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Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
If you work in customer support, if you lead a support team, or if you are looking to better the customer experience for your company, then this podcast is for you!
Happy to Help is a podcast about all things customer support brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. Join us, on the second Tuesday of every month as Buzzsprout's Head of Podcaster Success, Priscilla Brooke dives into the world of customer support to make remarkable support the standard, not the exception!
Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
How to Build and Maintain an Effective Knowledge Base
A great knowledge base can make life easier for your customers and your support team—but where do you start? In this episode, we're joined by Mat Patterson from Help Scout to talk about building helpful, well-maintained articles that can actually eliminate repetitive support questions. Whether you’re a support team of one or leading a larger team, this episode is packed with practical advice you can put to work today!
Mentioned in this episode:
- The Supportive Podcast & Blog
- Help Scout - Creating a Customer Knowledge Base
- Help Scout - Best Customer Service Software in 2025
Support in Real Life: Tech Recommendations
Get in touch with Mat:
We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!
To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com.
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. In this episode, we're joined by Mat Patterson to talk all about knowledge bases. We'll cover the importance of investing in your knowledge base and some tips for developing and maintaining one over time. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. Okay, so you already know who our guest is because I name dropped him in the intro to the episode, but I want to give him his full introduction anyway. So Mat is a customer service content lead at Help Scout and has spent his career starting and growing support teams. Mat is passionate about helping customer-centric people deliver consistently excellent service. He does this through written content with Help Scout and through his podcast, the Supportive. So welcome to the show, Mat.
Mat:Hello, thank you for having me.
Priscilla:Yeah, thanks for coming. A couple of weeks ago, or I guess it was months ago at this point, you had an episode of the Supportive that called on support professionals to send you audio clips for kind of advice for new support professionals. Oh yeah, and a couple people from the Buzzsprout team submitted some audio and when I submitted mine I plugged Happy to Help, which at the time I was like this is fine, and then you put it in the podcast. And then I felt bad that I had plugged my podcast in your podcast. So I felt like it's only right to now have you on the show so that you can plug your podcast and all the work you do at Help Scout and share your insight with all of our listeners over here so they can get to know you, since I kind of snuck my way into your podcast.
Mat:Always be closing Priscilla.
Priscilla:It wasn't with that intent, I promise. I was like, oh, I got to put this in, I got to remember to tell people I'm a podcaster. Now you know, you'd think a year into it and I would be saying it more naturally, but I still feel like I have to make sure I get it out there.
Mat:That is one of the things you just have to do when you make content and you eventually realize nobody sees it. It was kind of a waste of time.
Priscilla:It's so true.
Mat:You got to tell people.
Priscilla:The like, self-promotion of it all is not my favorite part of this whole thing, but same you know, you learn new things and it's good. It puts yourself out of your comfort zone. So before we get into the world of knowledge bases and help guides, I always like to start the episodes off with some positivity and just kind of like shouting out someone who does really remarkable work.
Priscilla:So, Mat, who has made your day recently?
Mat:Well, it actually relates to what we were just saying, because the person that I want to call out, who made my day her name is Jen, from Church Spring, and the thing that she did for me, which is super nice, was just sent me a message saying that she had listened to that podcast episode, the one you just mentioned with a lot of different people, including yourself, on it and just said that this was super helpful to us and we've put it into our onboarding so that new people in the team will listen to this as part of coming on board, which is awesome.
Mat:It feels fantastic and I think it's just a great practice if someone does something and you enjoy it, just to tell them, because often people aren't getting a lot of feedback, and it's so helpful. I really appreciated that.
Priscilla:Yeah, that is so good and it totally relates to what we were just talking about. You're pushing this content out. You're doing it because you love what you're talking about and you love helping people get better at what they're working on. And sometimes it can be kind of lonely and no one responds to you and you're like I have no idea if anyone likes this. And then someone responds and says, oh my gosh, this is great and I'm including it in our onboarding. That's awesome and it really gives you that like oomph to keep going and that the work you're doing is impacting other people, and so this is like a good reminder to anyone listening that if someone in your sphere is doing something that's making your day better, tell them, let them know, because it goes so far and it really can have huge impacts. I feel like some of the best compliments that I've received are from people that I don't know who just come up and say something nice and I go. Man, you did not need to say that, but it made my day.
Jordan:Recently the Buzzsprout Head of Marketing, Alban. He said that his goal for this year is to become, like, a better fan of the content that he consumes and make sure that he's reaching out to people and letting them know that it's made an impact, and I think that is like. A really valuable lesson to people is that you do pour your heart and soul into your content. So when someone just says something as simple as like oh my gosh, I love this. I shared this with my mom and she loved it too, that means the world of content creators.
Priscilla:So yeah, that's awesome. That was a great thing to share. Thanks for sharing it. Okay, so I want to start a little bit about learning more about you, Mat, and what you're passionate about in the world of customer support. So you've been doing this, serving customers and support teams, since 2006. Is that right?
Mat:Yes, 2006 was when I started the job where I built support teams for sure. I think actually this goes back even further because I'm old.
Priscilla:You're wise.
Mat:My very, very first job proper grown-up job was also in a support team actually.
Priscilla:Oh, I love it.
Mat:We were providing support to accountants who were trying to become financial planners.
Priscilla:Okay.
Mat:So I was on the phone talking to accountants explaining about their computer problems with this frankly quite terrible software that we were selling them. That was helping them to learn about financial planning. That is a good way to learn how to communicate, because trying to explain things over the phone about software programs to accountants is tough work.
Priscilla:In like the early 2000s yeah.
Mat:That's kind of where I started.
Priscilla:Yeah, how has your role in the industry changed since then? How have you kind of evolved?
Mat:From that job I accidentally became a web designer. What this is? How long ago it was, there were not really any web designers. Yeah, and we had just started to get websites, because this is really probably it's the late 1990s.
Priscilla:Okay, we were both alive. Then Jordan and I were both alive. Then, great, you were alive.
Jordan:I remember it.
Mat:And I was doing this customer support work but I heard someone sitting on the cubicle next to me saying, like how do we even update this page? And literally nobody in the company knew how to update a webpage. And I said I think I could probably do that because I did one course in HTML in my university degree and that's how I became a web designer. And then I did that for eight years in a bunch of companies. Wow, I was like the first web designer at the Australian Stock Exchange. They'd never had a web designer before.
Jordan:Oh my gosh.
Mat:Then I was overseas, in the UK, for bookingcom Well, what is now bookingcom, being a web designer there? And then I was at the Sydney Zoo Taronga Zoo being a web designer for them. That's a fun place.
Priscilla:How did you end up in customer support, like how did you make that change?
Mat:Yeah, so I came. I was at the zoo, literally inside the zoo, doing my very short term job there, and I saw an ad for Campaign Monitor, which was a company that I had used because, I was a freelance web designer as well and some of my clients used Campaign Monitor to send their email newsletters.
Mat:And I saw them advertising for a support person and I thought, oh, this is bad timing because I'd only started the zoo three months ago or something. And I thought, oh, I wonder if that company seems cool because the product is cool. And then I just basically sent them an email going like, why are you advertising this now when I've just got another job? And they said, well, why don't you just come and talk to us anyway? And then it turned out it was literally like 10 minutes from where I lived and it was three people, the company, and, yeah, I went and had a chat to them and they convinced me to come over and be the first support person. And it was a great combination of their customers were web designers, so I knew who they were. I understood how to talk to those people.
Mat:I was able to make that transition into being the first support person pretty easily.
Priscilla:So what are you doing now? So it's clearly been a lot of time you've moved since then. You're now with Help Scout, so what are you doing now at Help Scout?
Mat:Yeah, You're now with Help Scout. So what are you doing now at Help Scout? Yeah, so at Help Scout I'm not doing customer support directly. I'm trying to help educate all of our customers, who are obviously helping their customers. So Help Scout has always made a big investment in that sort of learning content, about talking about what does it mean to provide good customer service? What does it look like? How do you set up the systems and the processes that deliver that support more easily? How do you integrate all the tools, all of that sort of stuff? So at Help Scout, my job is finding lots of different ways and lots of different channels to talk about good online support, how we can do it, what's changing in the industry, all of that sort of thing. And so here, obviously, I make a podcast, I write a newsletter, I do talks at conferences, I make videos, every form of content you can think of Interpretive dance.
Priscilla:Oh, wow, I've never seen that I was going to say my support team, the Buzzsprout team. Last summer, we all gathered for an in-person meetup and we watched one of the webinars that you put on about analytical reading and it was such a great resource for us as a team. If you are listening to this, go watch that webinar. You could probably find it on Help Scout's blog. It was so fantastic, Gave us a lot of great insight into how to read emails, not just, you know, read them to fully understand them and what people are asking. It was a really fantastic webinar. So, for anyone who's not familiar with Help Scout and I think most people probably are, but for anyone who's not, can you give us a quick rundown of what Help Scout is?
Mat:It's a customer support platform, right. It helps you help your customers and it does that by giving you a help desk and a knowledge base and a little chat knowledge base support widget that we call Beacon, in case you're looking for it, and they all work together. So, basically, so that you can spend more time helping your customers and less time faffing about with all the different tools and systems. You've probably seen things that do much of that. Maybe the thing that's currently the most different on the number of customers you're helping and everyone can be in there and you can have everybody close to the customers, because there is no additional cost to you to just let everybody log in and see what the customers are talking about and how they speak about things. But I know you use HelpScout, so maybe you can tell us how you do it.
Priscilla:Yeah, I love HelpScout. We've been using them since 2018, 2019. It's been a really cool tool to use and it shaped a lot of the way that we think about customer service. When you're in there, just the way you're so intentional about how you name different things or calling tickets conversations Like they're not tickets in Help Scout, they're conversations and it's this reminder that, hey, this is a relational thing you're doing. This is not a transactional relationship here. This is actually like a conversation with a real person, and I do really love the way that you guys approach like online support in that way One of the coolest things about Help Scout recently that I really love. I think maybe you updated this sometime last year. If you want to link text, all you have to do is copy the URL that you want to link and then highlight the text that you're going to link that URL to and then paste it, and then it automatically creates a linked text to that URL, what I will not tell you. It saves so much time.
Priscilla:Yeah, it saves like four clicks, which you really don't think is that many clicks, until you're answering 120 emails a day, oh yeah, and linking things right and left. So good, I love it so much. Ok, before we jump into knowledge bases, one last question for you what is your favorite thing about customer support, like, what is it that makes you passionate about it?
Mat:There's probably not one thing, there's probably lots of things, things. But I think that's sort of the point is that you get to do so many different types of things that are all called support. Right, you answer the technical questions, but, especially in small companies, you're often doing some sort of like business consulting to these people who are like I have this problem. I think your product can help me, and you're really helping them figure out like, what are you actually trying to do and how might this help or not? You're figuring out like weird browser bugs. You're coming up with new ways to explain the same thing that you've explained a hundred times, but this person doesn't get that explanation and you need a new way to do it. And then you're writing documentation. You're running classes. You might be off to sit in on sales calls. It's just lots and lots of different things you can do that are all types of support.
Priscilla:And every day, sort of, is a little bit different, even though there is weirdly, a lot of repetition. It's hard to explain to someone who's not in it that there is this repetition of working through an email queue or, you know, answering phone calls or something. There's the repetition in that, but every single email or interaction is completely different, and so there is also this aspect of needing to be able to switch lanes really quickly and go into different modes just when it comes to problem solving or being an encourager or whatever it is that that email requires of you. So I totally agree with you that that dimension in the work is really enjoyable.
Mat:There's something about it. There's like a little dopamine hit that you get from answering conversations that you don't get in other jobs. That was something I found hard moving out of direct support into what I do now. So don't get in other jobs. That was something I found hard moving out of direct support into what I do now. So don't get those little like oh, I finished it and you can see the number go down. It's a really immediate measurement of progress. That you don't get in a lot of other jobs is to go like oh, I can, if I could delete that, I could close that, and then it goes. It's so satisfying.
Priscilla:It's so satisfying Like mowing your lawn and you can see it as you're mowing it, and there's something so satisfying about that, whereas if you're doing some other project where you don't see it as you're going, it's harder to stay motivated. I fully agree. Those little dopamine hits are awesome. That's why I like make sure I stay in support at some point during the day. I like to be in the inbox. It's just it feels so good.
Priscilla:So today we're talking about knowledge bases, and knowledge bases can sometimes be viewed as a necessary evil in the world of support, like you have to have these documents there, but a lot of times they get ignored or they become outdated over time and they just aren't invested in, and so I thought it would be a good thing for us to talk about today. Mat, I know you've recently done some work and developed some content about knowledge bases and some strategies for really creating good ones, and so I thought it'd be good for us to talk about kind of the importance of having strong knowledge bases and then also some tips and strategies for developing them and then maintaining them and making sure they stay up to date. So to kick us off, can you just define what a knowledge base is for anyone listening who may not have one.
Mat:A knowledge base is essentially it's a collection of documentation, right? The idea is this set of information that is designed to make it easy for your customers or the general public to find answers to questions without having to go through the actual support team, and that might mean it's a bunch of FAQs. There might be process guides, there might be you know what even is this product and how does it work. You get videos in there, sort of like a user manual and a how-to guide smushed together. Yes, that's a knowledge base. Lots of them are publicly facing Some of them will be internal only Lots of different types.
Priscilla:Last year during the Elevate CX conference, I had some support professionals give us like advice for the podcast. One of the questions I asked was what would they do if they were starting a support team from scratch? What was the first thing you do? And I think it was Ashley Hazlett who said that she would develop an FAQ, that that was the first thing that she would do, and it was funny because I hadn't really thought about that as being like step number one. But she said that she would do it because it'd be a way for her to train herself on the product and to really understand all the details there, and I thought really that was such a good first step. And so there's really so much good that can be found in a really strong knowledge base, and so can you tell us a little bit about why it's important to invest time into a knowledge base and then when you think support should take that step to actually create one?
Mat:Well, let me ask you a question first Are you any good at singing?
Priscilla:I am Okay.
Jordan:Multi-talented.
Priscilla:I did not see that question coming.
Mat:Yes, I've been singing my whole life, yeah, Well, you would have been okay, because I think if you look at cultures, pre-writing and cultures which didn't have writing, that was how they stored their knowledge. Right, you would have the person who would sing the songs, and this is how everybody learns about the cultural information. It's all stored within those songs and it's passed down generationally. And I think about that because if that was the way it worked now, my customer satisfaction rate personally would be so low because no one would understand anything.
Priscilla:But you're saying that I should start creating singing documents.
Mat:Absolutely. It could be just Buzzsprout. Support the musical every day.
Priscilla:Yeah, okay, but actually Jordan, and I would love that.
Jordan:I was a musical theater major, so yes, okay.
Mat:Well, you've got it sorted, You're fine. When writing disappears, Buzzsprout will still be able to provide great support.
Jordan:Oh yeah, we're staying afloat.
Mat:My customers, on the other hand, are in all sorts of trouble.
Priscilla:But we have writing, Luckily we have writing. Yes, we have writing. That's such a good thing.
Mat:The great benefit of writing, I think, is that you know. You write it down once and refer to it forever. It's out there. It's helping people when you're not around. They don't need to wait for you anymore. So it's like a source of truth for customers, but it's also a source of truth for your own team, because you come in you don't know something. The knowledge base should tell you. This is what it is and this is how it works. It's also for your little in-app help widgets or however you present that information. It's also now a source of truth for AI tools that come in and gobble up all your knowledge base and then regurgitate it to your customers like they're tiny baby birds.
Mat:And as to when should you have a knowledge base? Well, I think Ashley already said it, but basically as soon as you possibly can, you should start working on it, because it takes ages and you're already using that. You're giving information to customers already, right? You're doing it one-on-one, which is madness. To only do it one-on-one when you know you're going to have to use that information again. If you can start collecting it into a knowledge base, it's easier if you do it at the start. It only gets harder the longer you wait before you start doing it. So even if you can't do the whole thing, some knowledge base is better than no knowledge base.
Priscilla:Yeah, even if you're just pulling the top 10 questions that you have in support and you're writing documents about those 10 questions and posting that somewhere to get started, yeah, it's definitely worth it, and I like what you said about it making it easier on your support team, because then they have places to go to learn things, but then also resources to send out to customers. I really think it can be a huge resource, both internally and externally, and it can also be kind of like a marketing tool too for anyone who's coming to your product and doesn't know. I will oftentimes go into the help guide and see what the help guide looks like. Do they tell me how to leave? If they don't tell me how to cancel my account in a help guide, I'm probably not going to sign up for an account somewhere because I'm going to feel trapped in it. So I want to get an idea for how helpful they are in that guide, and so I think having that can also be kind of like a marketing tool for new customers.
Priscilla:Yeah, so I think it's clear that it's important to have a knowledge base and it's important to have a good, strong set of documents for your customers and for your internal support teams as well. But what do you include? What actually makes it up? What are you going to put your time into developing right in the beginning? So, Mat, where would you start as far as articles to write and processes to publish?
Mat:So you start with what you have right. Whatever answers that you already have, that you find yourself reusing like oh yeah, I've explained that before Once, you've done it more than once. That probably should be a knowledge base, because you know that it's going to come up again. Specifically, which articles should you write? Well, I mean, you might have, if you're using a help desk. You might have some reporting that tells you like these are the most common categories of questions we're answering. You might be able to look at, like what are the most frequently used, save replies that we're sending out to customers.
Mat:Maybe you have that, maybe you don't, but it's sort of almost doesn't matter, because whoever's on the support team, you just ask them like which question are you sick of answering? That will be the one that should be in the knowledge base, if it's not already in there. That's where you start. Absolutely, that's a great tip. That's a great question to ask your team when you're trying to figure out the next thing to write what are you sick of answering? I love that. Yeah, like they know the pain, they will know the pain, and so they will be like if I never had to write that same thing again, I would be so happy, and sometimes a knowledge-based article is the first step in dealing with that pain. And the second step is can we just fix it so it's not a problem anymore? Yes, and actually the real solution is fix the product. No one has to answer it. And also, we don't need a knowledge base article. That's the ultimate win.
Priscilla:That is such a good point. The knowledge base is there to help you explain and educate and give self-service right to your customers. But if there is an issue that is recurring so much that you have to rely on this article for every single person who runs into that using that feature, maybe the feature needs to be analyzed. It's not always going to be solved through education. If you're seeing something you're like even with this help article, we're still getting questions about this then maybe you need to look at the UI or the feature or whatever it is that is causing that extra friction.
Jordan:And we have a great episode about that that we just did with Tom Rossi talking about talking to the dev and product team about issues.
Mat:I used to do a thing with my team called kill that question, which sounds quite violent now that I say it out loud. Oh, I like it, though. It would just be the support team getting together and saying, like, if we could stop having to answer these questions like which ones would be we most happy about? And we just make a list To your point. We would take this to then the product teams and say, like, look, how many times we're answering this question. Here is our. Maybe we think this is how it could be solved. You probably have a better idea, but, like, this is the amount of work that we could be saving for our customers and for us, and so we would just make a list and then prioritize it and send it to them, and then they would sometimes take things off the list, and it was the most satisfying thing in the world to go back to there and say, oh, remember when that like, you just forget those questions immediately.
Mat:When you don't have to answer them anymore, they disappear out of your life and you feel like you're making no progress. But go back to the list and go oh yeah, we used to answer that a hundred times a month.
Priscilla:Right, and now we don't at all. Now it's not even a question oh, it's so nice, it's so satisfying. So what are some characteristics of a really great help, guide or knowledge base, like what are some of the things that you want to see in those really strong ones?
Mat:I want a knowledge base that is actually going to be helpful to people, so matching up the way people think about that problem, the words that they have in their head when they're running into the problem, and a knowledge-based article that takes them from where they are to where they need to be. So you mentioned before that Help Scout. You know we have this sort of intentional naming of features and things to try and send a message about, like this is how we think about it, which is, I think, very effective. But also you can cross a line where it's like well, no one understands what we're talking about.
Mat:I think people grasp the idea of tickets and conversations being the same thing, but sometimes there is like well, I've never heard someone talk about it in that way and so I'm searching for this thing, and the customer describes it. In the way the customer thinks about it, based on their past experience with other tools or whatever, they may never find the right article in the knowledge base unless they have the right terminology. So the first thing is to make sure people can actually find the right articles, because they are written from the customer's perspective and not from the company's perspective.
Priscilla:Yeah.
Mat:I think the knowledge bases which are super annoying are ones which are like you're obviously mapping this to your internal structure of how you think about things and it doesn't make any sense to someone outside the company.
Priscilla:Or if your marketing team is the one writing these articles and you're like oh, but you don't even know how our customers are responding to this. And yes, absolutely.
Mat:And I can tell you like you're trying to promote the thing, but you're also, you know that this is meant to be a help guide and it's for people who are having problems, and so there is a tension between the marketing aspects of the knowledge base, which are real. It is a way of explaining to people what you do and why it works and why it matters.
Mat:But there is a tension between that, and sometimes the product is not perfect. All times the product is not perfect. People are going to run into edges, they're going to get into trouble. We are going to have to talk about things which are less positive about this company in order to explain to customers how we do it, and so customer-centered as opposed to company-centered is very important for a knowledge base.
Priscilla:Yeah, I think another really important part of having a good knowledge base is having easy access to the support team. I think there's definitely knowledge bases that I've used where I can't find the answer in the articles that I'm reading through one, but then I can't find an email for a support team. They've buried it so much that I can't get to a team once. I've already tried to do the self-service route, and so for us I think every single one of our articles at the bottom of the article has the support email, because we want to make sure that once you've read the article, if you still have any questions at all, you can get to a person in about 10 minutes, and I think that is a sign of a really strong knowledge base, because you're saying we're going to give you the information. We feel confident that you can get there with the information you're giving here, but at the same time, like you were saying, we don't know what other things you're coming from with other knowledge you've gained at other platforms.
Mat:And so coming to us, you might have more questions beyond this article, and so I think that's another good thing to include in your help guides. And if they just found that, then they would be fine, they wouldn't have to wait for us. You know, some people prefer to hear it from a person. Fair enough, but there are a bunch of people who, if they had found that on their own, they'd be happier. You'd be happier because you didn't have to help them. And so figuring out a way to make sure that they can find it, that they can search it, that it returns useful results to them super important. And then, when they get that document, that they can read it and scan it and find the thing that they need in there easily Like, it's well-designed, it's easy to hop around and find the right section and follow links to a place that you want to end up.
Mat:So accessibility super important.
Priscilla:Yeah, Formatting. People don't think about how important formatting is with written content. But just having headers that are clear and easy to read, using, you know, bold and italics and font changes all of that can help you when you're scanning an article to go quicker, and I don't know about y'all. But I do not want to read a four paragraph page with no formatting in it and I'm not going to sit there and read it, I'm going to stop and then I'm immediately going to try to email whoever I can email because I don't want to read this long document.
Priscilla:But if it's formatted, if it's step-by-step points with bold and italics and highlighted things, it's so much easier to consume that I was at a support-driven conference years ago when I first ended up in a talk about the importance of formatting in knowledge bases and it just was such a simple thing that I had never heard articulated. But it really is so true. So if you're writing a knowledge base, be really aware of that, that that formatting is really going to impact how people consume that information and how likely they are to read everything that you're writing. The same for your emails too. When you're in an inbox and you're emailing customers, Make sure you're not just sending them blocks of text, because they're not going to read through all of that.
Mat:Yes, conciseness, clarity. If you're a good writer, you'll write things differently. For an email where you're talking to a specific person and you have context about who they are, yep, for a knowledge base will be different. Writing it in a chat response will be different. That's why you get a hire for people who can write in a lot of these cases.
Priscilla:Yeah, absolutely. How big should a knowledge base be? Is there a time when a knowledge base is too big?
Mat:It should be seven pages long.
Priscilla:All right, there we go.
Mat:Next question no, of course there isn't. There isn't a limit, right? I don't think you could get too big. It's just what is useful and helpful for this particular company and its customers and the products and the services that they're supporting. Right, all of these things will determine, like, what is an appropriate amount of knowledge base for this situation that we're in. Like, do you know how many pages are in the Buzzsprout knowledge base? Have you got any idea?
Priscilla:Gosh, I know we have a lot. I want to say we have like 97 last time I counted, but we probably have a couple more since then. But we have it all organized in different chapters type of a thing. But I think what you were saying is important, that it's not so much about the size, it's about what's important to have in there, and when something becomes outdated you take it out, you don't leave it in there.
Mat:Yeah, the number does not matter, right, it's only. Is the content in there accurate? Is it not duplicated across different places? Is it up to date with the current state of things?
Priscilla:And do you?
Mat:have the capacity to manage that many articles, because even if you start with a great number and it's all accurate, but you cannot possibly maintain that many different articles, eventually it gets terrible and then they're just in your way and your AI is now going to send people the wrong information forevermore because it's in the knowledge base. It is tricky. There's also an interesting discussion that we had about like, what about an individual article? How long should that be? Should it be short? Should it be long? Do you try and cover every possible scenario within one document? Do you split those up into lots of different ones and make people jump around? I don't think there is a single correct answer. I think that's a discussion we're constantly having and I think, as we have these AI tools ingesting stuff, those also might provide some pressure on the way that we structure documents.
Mat:In the same way that search engines kind of change the way people made webpages in general, AI tools are going to do the same thing to knowledge bases.
Priscilla:Yep, it's a case-by-case basis, at least for us, when it comes to how much information do we include in one document, or do we split it into two? And it always comes back to how is the customer going to read this and how are they going to want to see this information? Do they need to always have both sides of these answers at one time? If so, they should probably end up in the same document, but if it's an either or situation, then two documents may make it easier to consume.
Priscilla:So it is kind of like that Take it case by case and figure out what needs to be there, and if it doesn't need to be there, then it can go in another document or doesn't need to end up on the base at all.
Mat:Yeah, you also need to think about how are they seeing this? Because if they're reading it on a big window and they've got the whole browser window dedicated to this document, it can be longer but look less scary. But if they're getting it in a tiny chat tool and it's like 25 pixels wide, that thing's going to scroll for 27 years. You want a shorter piece then. Or if they're doing it in app and they're in the middle of a process and they just need one paragraph really that explains what's going on right now in this particular spot. You might need to split things up more.
Priscilla:Or make a video or something that's going to allow it to be a little bit easier to consume, like on a mobile version, or something like that.
Jordan:Yeah.
Priscilla:Mm-hmm. So some knowledge bases are built, like into the website. I know for Buzzsprout ours is built by our design team and our developers and it's built into the site, but that is not the only way to create a knowledge base. So can you tell us a little bit about, like, third party services? I know that Help Scout has a knowledge base aspect to it where you can build it through Help Scout. Can you tell us a little bit about that, because I'm not super familiar with that option.
Mat:Yeah, absolutely so. There are a million tools for this. If you do use a help desk, often the help desk will have one, like Help Scout does. It's called Docs, a very generic piece of naming, but everyone understands what it means, don't they?
Jordan:Help.
Mat:Scout's Docs. So the nice benefit of having those is that they can integrate right into your support tools. You can really easily reference oh here is a doc about this particular issue and you can tie those things together quite nicely. If you have one of those, you might want to look at that, see if it is a good fit for you. But you might want to have more control over it. Obviously, if you're using someone else's product, it might specify the way you can lay out pages and that sort of thing. You have lots of choices. There are standalone products like a Knowledge Owl or helpdocsio or HelpJuice I've never heard of HelpJuice.
Mat:No, shade HelpJuice, but that is a bit gross.
Priscilla:The naming is interesting.
Mat:But the tool that you choose, obviously it matters because things might resonate with you or the person who's mostly managing your docs. Maybe they find something that works really well with them.
Jordan:Yeah.
Mat:But ultimately it doesn't matter that much, does it, Because all you're doing is producing a document when you have a tool that helps you more easily keep things up to date and link things together and make it accessible in the way that you want, to choose that tool.
Priscilla:Yeah, I think that's a good point. It more in the way that you want to choose that tool. Yeah, I think that's a good point. It's the ease of updating it, it's the ease of staying on top of it and creating it. That's what's helpful. But the content inside of the document is really what's going to make or break your help guide or your knowledge base. And so if that's easier to do by building it in-house, that's one thing. If it's another thing to use a platform like Help Scout and build it into your email software, that's Use a platform like Help Scout and build it into your email software. That's another great way to do it. But really the content is what's important.
Mat:Customers do not care what tool you use to make your doc no, or where it lives yeah, it doesn't matter to them.
Priscilla:Yeah, you know, we've all used knowledge bases.
Priscilla:Where you just can't find the information you need, or you find an article that's related to the question you have and the information is outdated, it is not up to date with what the page that you're looking at I know for our customers, you know, one of the things that people have a lot of questions about is how to submit your podcast to Apple Podcasts.
Priscilla:Apple Podcasts changes that process often and our help guide has to stay up to date with what Apple's process is all the time, and so people will write in and say now there's, this button is not purple anymore. I'll be like you're right, it's blue now. And we have to make sure that we're staying up on top of it, because even a color change like that can be confusing for someone, because they're looking for a blue button even though it says the same name. It's a purple button now, or whatever the colors are. So it's so important to stay up on top of that and make sure you're maintaining that knowledge base, or else all the work you put into creating it is for nothing. It doesn't matter.
Mat:The wrong information. You find the wrong information is actually worse than no information at all, because it can send people down the wrong path and then they feel even grumpier than before they started.
Priscilla:And they question your ability to be experts on the thing you're talking about too, because they're like well, you don't know how submitting to Apple works either, so how am I supposed to trust you with this? So what are some pitfalls that you see people run into when they're developing these knowledge bases and maintaining them over time?
Mat:I think we've covered a few of those. I think you know, if it's too hard for the people to find, if the search doesn't work, like even if the right article's in there and I search for it and I can't find it, then what was the point? The individual articles are like difficult to scan or they're confusing. But I think the big one and we've talked about it a few times already is that documents that are just not well maintained. It's a nightmare because your customer has that experience of like, oh yes, a help doc. It's about the specific problem that I just typed in. It's got the answer, and then you go there and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't like to point. The screenshot doesn't match anymore. On that, there are now some tools which will help you with updating screenshots. I personally had the experience of owning the knowledge base at Campaign Monitor and then either the product changes and they're like oh yeah, we've decided to change the name of some button somewhere and now a thousand screenshots have to be updated, which is always no fun.
Priscilla:That literally happened to us this morning. That literally happened to this morning.
Mat:Yeah, or even I did one where it was like the design of the knowledge base itself changed and my screenshots didn't fit in anymore and I had to literally retake 200 screenshots.
Jordan:Yeah.
Mat:So I guess maybe we talk about, like, the reasons that things don't get maintained. Should we talk about that? Yeah, I think there's a few things right. It's just hard because you need to know the answer for a start. Like someone needs to understand that this is actually wrong. So it requires somebody with a bit of expertise is actually wrong, so it requires somebody with a bit of expertise.
Mat:Even like a technical writer who's not in the support team may not have the level of knowledge about how customers think about that thing and the phrasing that they use to make that page work for them, even if they understand the product side really well. So there's like the difficulty of finding someone who can actually do it. Especially if it's been left for a while. It can be just a massive job for someone to go in and start fixing stuff up and it feels a bit overwhelming. Sometimes you don't even know what's in the knowledge base because, like it was four people ago that this thing was set up and like who knew that half of those pages were even there and they refer to features that don't exist anymore or to payment plans that you can no longer apply to all of that sort of stuff.
Mat:Like it's just invisible problems. There's always something urgent to do in support, Like there's always there's a customer waiting right While you're taking time to write this document. You are making someone else wait a lot of the time, and that's emotionally difficult for support as well as annoying for the customer. And sometimes it's just the tools that you're using don't make it easy to maintain it, and it's like it's such a big effort to update a document that it doesn't ever feel like it's worthwhile, and I guess the last one would be it's nobody's job, Like nobody is the owner of it and therefore it never gets done.
Priscilla:It doesn't happen. I think that making it easy is such a good tip for people. You know, if you're in the process of going okay, we got to stay on top of this. How are we going to do it? Make it easy to make these updates, because then you're not having to jump through hoops, you're not having to go and get things you know run by four different people, get their buyout and then go in and update the article.
Priscilla:If it is a streamlined process and, like you said, if someone owns it and it's their responsibility to kind of stay on top of that, and of course, they pull in people that can help write articles or make updates.
Priscilla:They don't have to be the only one who touches it, but that they own it and they can make those executive calls when it comes to making updates. I think that's such a big thing. I want to say three or four years ago we kind of did an overhaul of our help guide and at the time it was much smaller and even that it was such a project to go through every article and get rid of ones that were outdated and update current ones and get everything. It really is an undertaking and since then, staying on top of it, and having someone who owns it has changed things so much because we don't have to do these giant overhauls anymore and when we see an edit that needs to be made, we can make it quickly and we can be intentional about going and looking through older articles that haven't been updated recently and making sure that those are fresh and in our tone, and so I think having someone own it is such a good strategy.
Jordan:Well, that makes it easier for people in other departments too. So, for example, if I stumble upon something while I'm interacting with someone over on the marketing team, I know that I can send a message to the person who's in charge and say, hey, I caught this little thing, and then they can go fix it. If you have somebody that like that's their thing. It's so much easier for the other departments to support the support team in that way.
Priscilla:Yeah, I think that's a good point. I also think it's important, if you're the person who it's your role to stay on top of the help guide. This was me the other day and you get a ping from Jordan that says, hey, this is not correct anymore. Being able to take that feedback and make the change without feeling some sense of oh my gosh, I've screwed up because I didn't update this fast enough. You know, I think sometimes things change so fast and so you have to be OK with getting it from other people from outside of it and knowing that this is not a personal anything on you. Things change all the time and sometimes you just got to go and make the update and move on from it, because it's easy to fall into this like place of I have to be the one who finds and updates things. No one else can see it. If someone else finds it, then that means I've done my job wrong, and that can be a dangerous place to be if you want to allow people to have feedback and support you.
Mat:Like Jordan was saying, yeah, I think it's important to realize, especially when you have a large knowledge base, you probably can't be 100% up to date all the time, because it is going to be a process but you also, if you're in charge of it, you also are probably aware of, like, these are the ones that we cannot let get out of date because it will be a disaster. And these are the ones where, like, no one's really looking at this. Once a month maybe someone uploads that page. It's useful to have there because we refer to it, but if it has to wait until after we do this other stuff, that's going to be okay. That's why it takes an owner who understands, like, what is in here, what's the relative importance of them, which ones do? I absolutely make sure that if they're working on that part of the product, I need to know early so that we can be ready because the support team will pay. Otherwise when you release something and then the document doesn't make sense anymore.
Priscilla:Absolutely, absolutely. I had someone write in the other day who said now this screenshot is showing this and this is no longer what it says. And I'm like, huh, you're right, it doesn't say that. I didn't know that. It doesn't say that anymore. I wonder when that changed and when we didn't hear about it. So I think that that's you know, that's a really important you know you want to make sure that the person who is owning the knowledge base, that they're the ones who really understand what is where and what's important and where people are going and where they're, what are the most important articles, so that those are the ones that can really be paid very close attention to. All right, so if you have one piece of advice that you can give someone who's going to start building their knowledge base tomorrow so this is the first time they're hearing about knowledge bases, they're a support team of one and tomorrow they're going to start what is your tip to them?
Mat:So, assuming you've taken our earlier advice about like where do you start, Like which documents do you start?
Mat:with I think fine, take that as read. I think the thing that you do first is to figure out the process of like how is somebody going to tell me when the knowledge base needs updating? Because, to your point earlier, any friction that's in that process just makes the whole thing much more likely to become outdated and painful. So you're going to give especially the support team, just give them a way that they can really easily tell you this thing needs updating or here is a new article that we need. So maybe you do that in your help desk. Like a really simple way would be just here's a tag. If you put this tag on a conversation, I have a filter that will just show me like, okay, everything that people are tagged as like needs documentation, and then I can just see that list right.
Mat:Or I talked to someone from Survey Gizmo years and years ago. They had like built some sort of browser extension, I think, where they could just press a button and then, with a little support, they could press a button. It would say, like here's an answer, I've already written it should be a document, and it would just send that over to the documentation person. Oh, that's great, because you get the question, you get the answer that's been written for this particular customer and then all you need to do really is like well, how do I make this kind of more general? That would apply to all customers and they've got 80% of the work done for them.
Jordan:That's cool yeah.
Mat:So whatever you can do to reduce the friction between person noticing that something needs documenting or needs improving and a person whose job it is to do that having that information. So reduce that, make it as short as possible. That will just make the whole thing run more smoothly.
Priscilla:Yeah, I think that's great advice.
Priscilla:You know, I think it's clear that knowledge bases can feel like this huge undertaking, but that they're so worth the time.
Priscilla:They're so worth the time to develop, to maintain, to create processes around maintaining them so that they can stay up to date and they can be an aid for your customers and for your support team, and it's worth putting the time into that. I know, you know, sometimes it can feel like, oh my gosh, like you were saying earlier, I'm leaving people in the queue to go and write articles, but the reality is those articles are going to help the next people that may come to your queue and hopefully will help them not end up in the queue, and so it's worth the time to devote a person to that, or to devote a couple hours of your day to that, to get out of the queue, to write an article every now and then, or to partner with a company or a software that can help you write those. It's worth taking the time to figure that out. And so thank you, Mat, for coming on and talking to us about help guides and knowledge bases. It's really been a great conversation.
Mat:Thank you so much. It's good fun to talk about knowledge bases anytime.
Priscilla:So it's time for Support in Real Life, our segment where we discuss real life support experiences. Jordan usually brings us something from the real world. What do you have for us today, Jordan?
Jordan:We have a message from Sally saying I'm starting a customer success department at my company and I'm curious to know what tools or tech stack do people find most useful? I know every company is different and there are many tools out there, but I'm just curious to know how do you value the most to help you with?
Priscilla:your job. So, Mat, do you have any tools that you use daily?
Mat:You might've heard of Help Scout. That's one that I do recommend. Yeah, a help desk. Obviously it is a pretty crucial tool. I mean a lot of people. To be fair, a lot of companies can start with just a shared Gmail inbox Totally fine, I think, if that works for you, especially if it's just one person, you're responsible for everything Absolutely, that can totally work fine. As soon as it gets a little bit more complicated, you have multiple people trying to keep track of who needs what and who's already answered this. That's when you want to look at a tool. I have written an article I think it's still there. I'll dig this up for you as well about, basically, how do you choose which help desk is the most appropriate for your given situation? It might be help scout, it might not be. It really depends on what you're trying to do, what sort of company you have one of the tools that I love is clean shot.
Priscilla:It is a screenshot tool that we use and it really makes taking screenshots and making them really effective so easy. And then you don't end up with all of these screenshots all over your desktop that are just clogging things up, but it gives you the ability to take a quick screenshot, to edit it at arrows, to blur out information. You can do so much with them and then you copy and paste it into the email and then it does not live on your computer forever, which is really wonderful. So if you're doing email support specifically, some kind of tool like CleanShot to do screenshots is a really really big game changer 100% and has made our support so much better.
Mat:It's not support specific, but Obsidian is a kind of connected text document manager so you can link all your sort of like a personal wiki if you're old, but I love that for just keeping track of everything. So in support there's a bunch of stuff that I want to keep. It's just for me like oh, I learned this thing about how Help Scout works and I just want to keep track of it and it's just a bit of plain text but they're all linked together and easily searchable. Obsidian Pretty good and for me and my content work. I also use it to keep track of just ideas, things that I think about. And there is a video on the Help Scout blog somewhere about how I write an article in which I talk a little bit about Obsidian in there too.
Priscilla:Oh, I love it. Thank you so much for joining us today, Mat, and sharing your wisdom with all of our listeners. We really appreciate it, as always, if you liked this episode, please share it with someone who works in customer support, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. We love to hear from you. Like we talked about at the beginning of the episode, it really makes us feel so good to hear back from people who are enjoying the content we're making. Thank you all for listening. Now go and make someone's day.
