The Article on Getting Started

Effective customer support is essential for onboarding new customers and users. A “Getting Started” reference guide will create a warm first impression and provide basic steps for getting started, such as installation, configuration, and usage of key features.

Creating a How-To Article

A good how-to is written in a sequence – first you do this, and then you do this. The essential question to ask yourself when writing a how-to is “What happens next?”. Keep answering that question over and over again until the end of the process has been reached.

This is especially useful for tricky workflows that require multiple steps, such as installing your product. Talk to your customer support team to find out where people are getting stuck and prioritize creating how-to articles for each of those use cases.

The Troubleshooting Guide

Once someone has learned your product, they’ll have to delve into the finer points of some area or another. This often leads to problems with understanding what’s going on. Troubleshooting articles help handle them by providing immediate solutions for common or easily solvable problems while saving time and energy for more important tasks.

For example, if it’s common for customers to get an error when importing their data, create a list of the top five things they can try and fix the issue.

FAQs

FAQ pages have become treasure troves of help guides, the place where information we don’t know what to do with is stored. They tend to feature questions which are bizarre and borderline insane.

Frequently Asked Questions are an easy way to show customers that their questions not only have been heard, but answered. Create FAQs which answer common questions and check with Customer Support if you’re unsure of what these would be.

To provide a workaround for an issue many customers are experiencing, you could outline your best alternative solution. To explain why you haven’t built a certain feature that customers are requesting, you could outline the challenges in developing this feature and what prevents its development.

Best practices article

Successful help content will not only answer the most common customer questions, but also act as a motivational GPS that keeps your customers on track.

To ensure that customers are getting the most out of your products, proactively teach them how to do something new.

Best practices are the most effective way to become an expert.

  • Share your best tips for using the product, as well as what others have shared about how they use it.
  • Share real-life customer examples that reflect your business goals and message.
  • Interview your team to discover their advice for how they use your product.
  • Ask your product-related and non-product-related questions to better understand what the customers are trying to do.