How Scribe Helps You Tackle Common Knowledge Base Issues To Create Effective Help Articles

✔️ Is your call center ringing off the hook? 

✔️ Are your customer support executives flooded with tickets? 

✔️ Do your employees spend a lot of time figuring out simple tasks?

All of these issues point to one bigger problem — the lack of an effective knowledge base. 

According to HubSpot’s 2021 survey, only 52 percent of companies maintain a knowledge base. 

Does that mean these organizations lack the knowledge to support their customers and employees? 

Not necessarily. 

But it does mean a company’s knowledge probably lives solely with teams and individual employees, forming information silos. 

Essentially, knowledge doesn’t do your team much good if only one or two people have it. 

An effective knowledge base helps you break those silos and make information easily accessible to your customers, employees and vendors. So, what deters organizations from creating a knowledge base? 

Because oftentimes it’s easier said than done. Organizations face many challenges when it comes to creating a knowledge base. For example:

• Lack of time to create high-quality knowledge base documents.
• Lack of technical know-how to structure the knowledge base effectively.
• Insufficient resources to keep help articles updated.

But don’t let those challenges stop you from creating an effective knowledge base. 

What you need is a versatile knowledge base tool, like Scribe, to get started. 

In this guide, we’ll go over how a good knowledge base helps your business and how Scribe’s features empower you to build one. 

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Benefits of an effective knowledge base‍
• Knowledge base article types‍
• Using Scribe to combat challenges in knowledge base creation‍
• Final thoughts: Create effective knowledge base documents with Scribe

Benefits of an effective knowledge base

Organizations often design their knowledge bases around customers’ needs. And yes, customers hugely benefit from knowledge base documents. But a well-structured knowledge base should help your employees, customer service teams and partners too. 

Knowledge bases also have indirect benefits. They can help with search engine optimization (SEO) and building authority in your industry. 

Let’s go over how all business stakeholders benefit from a knowledge base. 

Customers

According to Microsoft’s Global State of Customer Service report, 86 percent of customers expect some form of self-service option on a website. Well-written knowledge base documents help your existing customers and prospects in many ways. These help articles can:

• Solve customer issues. 
• Teach them how to use your products.
• Offer quick answers to common questions.
• Inform customers about new features and products.
• Help them overcome post-purchase anxiety.

Overall, a great knowledge base improves the customer experience and fosters engagement. With the right information, you can turn any user into a brand ambassador. 

Employees

A Panopto survey found that more than 60 percent of employees faced challenges getting the information they needed at the workplace. They likely have no idea who — or even what — to ask.

But if you have a comprehensive knowledge base, your team members won’t have to waste their time looking for information. 

An internal knowledge base can support employees on:

• Organization processes. 
• Company policies. 
• Information on new products. 
• Troubleshooting articles for software and tools.

Your knowledge base will also help new hires by being the starting point of your onboarding process. It enables new hires to learn at their pace and helps them when they’re stuck. 

Customer service teams

A well-written knowledge base article will work as a quick reference for your customer service teams. According to HubSpot, most customers expect a quick resolution to their problems — they want them solved in less than 10 minutes.

Help articles will take the load off customer support teams. Instead of answering routine questions, they can focus on serious customer issues. 

A knowledge base can also improve your help desk's quality, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.

Vendors

When you work with vendors, they need to access information about your organization and product features. A knowledge base will help them take less time to ramp up. 

For example, if you hire a content agency, you can direct them toward your knowledge base to kickstart their work. 

Knowledge base article types

The major types of knowledge base articles are:

• How-to guides.
• Tutorials.
• Answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs).
• Troubleshooting guides.
• Industry-specific information. 

Your internal knowledge base can have onboarding modules, standard operating procedures, company policies, templates and case studies.

Writing knowledge base articles and publishing them on a blog won’t be enough to build an effective knowledge base. You need to plan its structure and content carefully. 

Knowledge base management might present you with more challenges. You need a versatile tool like Scribe to overcome them.

Using Scribe to combat challenges in knowledge base creation

Scribe is a browser extension and desktop app that captures any process and converts it into step-by-step instructions, complete with text and screenshots.

Getting started with Scribe is super easy.

1. Get the Scribe Pro subscription (any browser or desktop) or sign up for the free basic plan (any browser).
2. Download the Scribe Chrome extension, Edge add-on or desktop recorder. 
3. Capture your process through the browser extension or desktop app. 
4. Scribe will then automatically convert your processes into a knowledge base article.

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Scribe has many features that’ll help you address the issues preventing you from creating a powerful knowledge base. Here are a few:

Issue #1: Lack of structure and clarity

Organizations often write a collection of knowledge base documents and publish them on a blog.

But a knowledge base without a proper structure isn’t easy to navigate. Your customers might find it difficult to find the articles they’re looking for. A good knowledge base should have easy navigation options — like a table of contents — and a search function.

Clarity is also vital for these documents. Poorly written help articles might end up just confusing your readers. 

Scribe helps you create a clear, structured knowledge base

Scribe’s versatile features enable you to create a clear and well-organized knowledge base.

• Record your business workflows with Scribe in just a few minutes.
• Organize your article into sections using the heading feature.
• Highlight essential information with the tips and alert features.
• Automatically add screenshots to every step to improve clarity.
• Use Scribe Pages to organize multiple docs into a neat structure.

Here’s how to document your process using Scribe.

And here’s a Scribe that shows you how to edit your knowledge base documents created with it:

Issue #2: Monotonous knowledge bases

Organizations might create awesome knowledge base articles… but fail to engage readers with block after block of text. 

To be frank, those articles can be boring and hard to understand. For a knowledge base to be effective, people have to want to read what's in it. 

Content creators often limit help articles to a full-text format because:

• They don’t have time to create videos and images.
• They lack the technical knowledge to create engaging content.
• They find it difficult to embed videos and images in an article.

Scribe helps you create highly engaging knowledge base content

Scribe makes it super simple to record your processes and instantly convert them into help articles. With Scribe, you don’t need image or video editing skills to create engaging content. 

Scribe Pages empowers you to combine multiple Scribes to create comprehensive knowledge base docs. You can also embed engaging elements to your Scribe Pages like:

• Videos, including YouTube, Loom and Gong. 
• Screenshots.
• Hyperlinks.

Issue #3: Outdated and inconsistent knowledge base articles 

Your products and processes often change — and so should your knowledge management. Outdated or inaccurate information will frustrate customers. 

There are a few reasons why knowledge bases often have incorrect or outdated information.

• The existing article is too complex to update.
• Content creators don’t have time for edits.
• Poor knowledge base management practices. 

Maintaining consistency across your knowledge base documents is crucial for meeting customer expectations.  

Scribe helps you keep knowledge bases up to date

Scribe is a highly flexible knowledge base software that enables easy edits. With Scribe, you can create well-structured content modules that are a breeze to update. 

Here are a few features that will help you keep your knowledge base updated.

• Add, delete or edit your help articles’ modules.
• Copy parts of one document to another.
• Merge parts of your documents to create new articles. 

Scribe also provides excellent knowledge base templates. And its advanced customization options empower you to create documents consistent with your brand style guide.

Issue #4: Lack of sharing and access control options

No matter how excellent your articles are, they’ll likely collect dust if they’re not easy to share. 

Not everyone goes to a company’s homepage to find help articles. The more time it takes for someone to share your content, the less likely it will reach the right audience. 

And if you have confidential articles? Access control options are a must. 

Scribe offers advanced content sharing options

Scribe provides you with many options to share your knowledge base documents. 

• Share confidential articles through email.
• Get a shareable link to your article.
• Export help articles into PDF, HTML or Markdown (comes with the Pro plan).

Scribe also offers Smart Embed, which lets you embed your knowledge base docs into various productivity tools.

• Embed them into wikis and knowledge bases like SharePoint, Confluence, Guru and Notion.
• Embed articles to help centers like Zendesk and Help Scout. 
• Add your articles to websites and blogs like WordPress and Webflow.

Issue #5: Lack of feedback options on KB articles

Some articles might not have options for the reader to share feedback — that’s a serious issue with knowledge bases. What if a reader found an error and wanted to give you feedback, or what if they have a question?

Your knowledge base article’s comments section is an excellent place to understand customer pain points. You can also improve your articles based on their feedback.

Scribe empowers readers to share feedback 

Scribe gives you great control over how to receive feedback on your knowledge base articles. You can:

• Allow public comments.
• Restrict comments to only the team.
• Get Claps, which lets readers show you they liked the article. 

Final thoughts: Create effective knowledge base documents with Scribe

A business needs an effective knowledge base to ensure customer satisfaction and employee productivity. It empowers customers to help themselves and reduces support tickets.

But many issues can keep your knowledge base from being effective, such as:

• Lack of structure and clarity.
• Lack of engaging content. 
• Outdated or inconsistent content.
• Limited options to share articles.
• Lack of feedback options.

Scribe will help you combat those issues so you can thrive. 

Scribe is a feature-rich knowledge-sharing tool that helps you create engaging knowledge base articles. It enables you to record any process and convert it into visual, step-by-step guides. 

Get started on your knowledge base with Scribe. It’s absolutely free!