Curious for everyone's opinion.
My company has a fabulous Knowledge collection, both internal/external facing.
But..... When doing a case analysis I notice we have maybe 4/5 topics that make up the majority of our cases. I know we have knowledge articles that explain in great detail what to do for these situations. (Upgrades/configuration issues)
I think there are a few things that may factor in.
1. How the articles are written, by developers not with basic end users in mind.
2. How the articles are formatted. They aren't consistent across products/articles.
3. How long they are.
Does anyone have any advice for tackling these issues?
We do not have a technical writer. I am not sure how best to format articles so that our clients actually read and understand them better. If we could get these right I am sure we could deflect a lot cases.
Or if we should be exploring short videos.
Please let me know of any suggestions, resources, ideas etc. Thank you
Hi,
We use KCS as our framework. In KCS techies write AND edit the Kbs. They are subject matter experts (SMEs) and own the content to some extent. The drafts are then reviewed by someone that is fit for a review (maybe you?) for:
- language; engineers are typically good at using language that is hard to get; double negatives etc.
- formatting standards (these may need to be defined)
- terminology (these may need to be defined)
- accuracy and relevancy: is the Kb up to date? will it actually fix the problem?
- Sanitize: does it reveal too much? is there an IP exposed? are customer names in Kb? etc.
- Can customer use and self-service the KB (if its public).
Etc.
So basically, you ll have to define standards, develop training and give training.
Then a review process needs to take place to ensure standards are met. IMHO Kbs
are never "flavor of the month" and seen more like a problem more than a solution to a problem at scale.
Once you have done the above you can move to "code as content": we have implemented that and show that 98% of the time when a coded Kb is consumed there is NO case logged.
Cheers,
Eric
