productivity and Efficiency

A well-organized internal knowledge base changes how your team works completely.

It centralizes scattered bits of knowledge into a searchable, logically organized repository.

Here’s how knowledge base increase productivity and efficiency:

• Provides quick, self-service answers for the staff and reduces repetitive support tickets and inquiries.
• Speeds up employee onboarding and training.
• Keeps information consistent across teams and channels.
• Cuts average handle time with easy reference articles.
• Enables automation through integrations
• Highlights content gaps with analytics for continuous improvement
• Less duplication of effort. With a single source of truth, employees aren’t each creating their own little stash of notes or repeatedly solving the same problem from scratch.

3. Knowledge Preservation

People come and go in any organization. But when they go, their knowledge walks out the door with them. That's the reality.

If you don’t have a system to capture what employees know, you risk losing valuable knowledge gained through years of trial and error.

An internal knowledge base is an excellent solution for knowledge preservation.

By encouraging (or making it as a weekly task) team members to document their processes, solutions, and tips in the knowledge base, you create a lasting record of institutional knowledge that stays with the company regardless of staff turnover.

This also helps with scaling. If you promote someone or move them to a new project, their replacement can get up to speed by reading what’s been left behind in the knowledge base.

You’re effectively future-proofing your operations by building a repository of tribal knowledge turned into formal knowledge.

4. Improved Collaboration and Communication

In any decent-sized organization, silos can easily form, causing each team or individual to operate with their own knowledge without sharing enough.

A shared space for information enhances collaboration by making knowledge sharing the norm.

When everyone from Engineering to Sales to Customer Support has access to the same repository, they gain visibility into each other’s domain knowledge.

This often leads to better cross-functional understanding and teamwork.

5. Consistency in Processes and Service Quality

Just as a customer-facing knowledge base brings consistency to customer answers, an internal knowledge base brings consistency to your internal processes.

When every team follows the same documented procedures and guidelines, you get more reliable outcomes

For example, if you have an internal article called “How to Handle a Priority 1 Outage” and all engineers refer to it during a crisis, you know the response will be uniform and according to plan.

6. Continuous Improvement and Insights

Here’s a more advanced benefit that sometimes gets overlooked: a knowledge base (both internal and external) can be a goldmine of insights if you pay attention to how it’s used.

By tracking what people search for, which articles are most visited, and where gaps exist, you can continuously improve your operations and products.

For customers, your external knowledge base analytics might reveal, for example, that a lot of people are searching for “integration with Gmail” and not finding results. This is a sign that you should create a new help article, or even build a new feature if it's a product limitation.

Internally, if you see your team frequently looking up a certain policy or asking a question in comments, maybe that process needs simplification or better training.

Create Your Own Knowledge Base Today

There are a lot of knowledge base benefits, including benefits that go beyond the obvious improvement in your customer support.

If you’re ready to begin reaping these benefits for your business, start developing your knowledge base today.

With our Heroic Knowledge Base WordPress plugin, you can create your own self-hosted, flexible knowledge base complete with useful features like:

• Instant live search suggestions.
• Knowledge base analytics to see what problems your customers need help with.
• Transfer analytics to see which articles result in the most direct support requests.
• Satisfaction rankings to see how satisfied users are with each article.
• AI-powered assistant

Here’s a tutorial on setting up a knowledge base with WordPress. Just install, follow the setup instructions and launch.

The post 14 Knowledge Base Benefits for Customers and Employees first appeared on HeroThemes.

By the end, you should have a clear idea of how to create the perfect search-friendly, well-organized knowledge base that is rich in useful content and always evolving.

Heroic Knowledge Base

Create a beautifully designed, searchable knowledge base in minutes.

Try Heroic Knowledge Base

What the Best Knowledge Bases Have in Common

Before we explore individual knowledge base article examples, let’s highlight a few traits shared by the most effective ones:

• Robust search functionality: A knowledge base without search functionality? Seems like a nightmare for customers. The help center puts a search bar front and center. Often, it’s smart, offering live suggestions or autocomplete to get users to the right answer faster.
• Clear organization and categorization: Group content into intuitive categories or sections. Like Account & Billing or Getting Started guides.
• Comprehensive, up-to-date content: Cover all the common questions with concise, jargon-free articles.
• Multi-format help (text, visuals, etc.): Make your guides simple with screenshots, videos, or even GIFs.
• Feedback and continuous improvement: Provide an option for users to rate articles. This feedback loop helps identify outdated topics.
• Easy access to human support: In some cases, businesses avoid providing costly human support in the name of self-service. Don't make this mistake. Make it easy for users to reach human support by highlighting it throughout your knowledge base.

10 Knowledge Base Examples to Learn From

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

1. Google Analytics Help

Google has countless product support hubs, here we’ll talk about the Google Analytics help center as an example of Google’s approach.

When you visit any Google’s product help center, the first thing you notice is a big, friendly search bar with faint grey text inviting you to “describe your issue”.

After that, you will have easy access to common guides, such as an introduction to analytics, setup, troubleshooting, so on.

A very simple layout that works like a charm for any type of knowledge base.

What you can learn from Google’s knowledge base example:

• Highly functional search bar that is easy to access from any knowledge base page.
• Neat breakdown of guides into categories.
• Easy access to community forums and human support.
• Minimalist design with a bit of personality—you’ll often see small illustrations or Google-colored icons that make the page more engaging without clutter.
• Multiple paths to answers: powerful search, clear categories, community forum, and customer support.

First, focus on building a solid knowledge base of official articles. As you grow, consider empowering a community or at least gathering user feedback on articles to take your knowledge base to the next level.

2. Shopify Help Center

Shopify powers online stores for businesses large and small. Their customer base (store owners, developers, partners) has a wide array of questions.

The Shopify help center is designed to guide new users and support existing ones through every step of running an eCommerce store. But, unlike other examples in this list it fails in many ways.

Here, I will only list the drawbacks of Shopify's knowledge base, so you can avoid these issues in yours.

What to avoid:

1. No search bar in the article (There is one, but it’s hidden in the sidebar menu). Well, users can go to the homepage and search there, but these unnecessary clicks and not finding a search bar right away, which is a common thing to have in knowledge bases, creates frustration.
2. Poor AI usages. Exploring Shopify’s knowledge base feels like using poor quality ChatGPT, literally.
   1. The answer quality is poor
   2. It’s very slow sometimes
   3. When you search something on Shopify support, it directly answers through chatbot instead of showing related topics. It could be similar to Google's knowledge base example, where you show a quick AI answer and related articles.
   4. “Ask about this article”, an AI feature to explore the article, or something like that. Instead, you could show a quick summary here or focus on simplifying articles more.
3. Hard to contact Shopify's support. There is “contact support” button on each guide, but when you click on it open an AI chatbot 🤦. First, you need to chat with an AI bot, then log in and share many details, no prominent contact option, etc.
   
   After some attempts you can chat with the agent, but it's clearly trying to avoid users connecting with human support.

There is just so much to improve with Shopify’s knowledge base:

• The articles could use some images and could be simplified slightly.
• AI could be used more effectively, like other knowledge base examples.
• The homepage could feature popular topics instead of random ones, and could use some icons for categories.
• Connecting to the support could be easier. Like submitting a quick contact form.

Hope you had a good idea why Shopify’s Help Center didn’t work for me and how you can avoid the same issues with yours.

3. Apple Support

Apple’s support knowledge base features a visually clean start page with icons for product categories and a prominent search bar, mirroring the company’s elegant branding.

Apple’s products are used by millions globally, so their support site needs to handle a vast range of queries.

Apple’s knowledge base is a masterclass in combining aesthetic design with practical navigation.

What you can learn:

• Modern and inviting support homepage. Clever use of product icons and images to improve visual navigation.
• Interactive search bar. When you click that search bar it immediately displays suggestions and starts offering recommendations as you type.
• Consistency and simplicity
• Use of a friendly, non-technical tone. Which is great for less tech savvy customers.

What to avoid?

• If you own a small business, consider highlighting top FAQs upfront. These could include refund policies and payment methods. In Apple’s case, they are 2–3 clicks away from the support homepage or need to be searched.
• Inconsistent dark and light color theme. For example, the support homepage has a light color theme, while the guides have a dark color theme. Switching between these pages felt very annoying to me.
• No search bar on the guides (There is a search icon in the menu, but it is very small to be noticed).

4. Slack Help Center

Slack’s help center keeps things super streamlined. A bold search bar, a few main topics, and some quick links. Making it easy to “Ask anything,” as the tagline suggests.

Slack is a widely-used workplace chat tool, and its user base ranges from techies to non-technical office workers.

Slack’s knowledge base example shows that you don’t need to drown users in links. Sometimes a simple search and a few well-chosen categories get the job done best.

What you can learn from Slack’s example:

• Powerful search and slick navigation. With the help of a menu, breadcrumbs, a table of contents, and even an AI chatbot to get answers or find relevant knowledge base articles.
• Easy to access to popular topics right from the homepage.
• A small number of broad categories, each with a brief description and relevant image.
• A section for “Slack Tips” at the bottom of the help center page. A smart way to surface useful info that users didn’t specifically search for.

Explore: How To Use Slack for Customer Support

5. Netflix Help Center

Netflix provides streaming services to over 200 million subscribers worldwide. Their help center needs to address everything from “How do I update my payment?” to device troubleshooting.

When you visit Netflix's help center, all you can see is a huge search bar in the middle of the screen. Which of course, invites you to search for the issue.

What you can learn from Netflix's help center example:

• Focus on the search with advanced search features. For example, even if you make a typo, Netflix will still find highly relevant results.
• Right below the search bar, there are links to a few popular topics. Like how to sign up, pricing, etc.
• Netflix also lists the main top-level topics on the homepage, each with popular articles underneath.
• Knowledge base articles are clear, with relevant images, icons and most content is neatly organized with accordions, headings, steps, bullet points, etc.
• You can also view important information (like pricing details or restricted content) based on your country.
• Quick links for specific actions. E.g. to change password or update email.

Netflix makes sure that the 90% of issues that make up the bulk of support volume are front and center. Do the same for your product: figure out the most asked questions and make them one click away on your knowledge base homepage.

Although the Netflix Help Center focuses on helping users search for solutions faster, they forgot to add a search bar to their guides 😛.

Don’t do this with your knowledge base.

6. LinkedIn Help Center

LinkedIn’s help center highlights the most searched issues as “Shortcuts,” helping users quickly access the necessary settings without needing to follow a guide. Kinda similar to Netflix’s quick links.

LinkedIn’s user base ranges from job seekers to recruiters to casual social browsers—a diverse crowd.

Their help center contains a lot of information, and LinkedIn handles this by smart prioritization.

The best thing about LinkedIn’s knowledge base articles:

As you can see in the image above, LinkedIn simplifies the tutorial by providing a direct link to the exact setting page, and having a single guide for all types of devices, which prevents confusion during search.

LinkedIn’s articles are clear and well-structured. They use a button to highlight the settings page and tabs to divide the tutorial based on the user’s current device (desktop, mobile, or app). Use a step-by-step list with minimal icons for the actual guide.

Key features and highlights:

• Simple and straightforward guides. Use of numbered lists to provide step-by-step instructions, and avoids fluff content.
• Easy access to create support tickets
• Sticky and powerful search bar
• Minimal design with plenty of white space and a straightforward layout.

Use your knowledge base analytics to your advantage. If you know certain questions or pages are hit most often, do what LinkedIn does and put them front and center, allowing users to instantly access the exact page.

Pages like: refund request, order status, password reset, etc.

A note on design: LinkedIn manages to keep a huge help repository from feeling overwhelming by breaking it into bite-sized links. Users aren't bombarded with 50 categories at once—just a few key ones and some top questions.

If you have a large knowledge base, display broad categories first instead of showing everything.

7. Spotify Support

Spotify’s support homepage keeps things on-brand with a dark theme, and immediately lists popular help topics (kinda similar to Google’s help center), and AI integration.

Spotify has a lot of content, so they rely on good search and community forums for edge cases.

The best lesson to take away from the Spotify knowledge base example is how to properly use AI.

The answers AI gives here are simple and short. And it uses knowledge base content for information and links to it.

Key features and highlights:

• Uses big, clean category blocks that reduce cognitive load
• Maintains visual consistency with dark mode everywhere (unlike Apple’s constant changing color themes on help center)
• Articles are short with clear microcopy instead of long explanations, and keeps each article focused on one problem only.
• Groups device-specific instructions (Android, iOS, desktop) in the same article.

8. Dropbox Help Center

The first impression is how uncluttered the Dropbox knowledge base is.

Dropbox’s help center uses plenty of white space, approachable graphics, and a clear layout to make self-service as easy as saving a file in Dropbox (almost).

Dropbox’s knowledge base stands out for its simplicity and a dash of visual flair.

The key lesson from Dropbox's example is that the knowledge base doesn’t have to be limited with written content.

A knowledge base can include courses, video tutorials, virtual guides or anything that can help customers learn more effectively.

Key features and highlights:

• Extremely clean, distraction-free layouts
• Uses a sticky menu to provide quick access to frequent help topics. Like the getting started guide and account-related questions.
• Smart separation between “personal,” “team,” and “admin” content.
• Frequent micro-tips inside articles to prevent future errors.

9. Canva Help Center

Canva’s knowledge base reflects its design-centric brand—colorful, well-organized, and with handy suggestions that guide you to related information as you browse.

Canva’s example shows that a knowledge base can carry the same visual language as the main product, making users feel at home while seeking help.

Like Dropbox, it neatly integrates its courses, videos with the knowledge base. Which not only solves users’ problems but also encourages them to level up their skills.

Key features and highlights:

• The homepage is bright and welcoming, and feels more like a learning portal.
• Deep integration with AI. An AI assistant that answers questions like a chatbot, quick summaries for guides, and direct AI based answers after search.
• Powerful search bar with AI based answers, which also shows relevant knowledge base articles and recommend courses based on user’s query.
• Also provides quick access to common questions about payments, accounts, troubleshooting, etc.

10. Asana Help Center

Asana’s support portal is a modern, text-focused layout that lists key resources and offers helpful in-page navigation, making even complex guides easy to navigate.

Similar to Canva, Asana’s knowledge base encourages users to learn more about it with small 1–2-minute video tutorials, courses, and training programs.

Asana’s guides are much more comprehensive than other knowledge base examples in this list. But they don't feel like it.

The guides are well-structured, use a lot of images and step-by-step instructions to teach users.

Key features and highlights:

• Focus on encouraging users to learn more about Asana through short videos, and curated courses.
• Use of a grid layout for the support homepage that feels modern and elegant.
• A well-crafted navigation system with table of contents, sticky top menu to access popular topics, and well categorized sidebar menu.
• Guides uses lots of clean product screenshots with callouts, and sometimes quick GIFs that show the complete process without complicating stuff.
• Uses an AI assistant to provide quick answers.

If your product has many features or a lot of depth, consider providing users with tools to help them navigate between and within articles, such as Asana’s sidebar index and tables of contents (a very common feature I found during my research about the best software documentation examples).

This improves the user experience by preventing information overload, so users won’t feel lost on a long page.

One caution: A comprehensive knowledge base like Asana’s requires frequent updates. For example, you have to keep guides updated with product UI changes. So, keep an eye on it.

Build Your Own Best-in-Class Knowledge Base

After seeing what makes these knowledge bases tick, here's the simplest way to create your own knowledge base today.

Heroic Knowledge Base

Heroic Knowledge Base (Heroic KB), it’s designed specifically to make building and managing a knowledge base easy, even for non-developers.

Out of the box, it gives you a beautifully designed, searchable knowledge base section on your site.

Key features of Heroic Knowledge Base:

• Instant, smart search
• Organized categories and tags
• Feedback system
• Powerful and flexible no-code editor to create articles and unique knowledge base layouts.
• Article analytics and reporting
• Multilingual support
• AI assistant trained on your knowledge base content
• Internal knowledge base support
• Seamless WordPress integration to make use of thousands of other plugins with Heroic Knowledge Base.

You just have to install Heroic KB in your WordPress site > Import demo site > start uploading your content.

Here's the perfect guide for you to build your knowledge base today.

The post 10 Knowledge Base Examples (Good + Bad Lessons) first appeared on HeroThemes.

🙄 It hurts to admit, but that’s the truth for you.

I remember early in my career losing a veteran employee, and with them went decades of undocumented knowledge.

It felt like someone yanked out a piece of our collective brain. That’s where knowledge culture comes in.

In this guide, I’ll explain what knowledge culture is, why it’s important, and how to build one that keeps your business running smoothly.

Ready? Let’s break it down.

What Is a Knowledge Culture?

A knowledge culture is an environment where sharing know-how is second nature. It’s the opposite of the old “knowledge is power, so keep it to yourself” mindset.

In a company with a strong knowledge culture:

• Employees freely exchange expertise
• Document their insights
• Collaborate to solve problems

All without fear or fuss.

From an academic perspective, knowledge culture is considered a facet of corporate culture that describes how an organization handles knowledge—how it’s identified, acquired, shared, and retained.

Knowledge Culture or Knowledge Management?

Knowledge culture ties closely with knowledge management (KM). The processes and tools to capture and organize knowledge.

You can roll out fancy knowledge management software, but if your culture discourages sharing, those tools will be of no use.

Introducing new tech alone isn’t enough; without leadership support and a culture change, even the best knowledge-sharing system will flop.

In short, knowledge culture is the human side of knowledge management.

It’s the behaviors and beliefs that make knowledge flow freely rather than getting stuck.

When your team believes “we succeed together by learning from each other,” that’s knowledge culture in action.

Key Components of a Knowledge Culture

In my experience, and backed by research, here are the core components that make knowledge sharing culture thrive:

1. Trust and Openness

Trust is the backbone of building a viable knowledge culture.

Team members must feel safe admitting what they don’t know and comfortable sharing what they do.

A trusting, open vibe encourages questions and knowledge exchange without fear of looking silly.

2. Leadership and Strategy

Leadership support is one of the most important factors for a strong knowledge culture.

Leaders must walk the talk. If the CEO and managers openly share information and credit team knowledge, it sets the tone. And your goals should be converted into strategies.

3. Shared Purpose and Values

A knowledge culture flourishes when everyone buys into a common mission: we’re all here to learn and improve together.

That means defining knowledge-sharing as a core value.

Some companies include it in their core values and onboarding.

4. Organizational Structure

Rigid silos and hierarchy can strangle knowledge flow. In contrast, flatter structures and cross-functional teams facilitate knowledge sharing.

If your organizational chart is too complex, establish networks such as communities of practice, which are groups of people from different departments who meet to share expertise.

These communities break down silos. For example, engineers, support, and product folks might form a knowledge-sharing circle.

Companies that excel at knowledge management (KM) often nurture such cross-team forums.

5. Incentives and Recognition

People respond to incentives. If sharing knowledge is rewarded through bonuses, career advancement, or even just a simple shout-out, folks are more likely to do it.

A knowledge culture often includes reward systems to recognize contributors.

These rewards don't have to be monetary. Even a company newsletter praising “Knowledge Champions of the Month” can motivate others.

6. Processes and Tools

Finally, you need the right processes and tools to support all this human effort.

This includes making it easy to document and find information.

For instance, using a well-organized knowledge base, an internal wiki, or shared drive with clear structure.

A tool like Heroic Knowledge Base can serve as a user-friendly hub for all your documentation and FAQs.

The process part means integrating knowledge-sharing into workflows:

• Code review meetings that capture lessons learned
• Customer support teams that turn solved tickets into knowledge base articles, etc.

When contributing knowledge is just “how we do things here,” culture change sticks.

Why Knowledge Culture Is Important

Why bother fostering a knowledge culture? Because it can make or break your business’s agility and innovation.

Here are some major reasons a strong knowledge culture is crucial:

1. Faster Problem-Solving and Onboarding

When employees actively share know-how, everyone finds answers quicker.

New hires ramp up without banging their heads against unknowns for weeks.

For example, if your company has a practice of documenting solutions in a knowledge base (and a tool like Heroic KB to search it), a new support agent can solve a ticket in minutes by reading an article instead of hunting down a veteran coworker.

2. Avoiding “Reinventing the Wheel” (and Saving Money)

A knowledge culture prevents the scenario where five people solve the same problem five different times in isolation.

A company that centralizes knowledge and encourages reuse will save countless hours (and dollars).

3. Innovation and Continuous Improvement

The culture of knowledge-sharing fuels innovation. Why?

Because when information flows freely, people can build on each other’s ideas.

Employees feel empowered to suggest improvements since they know what has been tried before.

4. Employee Engagement and Retention

Believe it or not, knowledge culture also affects morale.

When people have access to information and opportunities to learn, they feel more competent and valued. They’re not stuck in the dark or constantly frustrated by missing info.

This boosts job satisfaction. Plus, sharing knowledge gives employees a sense of purpose and teamwork. It feels good to help colleagues and be recognized for expertise.

5. Resilience to Turnover

Every organization faces employee turnover eventually. Retirements, departures, etc.

Without a knowledge-sharing culture, each exit can feel like a devastation, as critical know-how walks out the door.

A strong knowledge culture turns individual knowledge into institutional knowledge.

When knowledge is routinely documented and shared, you reduce “single points of failure.

Examples of Knowledge Culture in Action

Toyota: Teaching Every Worker “Why” and “How”

One classic example is Toyota, the auto manufacturer known for its Toyota Production System (TPS) and relentless improvement.

Toyota’s culture has long treated knowledge as a collective asset. They distinguish between explicit knowledge (documented processes) and tacit knowledge (experience in people’s heads), and make a concerted effort to share both.

How does Toyota do it?

One way is through a practice called the Job Instruction (JI) document.

Every critical task in a Toyota factory is distilled into a JI document that any worker can follow.

But it’s not just a dry checklist. A JI document includes:

• The step-by-step procedure
• The key points (tips to save time or avoid errors
• The reasons behind each step

With this, employees aren’t just told what to do, but also why it matters.

Hundreds of these documents collectively capture Toyota’s manufacturing knowledge, so a new hire on the assembly line can learn proven best practices on day one.

How to Cultivate a Knowledge Culture in Your Organization

Here’s my playbook for cultivating a thriving knowledge culture. It's a blend of personal experience and best practices:

1. Lead by Example from the Top

Change starts at the leadership level. If you’re a founder or manager, model the behavior you want to see.

Share information openly. Whether it’s business performance data, lessons from a failed project, or a personal “I learned this the hard way” story.

When leaders admit what they don’t know and actively ask others for input, it normalizes curiosity and collaboration.

Make knowledge-sharing part of team meetings.

Does anyone have insights on this issue?

When your team sees that you value their knowledge and you’re willing to learn from them, it sets a powerful precedent.

2. Break Down Silos and Encourage Collaboration

It’s hard to have a knowledge culture when teams operate in isolation.

Facilitate more cross-pollination of ideas.

This could mean creating cross-functional teams for projects, or setting up informal meetups (virtual or physical) where people from different departments share what they’re working on.

Some companies also do rotational programs like job shadowing, where an engineer might sit with customer support for a day to exchange knowledge (and empathy!).

You can also use a platform like Slack or Microsoft Teams with dedicated channels for Q&A, tips, or “Here’s something cool I learned.” The easier you make it for people to connect and discuss, the more knowledge will flow.

3. Design Easy Processes for Knowledge Sharing

One big barrier to sharing is simply “I don’t have time” or “It’s too cumbersome.”

Reduce the friction.

Integrate knowledge capture into existing workflows so that it doesn't feel like extra work.

For example, if your support team closes a ticket, have a quick checkbox or prompt: “Does this solution belong in the knowledge base?”

With a system like Heroic Inbox, you can easily create these types of workflows.

4. Implement the Right Tools

While culture is mostly about people, technology is an essential enabler.

Provide a central, accessible place for knowledge to live.

This might be an internal wiki, a shared Google Drive with good organization, or a dedicated knowledge base platform.

A software like Heroic Knowledge Base can quickly give you a professional knowledge portal where employees (or customers) can search for answers 24/7.

The key features to look for are a robust search function, easy content creation (so non-techies can add articles), and feedback mechanisms.

5. Create Incentives and Recognize Contributors

This can be one of the most fun parts of building knowledge culture—celebrating the knowledge heroes.

There are many ways to do it:

• Give out monthly or quarterly awards for the “Most Helpful Article” or “Top Knowledge Sharer,” with maybe a gift card or simply public kudos.
• During team meetings, recognize someone who uploaded a great tutorial or spent time mentoring a colleague
• You can even gamify it a bit.

Be careful not to make it too competitive, it’s about sharing, not scoring points.

6. Hire and Onboard for Knowledge Culture

Finally, sustain your culture by bringing in people who embrace it. During recruitment, look for signs of collaboration and curiosity.

You can ask candidates to describe how they’ve helped coworkers in the past, or how they learn new skills on the job.

Their answers give insight into whether they’ll hoard info or share freely.

Once hired, immerse new employees in the knowledge culture right away.

Final Thoughts

Building a knowledge culture is an ongoing journey. Start small, with one team or one practice, and grow it.

Solicit feedback on what’s working or what isn’t. Maybe the team finds the wiki clunky but loves the lunch-and-learns. Adjust accordingly.

Keep the conversation about knowledge going. Over time, these practices will become habits, and those habits will become your culture.

As a leader, your role is to consistently nurture this culture by removing barriers, cheering on contributors, and emphasizing the “why” — that when we share what we know, we all become smarter and more successful.

The post What Is a Knowledge Culture? Its Importance, Key Components & Examples first appeared on HeroThemes.

According to Forrester’s research, 70% of customers prefer to find solutions to their problems by using the company website than using email or phone.

Self-learning is the future of customer support as well as educating your company employees. The only way to adapt and future-proof your business is to share knowledge.

In this article, we explore some of the benefits of knowledge sharing. Learn about its importance and how it can help grow your business.

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

What Is Knowledge Sharing?

Knowledge sharing can be defined in many different ways. But, when it comes to business in general, it’s about sharing everything there is to know about a product or service with your customers and employees.

Many startups and businesses now use knowledge bases to create an organized database full of knowledge. Knowledge bases consist of different types of knowledge articles, guides, and tutorials. Customers can search for this content to find solutions to common product-related questions.

Example: Asana knowledge base

There are also private knowledge bases that are designed to educate employees. These knowledge bases help employees learn more about products and even learn to handle different situations. Such as how to respond to customer inquiries and support tickets.

Why Knowledge Sharing Is Important?

You can’t expect your customers to be familiar with your service or software by trial and error. They always need a helping hand to guide them through the initial learning process.

Sure, you can employ a customer support team to help customers fix things. But, what happens when another customer comes to you with the same issue. And then another.

This is where knowledge sharing comes to help. With a well-documented knowledge base you can help users learn through guides and tutorials all by themselves.

Even your most valuable and expert employees won’t be there to help the customers. Some will get promoted and some will leave to join other companies. What happens to all the knowledge they have about your business?

The only way to prevent their knowledge from disappearing and to pass it along to the next employee is to share it. To create a knowledge base and let others learn from it.

5 Benefits Of Knowledge Sharing

If that’s not enough, here are a few more reasons to prove the importance of knowledge sharing.

1. Empower Customers

Knowledge sharing is all about putting the power back in people’s (or customers’) hands. So that they don’t have to depend on a company customer support or rely on experts to find solutions. It not only helps customers feel confident about their abilities but also improves the user experience.

2. Builds Authority And Trust

When you create a knowledge base full of content about your business, it builds authority and makes your business trustworthy. Customers can easily access your knowledge base to learn about a product without having to buy it first. It will make things much easier for your customers to make buying decisions as well.

3. Save Money

Think of all the phone calls and support tickets you’ll never have to worry about. When people find answers by themselves, you’ll have fewer support inquiries from customers. Of course, this means you can even reduce your support team to just a few members and save a ton of money.

4. Save Time And Effort

Knowledge sharing will also help your employees save time and provide better service to customers. Instead of transferring customers from one expert to another, they’ll be able to find solutions directly from the knowledge base to help customers more efficiently.

5. Minimize Mistakes

It only takes one wrong answer or wrong reply from your support team to lose a valuable customer. In fact, wrong decision-making can even lead to bad press and completely ruin the image of your brand.

It’s quite important to have a proper guide or a knowledge base in place to help your employees prevent such things from happening.

Explore: 7 Key Knowledge Base Benefits

Different Ways To Share Knowledge

There are many different types of content you can create for your knowledge base to share knowledge.

Documentations

Documentations are like digital product manuals. They help users learn how to use your product or service properly.  You can create detailed documentation to teach users how your product works and help them get started more easily.

Explore: Product Documentation: What It Is, Software and How to Create

Questions And Answers (FAQs)

Adding a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section to your knowledge base is one of the best ways to share knowledge. It will allow users to find answers to common questions by simply searching your knowledge base.

A great way to create effective FAQs is to gather data from your customer support team. Take note of the most common questions asked by customers and add them to your knowledge base.

Tutorials And Guides

You can also add step-by-step guides and how-to guides to your knowledge base to let users learn how to make the most of your product or service. Adding video tutorials can help make your knowledge easier to digest.

Training Programs

If you’re making a private knowledge base for your employees, you can add training programs. In-depth and structured training programs will help your new team members learn the core features of your products without the need of expert instructors.

How To Share Knowledge

You don’t have to build an entire library section in your office to share knowledge. Now, all it takes is a simple knowledge base website.

Whether you want to make a public or private knowledge base, you can easily setup a knowledge base website using WordPress. It only takes a few steps.

1. Pick a domain name
2. Get web hosting
3. Install WordPress
4. Get a knowledge base WordPress theme
5. Install the theme and customize the design
6. Start adding different types of knowledge articles

That’s it!

Wrapping Up

As the popular saying goes, knowledge is power. But, there’s no value in it if you keep hoarding knowledge. You need to share knowledge with others to make use of it. It’s the best way to empower your employees and customers.

If you’re thinking about starting a knowledge base, we encourage you to explore our blog. We’ve covered many guides to help you with the process of choosing the right knowledge base software to strategies for managing knowledge and more.

The post Knowledge Sharing: What It Is & Why It’s Important for Businesses? first appeared on HeroThemes.