How to tackle a major knowledge base revamp

You’ve just been tasked with a complete overhaul of your company’s knowledge base.

Cue all the emotions—excitement, fear, nervousness, and more. 

It’s tough to overstate the value of an effective knowledge base. It’s a pillar of your self-service efforts, a resource for your agents, and something your customers rely on.

But that’s the issue, right? 

Tackling a major knowledge base revamp can feel overwhelming because it’s such a crucial project. And, depending on the size of your existing knowledge base, it can also be a massive project with a ton of moving parts. 

Helping companies build and improve their knowledge bases is our bread and butter at KnowledgeOwl. Below, we’ll share what we’ve learned about the best way to handle a knowledge base revamp. 

A successful knowledge base revamp includes three main phases:

• Preparation

• Execution

• Maintenance

Preparing for your knowledge base revamp

Preparation isn’t always fun, but it’s often the key factor impacting a project’s success. Before starting your knowledge base revamp, this prep work will get you organized and help the whole process run more smoothly. 

Step 1: Create a list of current knowledge base articles

Start by creating a list of all your current knowledge base articles. 

Many tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, and KnowledgeOwl give you the ability to export current help articles into a CSV file. 

In KnowledgeOwl, you can export your articles with just a few clicks. Your export can include dozens of columns with virtually everything you might want to know about your knowledge base.

You might say it’s a bird’s eye view (see what I did there?).

After you export your list, drop it into a Google Sheet or Airtable and use it to track progress throughout your project. This also makes it easier to collaborate with others throughout the whole project. 

If your knowledge base tool doesn’t have an export function—which would be awful—you may need to copy and paste key details into a Google Sheet. At a minimum, try to get these six columns:

• Name of article

• Date of original publish

• How many views/how frequently is it used

• Date of last update

• Name of last updater 

• Notes

Step 2: Assess the current state

With your list in hand, identify what’s currently working, what’s not, and any gaps or shortcomings. Keep a close eye for outdated, inaccurate, or redundant information. 

It’s also usually a good idea to gather data on any customer feedback, common support issues, and any support team feedback related to your current knowledge base. 

From there, prioritize the articles that have the most views or are related to your most common support issues. Tackle these ones first, because they’ll have the biggest feedback on your customers and your support team. 

As part of auditing your current state, determine  the stakeholders for the information you’ll be updating within your knowledge base:

• Who can ensure the content is accurate? 

• Who else uses the knowledge base?

• Who might be surprised or affected by large scale changes? 

You may want to add another column to your Google Sheet to track stakeholders. 

Step 3: Define measures of success

Knowledge base revamps are a major undertaking, and it helps to know what success looks like. What’s the outcome you’re trying to achieve with a complete revamp?

• Are you looking to reduce the number of customer support tickets? 

• Is improving customer satisfaction the goal? 

• Will this help streamline what your support team is doing so they can focus on the true issues only they can handle?

• Are you looking to launch a chatbot or AI-powered tool in the near future?

Set clear and measurable objectives for your project so that you know what to focus on up front.

Step 4: Set up a style guide

One of the best ways to convince your customers to use your knowledge base is to make it a consistently great experience. And since your help center is a key touchpoint with customers, it should accurately reflect your brand. 

Creating a knowledge base style guide isn’t hard, but it goes a long way to delivering that consistent experience. Your style guide should include things like the tone of voice, formatting, jargon to use or avoid, and more. 

While your customers will feel the impact of your style guide, this isn’t just for them. Creating a style guide also makes it easier for you to manage your knowledge base, and for others to contribute to it down the road.

Step 5: Choose the right knowledge management software

From all-in-one source of truth solutions like KnowledgeOwl to wiki-style software like Notion, there are plenty of places to house your knowledge base these days. 

Choosing the right knowledge base software depends on your needs and your budget.

Some things to consider are:

• How many people will be editing your knowledge base? Just you? A team? Multiple teams?

• Who is your audience? While many tools enable both, an internal knowledge base can have different requirements than customer-facing knowledge bases.

• What features are most important? There’s no perfect tool out there (although KnowledgeOwl is pretty packed with features, if we do say so). Create a prioritized list of key features—like search functionality, content organization, and integration capabilities—to help you sort through the many solutions that exist.

Choose a knowledge management platform that aligns with your objectives and budget. And don’t forget about the importance of prioritizing the customer experience!

Executing your knowledge base revamp project

At this point, it’s time to buckle down and get to work.

Revamping your knowledge base can be a long process, depending on how much content you have to update. But that’s okay! A project of this scope and importance deserves time. 

Pro tip: If you’re working against a deadline or setting a timeline in place for your project, add in an extra 10-20% more time than you think. Revamping a knowledge base can bring many surprises. 

Step 6: Assemble your team

Many hands make light work, so if possible, it’s always best to tackle a project of this scope with a team. 

Assemble a team of people who are already documentarians or whom you can teach to take pride in the quality of documentation you’re hoping to achieve with your revamp.

Aim for a diverse team with expertise in content creation, subject matter expertise, and technical skills. Once you’ve got your team assembled, use the style guide you created in step four to provide direction and guidance. 

Step 7: Write and rewrite the content

Start moving down your prioritized list of existing articles. Remove or update content as needed to ensure accuracy and relevance, and track your progress as you move along.

While it’s smart to use your existing content as the baseline for your project, don’t forget to keep an eye out for content gaps. What customer questions aren’t being answered? What product features aren’t explained?

These content gaps are prime opportunities to create net new help articles that will make your new and improved knowledge base even more valuable.

As you write or rewrite the content, make sure you’re following your style guide and not creating lengthy and confusing articles. You can also use SEO tactics within your content to make help content easier for customers to find. 

Check out the “Writing Docs” category of our blog for more tips on writing incredibly helpful knowledge base content.

Step 8: Quality check as you write

Build in a quality check system as you and the rest of the team update your knowledge base content. As the leader of this effort, trust your team to make sure everything gets done to the level it needs to be. At the same time, remember that humans make mistakes.

When you’re writing something new, it’s easy to have blind spots. Getting someone else to check your work and verify completeness, accuracy, and clarity is a critical safety net. 

It’s how you catch mistakes quickly and create a better end result for everyone involved. 

Maintaining your knowledge base

Ah, that feeling of being finished with a large project. Cue the celebrations!

But also, remember the work isn’t done yet (real talk: your knowledge base is a living thing, and it’s never 100% done).

Putting in place a few practices to help maintain your knowledge base can go a long way towards maximizing the impact of your work and making sure you never have to tackle a major overhaul again.

Step 9: Final quality check

After you finish your revamp but before you push that done button, give everything a final quality check. If you followed step eight, you shouldn’t need a meticulous line-by-line edit at this point, 

This step is just to make sure everything is working right with search, navigation, and overall formatting. Publish everything—use a sandbox environment if you’ve got one—and skim everything over to make sure it looks good. 

Then pat yourself on the back. You’ve done it!

Step 10: Analyze the success of the revamp

Now that the completely revamped knowledge base is released and in use, you’ll want to pay close attention to your analytics and your customer feedback.

KnowledgeOwl includes native reporting and analytics, and most other knowledge base tools do too. Many tools will also allow readers to rate and provide feedback on individual articles. 

Since you’ve just made major changes to your knowledge base, it can take some time to understand the impact. A great approach to seeing what’s changed is to do a before-and-after comparison. How did key metrics change in the 30/60/90 days before you published your changes when compared to after? 

You should also monitor the measures of success you created in step three above.

Step 11: Set up a plan for regular updates

The last step in your knowledge base revamp is one that never stops: keeping your knowledge base up to date. 

The right process for maintaining and updating your knowledge base will vary depending upon your organization. It requires being plugged into what’s happening across your product and engineering teams. You’ll need to review your knowledge base tool’s analytics regularly. 

And, most importantly, you’ll want to listen to what your customers and your support team are saying. 

Revamping your knowledge base is worth the effort

A major knowledge base revamp can be a long road, but this guide should provide you with a map to get from start to finish. 

Your customers’ needs are always changing and evolving, so it’s critical to continually adjust your knowledge management processes. 

If you need an easy- to- manage knowledge base tool that enables you to empower your support team and customers to find what they need quickly, KnowledgeOwl might be just the fit for you. 

Check out some real-world examples of KnowledgeOwl in action, then take advantage of our 30-day free trial today to give it a try for yourself!