Increasing User Involvement on your Knowledge Base

When you first start your customer support knowledge base, how do you build traction and get users involved?
If you have an existing knowledge base, how do you increase and maintain user involvement?

Best Practices to Increase User Involvement in your Knowledge Base

If you are just getting started or aren’t satisfied with your current level of engagement, here are some best practices to increase user involvement in your knowledge base.

Install the Help Widget on your website

Add the knowledge base widget to your site to make so that users can search the information stored in the knowledge base from where they are.

You’ve already done that, but you’re not seeing engagement?

• Add the knowledge base widget in additional places. Increasing the number of areas where you have the widget implemented will increase the chances of users accessing the knowledge base, as they won’t need to navigate to a specific area and have their experience interrupted.

Respond and act on user comments

By responding to comments posted by users on the knowledge base articles, users see that their feedback is being heard. This motivates them to come back and share additional comments (ideas, feedback, and opinions) because they can see how to communicate with the support team. Many times, customers post comments to share ideas and suggestions for improvement of your product/service.

• Look for suggestions that you can implement now or in the near future.
• Even declining an idea and providing a reason why it is valuable to customers - shows that you are listening.
• Reply to the ideas or suggestions asking for more info from your users.

Optimize your knowledge base for a frictionless experience

You want to make it easy for users to search for information stored in the knowledge base because a low-effort experience will encourage them to keep coming back to your knowledge base whenever they have a support-related query.

• Make sure your knowledge base articles and categories make sense to your end-users. You don’t want them to have to think too hard about where to find the solutions. Check out our best practices for additional guidance about how to structure your knowledge base and categories.
• A welcome message on your knowledge base site will make it clear to your users how to use the knowledge base and set expectations. A welcome message can provide directions to your users to assist them in finding relevant information.

Promote your knowledge base

Link to your knowledge base whenever you communicate with users.

• Newsletters
• Email signatures
• Social media
• Add a temporary banner in your product or on your marketing site announcing your knowledge base initiative.