Getting knowledge to your customers quickly and effectively is one of the most important functions of customer support.

No matter how you structure your Zendesk knowledge base (KB), it has to be efficient at transferring knowledge and easy to navigate. Without those things, your customers and agents will struggle to find what they need when they need it. 

Here are three secrets you can use today to ensure success with your knowledge base and self-service strategy.

1. Increase readability

Creating a consistent style in your Zendesk Knowledge Base isn't just about aesthetics — it's a powerful tool for enhancing efficiency and usability. Imagine your KB as a road map that swiftly guides customers and agents to solutions. 

Here's why a consistent style matters: According to a study by Nielsen Norman Group, maintaining consistency in content presentation can boost usability by a staggering 47%. 

Consistency instills familiarity and streamlines comprehension, helping users find answers more easily. Articles should be concise and solve one issue or answer one question. 

The days when a product came with a several hundred-page manual describing every feature, button, and option are gone. 

Our habits have shifted to using keywords or questions to find the exact answer we want. This means that structuring your articles such that the problem, the symptoms, the cause, and the solution are all super clear to the reader will improve scannability and get your point across more effectively.

One way to improve the ability to find information is to harness the customer's language.

For example, following the principles of Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS), integrating commonly used phrases and terminology resonates deeply with users. It's like speaking their language — an immediate connection that bridges the gap between the query and the solution. Titles and summaries should reflect how an end user would describe the problem, not how you would as a subject matter expert.

Small yet pivotal details need to be highlighted consistently as well. For example, bolding crucial information such as browser requirements or permission prerequisites can guide the customer quickly on what might be wrong. This practice helps customers avoid the frustration of 'almost solving' a problem by thinking they have all the steps needed and then realizing their environment or access levels can't execute the actions in the article.

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Consciously designing your style guide for maximum readability and scannability will decrease the time it takes for agents and customers alike to find the right answers.

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2. Add visual content

Incorporating visual content, particularly videos, into your Zendesk KB is a strategic move that can elevate customer engagement and comprehension. 

The NN Group has some excellent style ideas on incorporating instructional visuals into your content. They found that video, in addition to text, is the most successful model: "Many study participants appreciated a video as a secondary source of information — especially for long, multistep processes or complex topics. Even when people chose not to watch the video, they still often commented that they liked seeing that one was available."

Not only do your customers want to see video content, it's been shown that people process and retain video content better than text. A key function of a knowledge base should be to help teach your customers, and Zendesk reported: 

"One Psychology Today study reports that the human brain can process video 60,000 times faster than text… Your support pages, though, are about more than just delivering instructional information. With every crucial how-to interaction, there’s an opportunity to deepen your relationship with the customer.”

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Visual content helps to show, not tell, a story. It allows the reader to follow the steps you’re describing, better understand what they should be seeing, and, in many cases, makes it easier to complete a task. 

Zendesk Guide allows for many different ways to embed content:

• Inserting an image, such as a screenshot or a GIF
• Embedding a video from popular video creation tools by inserting a link
• Adding an HTML embed code from a third-party application

Visual content is more appealing, conveys complex ideas better, and educates your customers more effectively. All of these traits will make your Zendesk KB more effective.

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3. Deliver content faster

Your knowledge base should be the hub of information your customers and support team rely on to solve issues regarding your products and services. Documenting all of this knowledge is only the first step, however. The most important part of creating content is getting it into the hands of those who need it as fast as possible when it's required.
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The best way to accomplish this is to ensure your knowledge base is searchable. To start, this means using Zendesk concepts like keywords, categories, and tags effectively. However, there are many more advanced ways to highlight your content.

With the advancements in artificial intelligence, you could employ new technology to your searchability. Large Language Models (LLM) have been trained on data sets that can help recognize the intentions of a user's query beyond simple keywords. Chatbots, Zendesk Messaging, and agent assist can all ingest the entirety of your knowledge base, and then, using the AI model's training, will recognize and relate articles to how your customers phrase their issues, allowing relevant articles to be highlighted faster.

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In the software world, another option is embedding knowledge directly in your platform. Working with your engineering team, you can create effective content that can be linked within error messages. For example, when an error is encountered by an end user, you can include in the dialog a link to an article that explains how to correct the problem. 

Even delivering content to your agents faster can be the difference between a frustrated customer and a satisfied one. The Zendesk Knowledge Capture app is a free app that both enables article suggestions and allows agents to create new articles if one does not exist for the given question and context. Having that at the agent's fingertips saves time searching for the information themselves.

Content is only as good as its delivery mechanism. Your agents need quick access to articles, and your customers want to self-serve as much as possible. Integrating your knowledge as tightly as possible into their respective workflows will enhance your Zendesk KB's effectiveness.

Effective Zendesk KBs

An effective Zendesk KB needs to have up-to-date, accurate information that is searchable, consumable, and available when your customers need it. Implementing tools and strategies to meet these criteria will accelerate knowledge transfer and optimize user experiences within your Zendesk KB. 

A consistent style breeds easier consumption, visual content enriches engagement, and advanced delivery methods ensure rapid access. To provide the highest quality customer experience and help serve your customers better, you need to make your Zendesk KB as effective as possible.