The Knowledge Base

The knowledge base holds categorised articles users can read for themselves — how to do something, what a term means, what to do when something goes wrong.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → Help & Support:

Knowledge Base — categories and their articles
Manage Articles — the in-application help content

What it is for

Deflecting questions that have a settled answer. Anything asked more than about five times is a candidate: it is a question with a stable answer, and answering it individually each time is work nobody needs to do.

Writing articles that work

Title it as the question somebody would ask.
Answer in the first sentence. Background afterwards, if at all.
One article, one question. A long article covering six things is found for none of them.
Say what to do if it does not work — that is usually why they are reading.

Keep it current

A knowledge base decays. An article describing a screen that changed eighteen months ago actively damages trust: the reader concludes the whole thing is unreliable and stops using it, which costs you more than never having written it.

Review on a schedule, and delete rather than leave stale. A smaller accurate knowledge base beats a large decaying one.

Use the questions you actually get

The best source of articles is your own support queue. Where a request could have been answered by an article, write the article and link it in the reply — which both answers this person and prevents the next one.

Worked example

A service desk finds a third of its tickets are three questions: resetting a password, changing bank details, and where to find a statement. Three articles, linked from the portal home page, removed most of that volume within a month — and the team now writes an article whenever a question arrives for the third time.

Recommendations

Write from real questions, not from what you assume people need.
Title as the question asked.
Set a review date on every article and honour it.
Delete stale content rather than leaving it to mislead.