The challenge with knowledge management
Sep 10, 2023
In a fast-moving business landscape where products constantly change, it is crucial to update your help documents regularly to match the pace of product updates. While it's great to consistently ship new product updates, your help docs should not be neglected.
Stale help documentation causes confusion and dissatisfaction among customers. This results in wasted investments in self-serve support and AI, but also increases support requests, negating the benefits these investments should provide.
Adaptive Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS)
To avoid these issues, it’s necessary to manage your help documentation proactively, allowing it to grow and evolve with your product. A well-maintained KCS reduces customer frustrations by offering the latest, most relevant information, enhancing the user experience, and reducing the support effort of your team. It's important to set up policies and systems to manage your documentation and ensure the most important docs are always fresh.
Track, update, and verify
The easiest way to ensure you're keeping your help docs up-to-date is to implement an automated process for monitoring documents and getting subject matter experts to verify that a document is fresh. These are the steps to setting up a process:
Set up a policy for how often documents are reviewed and verified (ie. every 3 months and/or every product update)
Assign verifiers for certain documents
Run this policy against your documents to see what's currently stale
Prioritize which stale help docs to update first
Try to automate as much as possible otherwise stale docs WILL slip through the cracks (Try Docs Fresh)
Get fresh and stay fresh
Imagine a future where users only need to interact with your team 10% of the time with the other 90% handled via AI. You're so close. But the biggest thing holding you back is reliable and up-to-date content for AI to reference. Focusing efforts on fresh help documentation will improve the customer experience and increase ROI on self-service support and AI.
In a fast-moving business landscape where products constantly change, it is crucial to update your help documents regularly to match the pace of product updates. While it's great to consistently ship new product updates, your help docs should not be neglected.
Stale help documentation causes confusion and dissatisfaction among customers. This results in wasted investments in self-serve support and AI, but also increases support requests, negating the benefits these investments should provide.
Adaptive Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS)
To avoid these issues, it’s necessary to manage your help documentation proactively, allowing it to grow and evolve with your product. A well-maintained KCS reduces customer frustrations by offering the latest, most relevant information, enhancing the user experience, and reducing the support effort of your team. It's important to set up policies and systems to manage your documentation and ensure the most important docs are always fresh.
Track, update, and verify
The easiest way to ensure you're keeping your help docs up-to-date is to implement an automated process for monitoring documents and getting subject matter experts to verify that a document is fresh. These are the steps to setting up a process:
Set up a policy for how often documents are reviewed and verified (ie. every 3 months and/or every product update)
Assign verifiers for certain documents
Run this policy against your documents to see what's currently stale
Prioritize which stale help docs to update first
Try to automate as much as possible otherwise stale docs WILL slip through the cracks (Try Docs Fresh)
Get fresh and stay fresh
Imagine a future where users only need to interact with your team 10% of the time with the other 90% handled via AI. You're so close. But the biggest thing holding you back is reliable and up-to-date content for AI to reference. Focusing efforts on fresh help documentation will improve the customer experience and increase ROI on self-service support and AI.
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