Getting started with self-service – Part 3: Determining what articles you need to create

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<a href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5411234991258-plan" rel="noopener" target="_blank">What's my plan?</a>
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<p class="sidenav-heading">Articles in the series</p>
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<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408885576346">Introduction: Elements of a self-service channel</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408886455578">Part 1: Planning your self-service content project</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408883389338">Part 2: Planning your self-service content structure</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408894140826">Part 3: Determining what articles you need to create</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408887322522">Part 4: Writing your knowledge base articles</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408885574298">Part 5: Launching your help center</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408894139930">Part 6: Tracking essential self-service metrics</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408882663194">Part 7: Maintaining and improving your knowledge base</a></li>
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<p class="p">When it’s time to plan out what articles you want to include in your knowledge
base, there’s no need to guess; you should have plenty of existing resources to help you
determine what you need to write about. For example, you can look at your existing support
requests to find what your customers ask about and have trouble with most often.</p>
<p class="p">This article covers the following topics:</p>
<ul class="ul" id="topic-1__ul_kxc_w53_x4b">
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_hz2_nhd_jmb">Searching for article ideas</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_ajv_zmj_x4b">Creating the list of articles you need to write</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_c5d_2nj_x4b">Assigning the writing work</a></li>
</ul>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title2" class="topic nested1" id="topic_hz2_nhd_jmb">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title2">Searching for article ideas</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">As you’ll see in the article we’ve linked to above, the following are four incredibly
helpful questions that you should ask when you set to determine what articles you need to
create: </p>
<ul class="ul" id="topic_hz2_nhd_jmb__ul_tyc_hmj_x4b">
<li class="li">What are common issues?<ul class="ul" id="topic_hz2_nhd_jmb__ul_vbf_3mj_x4b">
<li class="li">“Users always struggle with X.”</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="li">What are frequently asked questions?<ul class="ul" id="topic_hz2_nhd_jmb__ul_q4h_3mj_x4b">
<li class="li">“Users always ask Y.”</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="li">What are known issues that impact a lot of customers?<ul class="ul" id="topic_hz2_nhd_jmb__ul_i4j_3mj_x4b">
<li class="li">“Your website does not function correctly on mobile devices.”</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="li">What are the most time consuming issues?<ul class="ul" id="topic_hz2_nhd_jmb__ul_ypl_3mj_x4b">
<li class="li">“It takes 30 minutes to set Z up.”</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p class="p">To answer those questions, providing you already have some history supporting your
customers and therefore have the data, here are the resources that you should have available
to you.</p>
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<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">Existing ticket data</td>
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<p class="p">Your existing tickets have plenty to tell you about what the common support issues
and your customer pain points are. You can review your open and resolved tickets for
common support issues that you can turn into knowledge base articles.</p>
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<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">About custom field</td>
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<p class="p">To efficiently categorize and analyze your ticket data, it’s helpful to use
custom ticket fields. A commonly used agent-facing custom ticket field is the About
field. </p>
<p class="p">You create a custom About field (see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409155792026-The-About-Field" target="_blank">The 'About' Field</a>) to help you categorize
incoming support requests. An About field allows agents to select from a drop-down
list the different categories within the products and services you provide (for
example, Payment Issue, Returns, Product Defect, and so on). Your list should
contain whatever is relevant to your business or organization. </p>
<p class="p">After this
data has been captured, you can generate reports to analyze and help determine the
content you need to create. For example, if you’re receiving a high number of
tickets related to making returns, this can indicate that a knowledge base article
on that topic should be created to provide the information your customers need.
</p>
For more information, see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408828230554-Best-practices-for-finding-customer-issues-to-start-your-knowledge-base#topic_jzb_mvd_jj" target="_blank">Analyzing ticket data to determine customer
issues</a>.</td>
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<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">Resolution custom field</td>
<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">
<p class="p">Similar to the About field, you can add a custom ticket field to capture the
support issue resolution. For example, you can create a drop-down list with
resolution values such as User Education and Documentation Fix. User Education would
indicate that the support agent needed to provide instructions that most likely
should be in a knowledge base article. Documentation Fix would indicate that an
existing knowledge base article was incorrect and needed to be updated. </p>
For more
information, see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408822200346-Using-the-Resolution-field" target="_blank">Using the 'Resolution' field</a>.</td>
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<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">Existing internal documentation</td>
<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">
<p class="p">Review internal documentation for article ideas. For example, your support
team might have already created internal documentation for common support issues or
product specs are available that you can use to create an article about how to use
your product. </p>
For more information about using internal documentation to look
for content ideas, see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408828230554-Best-practices-for-finding-customer-issues-to-start-your-knowledge-base#topic_d13_lyd_jj" target="_blank">Looking at other sources to determine customer
issues</a>.</td>
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<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">Support macros</td>
<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">If your support team is using macros to quickly respond to common support
issues, those can be an excellent source of ideas for knowledge base articles (for
example, a macro that explains how to request a refund). These sorts of issues that
are easily resolved with a standard set of instructions and that apply to all users
should be documented in your knowledge base. </td>
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<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">Frequently used tags</td>
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<p class="p">Ticket tags are also useful in helping you to categorize tickets and find common
support issues. Similar to the About field, you can use tags to add more detail to
the ticket that can be helpful in drilling down into the specific areas that require
support. </p>
<p class="p">A common use of ticket tags is to indicate that the issue points out the need for
some customer facing documentation. For example, a standard practice is to add a
‘doc-needed’ tag when agents see an issue that requires documentation.</p>
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<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">One-touch and two-touch tickets</td>
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<p class="p">One-touch and two-touch tickets are a good place to look for content ideas
because they often indicate support issues that are easy to resolve and therefore a
good fit for self-service. An example of that is something such as ‘how do I reset
my password?’. It’s probably not something that a support agent needs to handle;
it’s more likely that the customer can do it themselves, but they just aren’t aware
of that or can’t find the instructions for how to do it. </p>
<p class="p">Support issues like
these are usually handled with a single response from a support agent – a one-touch
ticket. Using Zendesk Support you can easily locate the support requests that were
resolved with one interaction. </p>
To see how you can report on one-touch and
two-touch tickets in Zendesk Explore, see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408843225370-Explore-recipe-One-touch-tickets" target="_blank">Explore recipe: One-touch tickets</a>. </td>
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<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">Google Analytics</td>
<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">
<p class="p">One of the many things that Google Analytics does is track the search terms
that your customers use when they visit your website. Google Analytics can and
should be enabled for your Help Center (see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408828643098" target="_blank">Enabling Google Analytics for your help center</a>). </p>
<p class="p">If
you haven’t launched a Help Center yet, check the search term metrics provided by
Google Analytics to see what your customers are looking for on your website. You may
find that a number of your customers are looking for information about specific
issues (for example, ‘shipping problems’ or ‘can’t sign in’). You can also
investigate what search term refinements they’re making – the other words that they
are using to try and find the information they’re seeking. </p>
<p class="p">You’ll not only
discover some articles that you need to create, but you can also use those search
refinements as labels in articles to help ensure that the article is returned in a
Help Center search if an alternate search term is used. For example, if you change
the name of a product, you can use the old name as a label to help your customers
find the articles they need. </p>
After you launch your Help Center, you can use the
Search dashboard to review the search terms that your customers are using (see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408818465562" target="_blank">Analyzing help center search
results</a>).</td>
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<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">Your subject matter experts and community</td>
<td class="stentry" style="vertical-align:top;">
<p class="p">The people who deal directly with customers probably have something to share with
you about what needs to be documented in your knowledge base. Talk to your support
agents and people involved in product development about their ideas. </p>
<p class="p">If you have an active user community and a forum for them to provide you with
feedback, you can either solicit them for feedback or review what they’ve already
shared with you via their community posts and comments. You should also review your
social media channels.</p>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title3" class="topic nested1" id="topic_ajv_zmj_x4b">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title3">Creating the list of articles you need to write</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">As you’re doing all that research, capture your article ideas and needs in a list somewhere
(Google Docs, your internal wiki, etc.). You can also create article stubs and then assign
them to writers to complete the articles.</p>
<p class="p">In the next article in this series (<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408887322522" target="_blank">Getting started with self-service – Part 4: Writing your knowledge base
articles</a>), you’ll find some best practices for creating a plan to get the writing
done and getting your knowledge base articles published.</p>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title4" class="topic nested1" id="topic_c5d_2nj_x4b">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title4">Assigning the writing work</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">If you’re working with a team of people who are helping to create your knowledge
base articles, the first step is to divide up the work and assign specific people to write
specific articles.</p>
<p class="p">Based on the research you did to discover the topics you need to cover, you
should have compiled a list of articles that need to be written (if you haven’t gotten down
to the level of defining specific articles with titles, even a comprehensive list of subject
areas is a good place to start). </p>
<p class="p">Whatever level of detail you’ve gotten to, at this point you should know what
needs to be written. Share that list with your team and assign specific parts of it to the
team members. Who you assign to what parts will probably be determined by who has the
subject matter expertise.</p>
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