5 strategies for building up your help center content for AI

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Over time, the best strategy for building a solid foundation for effective self-service is to create and maintain a quality knowledge base using our recommended best practices. However, if you want to quickly ramp up your knowledge base and enhance the quality of your AI responses, the strategies listed below will help you get started.

This article contains the following sections:

Strategy 1: Analyze ticket data

Strategy 2: Identify common customer issues

Strategy 3: Review existing content

Strategy 4: Listen to your community

Strategy 5: Optimize your content

Strategy 1: Analyze ticket data

Analyzing your ticket data is the best way to search for the topics that will help the most customers. Once you know which topics are necessary to proactively help your customers, you can develop or enhance knowledge base articles to provide the missing information. For example, you can analyze your tickets to find:

Common issues or pain points that users struggle with

Frequently asked questions

Known technical issues and workarounds that impact customers

Time-consuming issues

Analyzing tickets can be a manual process, and may be overwhelming at first. Having a good strategy helps. Here's one process you can use to analyze your tickets and identify required content:

Categorize your tickets: How you categorize your tickets depends on the information you're collecting in tickets. Ideally, you'll want to categorize by issue, using a custom "about" field. Then, you can build an Explore report to see what your major ticket categories and issues are. See Categorizing your tickets.

Drill-down into ticket groupings to find common issues: After you organize your tickets into categories, you'll want to create a view to dig into the categories with the most tickets and find the common, high frequency issues. See Drill-down into ticket groupings to find common issues.

Create articles from tickets: Agents can use the Knowledge section of the context panel to create or request new help center articles directly from a ticket within Agent Workspace. See Creating and requesting articles in Knowledge.

Expand article content with generative AI: If you have the Copilot add-on, you can use the text expansion tool within the article editor to quickly create expanded content for articles. You can write short notes or bullet points, then use the tool to turn them into complete paragraphs. This can help you quickly ramp up your help center content. See Using generative AI to expand and enhance help center content.

Determine what to document: Keep a tracking document where you can record issues you find, then determine what you want to document and set priorities for creating the content. Start by identifying 5% of your most common issues, and focus acting on those first. Taking small steps toward developing knowledge base content to address ticket issues will yield huge benefits. See Determine what to document.

Strategy 2: Identify common customer issues

Once you've looked through your tickets for common customer issues, you can turn to other resources to further investigate your customer pain points. For example, you can analyze the following:

Macros: If you use macros for common responses to tickets, you can look at your most used macros to find clues about your common customer pain points. You can then document the topics covered in those macros in your knowledge base. Macros that cover known issues and workarounds are a great resource for creating help articles.

Tags: You can use the tags on tickets to help pinpoint common issues. Examine your tag cloud to see the 100 tags that have been most applied to tickets in the last 30 days. This will help you understand issues that may require knowledge base articles.

To review macros and tags for common issues, see Looking at other sources to determine customer issues.

Strategy 3: Review existing content

Existing content can be another source for determining issues and starting your knowledge base. In most cases, it's ready-made content that can go directly in the knowledge base with little or no editing.

For example, some agents might have informal documentation, or "cheat sheets," that help them remember common issues and workarounds. Other agents may share information with their team via a wiki, internal help center, or other informal process that you could leverage.

To review strategies for leveraging your existing content, see Looking at other sources to determine customer issues.

Strategy 4: Listen to your community

To learn about common issues and pain points in your community, you can:

Talk to your agents: Agents can not only tell you what the common issues are, but often they can articulate exactly what documentation is required. Meet with agents regularly and encourage them to suggest new content and participate in content creation or review, where possible.

Listen to your community: Check the most active threads for possible points of confusion. If customers are commenting a lot, it might be a source of frustration that needs documentation. You can monitor your own help center community forum, if you have one. If not, you can check third-party community forums where your customers might be talking about your products and asking questions (for example, Reddit).

Check social media: Go everywhere your customers are and find out what they are saying. You might hear about some common issues.

Strategy 5: Optimize your content for AI

Once you identify the issues you need to document, you can either write articles from scratch, create articles from tickets, or use generative AI to expand articles based on minimal bullet lists or notes. No matter how you create articles, you can use these simple strategies to optimize the content and create AI-ready articles in your help center.

Use consistent and structured formatting for article titles and content: Write simple, descriptive titles and subheadings for articles. Incorporate bullet points and numbered lists when presenting steps or key points within articles.

Use multimedia sparingly: While it's a good idea to enhance articles with images, diagrams, or screenshots to clarify concepts and improve comprehension for users reading articles in your help center, keep in mind that images and videos are not used by AI. When using images, always use an ALT tag and try not to use multimedia as a substitute for text.

Focus on one idea: Concentrate on a single idea and use a concise article title to create clear and focused content, facilitating user comprehension.

Keep it simple: Keep articles simple, concise, and to the point. Use clear and straightforward language, avoiding jargon, to ensure easy comprehension by users of all levels of expertise.

To optimize your articles to improve the quality and accuracy of automated responses, see Optimizing your help center content.