Reinventing Knowledge Base Software
The core of any customer service portal is a knowledge base. A knowledge base theoretically empowers customers to find answers on their own, thereby allowing faster results for them and increased efficiency for your help desk.
Unfortunately, in application, many knowledge base software products simply don't achieve optimal results for the customer. Most blindly follow each others nested folders metaphor. As you've seen before, the infinitely deep nested groups of categories where knowledge base articles are categorized someplace in this hierarchy.
This layout makes perfect sense to your support staff and in-house personnel who know the content well, but little sense to customers focused on finding answers to specific questions. All customers see are the top level folders. A meaningless group of headings, comprised of the most general topics. From here, customers are left on their own to drill down through endless layers of folders until they find what they need. That of course assumes they know exactly what they are looking for and how that somehow maps into the hierarchy you created. Often that's not the case, which makes searching impossible and scanning just as hard.
Knowledge books, HelpSpots knowledge base, provides a superior organizational construct for your institutional data, allowing far easier customer access. The core attribute of HelpSpot knowledge books are that they are organized like a traditional book, which provides several key customer access improvements over traditional knowledge base software.
To get the customer started, each book has a table of contents. The table of contents allow customers to quickly scan a books contents, so even if they don't know the exact term they need it's much faster to browse what's available. The more familiar book format provides an easier user experience for customers who are more comfortable with the layout of a book than a nested group of folders.
Over traditional knowledge bases products, the book-like structure of HelpSpot's knowledge books also forces you to step back and look at the organization of your content; it becomes more difficult to just stick individual articles in a folder and forget about it. The book format means you need to organize your thoughts and content by asking: Which books are appropriate to create? Which chapters should be first? What order should the chapters appear in? How many pages should a chapter contain? Should this information be it's own chapter or just a few pages in another chapter? All questions that force you to think about the organization of your support information in ways that ultimately result in a better constructed, easier to use resource for your customers.
Interested in learning more? Visit the knowledge book tour or the full HelpSpot tour.