7 Steps to Build an Awesome Service desk Knowledge Base

Managing a Service desk is like firefighting. You are always on your toes; the next incident can arise anytime even though you are buried under tons of service requests.

So, what to do?

The very definition of an incident is unplanned disruption of a service or services; this makes incidents by nature non-standard and un-predicable. Service requests, on the other hand, are better defined since there are standard deliverables. If you want to know more about the differences between incident and service requests: Click Here.

From here on we will refer all non-standard requests as support requests.

You must have noticed that your team gets the same support requests no matter how many times they resolve them. I bet; this puts you to wonder how to scale your support operations.

The Solution?

A robust knowledge base accessible to both requesters and technicians.

Before we dive into the guide of building an awesome knowledge base, let’s first discuss what it is a knowledge base and why it’s important.

What is a Knowledge Base?

To put it in simple terms, a knowledge base is a repository of relevant data organized in such a way, so as to provide solutions to specific problems.

The data is generally gathered from practical experiences supported by secondary research. It can be in the form of long articles or shot answers to FAQs.

In Motadata knowledge base, a technician/admin can use both articles and FAQs to capture knowledge. The resulting content can be made visible on both customer and technician portals along with an advanced search bar.

Motadata Knowledge Base 1

Why knowledge base is so important?

The general norm is to store solutions, workarounds, best practices, and general information in a knowledge base that has the following benefits:

• Promote self-service among requesters: With a knowledge base, requesters can search for a solution on their customer portal for common issues like how to reset one’s password.
• Bring down the inflow of tickets: With common issues being taken care of, people usually will file a ticket for issues they can’t find a solution in the knowledge base. This would drastically reduce the number of tickets coming to the service desk.
• Improved service desk KPIs: With an active knowledge base in place, certain metrics will drastically improve – like the First Call Resolution and Average Resolution Time.
• Declutter the service desk: With a knowledge base in place, there won’t be a flood of tickets for issues that have a solution in the knowledge base.

7 steps to build an awesome knowledge base (Kbase)

1. Create a structure for your knowledge base: Foremost thing to do when building a knowledge base is to decide on a structure. A structure will give you an idea of how to structure the data, be it articles or FAQs, not just for navigation but for better searchability.
   Motadata knowledge base by default makes it compulsory to group every piece of content by a folder. Hence, the entire content is structured using folders.
2. Choose relevant knowledge base topics: Whenever you are writing a piece of content ask yourself this one question, “Who will read my content?”I am giving you two ways you can come up with knowledge base topics:
   ⦿ Search trends in old tickets, and see whether they are talking about similar problems. Create content around such problems.
   ⦿ See what the requesters are searching on the customer portal. Motadata knowledge base shows the most searched keywords on the technician portal.

3. Control publishing: With regards to publishing content, you have to decide two things:
   1. Decide on the person who will decide what gets published in the knowledge base.
   2. The number of authors who will contribute to the knowledge base.

The first decision can be streamlined using an approval workflow, which is one of many automation features of the Motadata knowledge base.

For the second decision, you can create custom roles for authors if your ITSM tool permits it.

4. Set Document Visibility: You need to control what people can see what they can’t. It can never happen that all of your documents need to be open for all; some of them have to be confidential. Your authors need to set the visibility settings for each content keeping the audience in mind. For example, certain HR documents will be visible to people in the HR department.
   Motadata knowledge base has visibility control available for every content.
   

5. Make your content more searchable: I am giving you two ways to make your content more searchable:
   1. Make sure relevant keywords are there in the title and first paragraph of every content.
   2. Make adding relevant tags to every piece of content a norm.
6. Add visual elements in your content: Visual elements make your content more appealing. It’s estimated that 65% of the population are visual learners. So, it’s likely that a sizable portion of your audience will find the visual elements appealing.
7. Keep knowledge base up-to-date: Nothing stays constant. With time, existing problems evolve and a new one arises. Keeping this in mind, make sure your authors are updating their content when the need arises.

Conclusion

We have discussed what a knowledge base is and why it’s important, and how to build an effective one. You might have known by now that to take your service desk to the next level, you need a knowledge base that supports you in terms of capabilities. If you think your existing knowledge base solution is holding you back then try Motadata ITSM for 30 days. Click here to download our free trial.