Customer centricity, customer empowerment, and self-service are some of the prominent terms in customer service nowadays. These terms are all made effective in the form of a single informative knowledge base using a number of tools available.

Tools like WordPress, Heroic KnowledgeBase, KnowAll etc. allow the businesses to put up the best kind of enlightening content for their customers. However, the tools won’t magically do everything that a knowledge base is supposed to do. Also, the tools can help put up great knowledge base content but there’s still a high probability of things going wrong.

Here’s a list of all the mistakes that a business may be making despite a rigid support from these highly efficacious knowledge base creation tools. Take a look at the most common knowledge base content mistakes so that you keep them at bay:

Using jargons:

So, you’ve been working in your field for a long time now. You know every bit of information about the domain. You have the best of knowledge about all the terminologies used in the industry. But do all your customers know that much about your niche?

Well, the probability is quite low. In fact, many of them may be new to everything that you talk about! So, in such instances, when you use jargon, they only make a knowledge base more complex.

As a matter of fact, all your customers refer to the knowledge bases to resolve their queries on their own. However, if you use jargons thinking that you’ll attract more customers, they may simply abandon your site with a handful of unresolved queries.

Creating non-searchable content:

Assembling the best kind of information for your customers and putting it up is of no use if it is nowhere to be seen.

In other words, your knowledge base won’t be able to serve its purpose if your customers can’t find it. So, it’s imperative that you work on the quality of the content so as to increase its searchability. Further, make sure that your knowledge base content encompasses all the necessary information that the customers will find useful.

Serving incomplete content:

This is yet another mistake that may provide an advantage to your competitors.  Serving incomplete, shallow and generic content, in no way, helps resolve your customers’ issues. It’s simply of no use to them and they are less likely to buy in such a case.

So, make sure that you create complete content with each and every bit of useful information customers can use to solve their problems.

Trying to answer numerous queries in a single post:

Just like the customers do not like shallow content, they also tend to dislike content that’s overstuffed. You may think that it’s a great idea to answer more than one query in a post. But that’s not what your customers think.

The reason?

Well, none of your customers would be pleased to go through a pile of numerous explanations just to reach to the exact solution buried under the heap. So, it’s advisable to use context-sensitive help. You can further allow the customers to click for further clarifications if needed. This would help save their time and eliminate any chances of them bouncing off!

Putting up a long login procedure:

Everyone has got a busy life today. More importantly, the world has grown mobile and your customers, impatient. Now, a knowledge base that requests for a customer’s password and usernames before he/she logs in is a huge turn-off.

The solution?

Well, simply cut the long procedures and let customers log in and out anytime.

Not updating the knowledge base content:

Lastly, try and save your knowledge base content from stagnating. Information that has not been updated for a long time not only becomes useless but also takes away the credibility of your business.

The reason?

When there’s no one to take care of the timely updates, the customers feel as if you are not professional enough. So, make sure that all website content is optimized and reviewed on a regular basis. This will help keep the customers properly informed and hence satisfied.

Now that you’ve known what all you should be avoiding so as to make your knowledge base content as useful as possible, I hope you are already working on fixing yours, aren’t you?