Enhancing Self help KBAs

[Surbhi Kaushik]

Hi,

We are planning to improve our self help KBAs. The policy is to review the articles once a year.

As of now, the usage is almost negligible. It would be great if i could get some insights on how you spread the knowledge created, and how to make sure that people use the knowledge.

[mauramcgrath]

I would recommend partnering with communications to send knowledge articles as part of promoting the information. Every time an article is linked in an organizational email the views skyrocket for us. Also, we had a partnership with benefits during our open enrollment and created a dashboard for the team to see how much the information was being used. Ever since that one team saw the benefits the rest of HR has started engaging more and creating/maintaining articles.

[John Regalado]

Hello Surbhi, similar to @sandied and @Dave Littlejohn it utilizing various methods (i.e. user conversations & KFT's) to get adoption of a Knowledge Base, especially if one was never used.  It takes leadership to have conversations with other leaders to get their folks to use knowledge articles and to encourage them in providing input via feedback task. 

It also takes conversations with your knowledge owners and teams.  We have over 130 Knowledge Groups and we encourage the manager of these groups to identify key staff members who will keep articles relevant and respond to KFT's.  We also leverage our internal ServiceNow IT News letters to our IT SPOC's and hold quarterly fulfiller meetings to communicate the importance of using and having good articles, especially as the conversation starts to lead towards virtual agent and AI.

Good luck with Knowledge.

[John_Wilkes]

You may want to consider having a content designer if you haven't already. Having self help articles is great but if they are not presented in a structured way with language the end user will understand then it is almost as bad as having no knowledge at all. There isn't a one size fits all for this, its a case of understanding your language (for example just because it may be English doesn't mean UK English styles would work if your audience is mostly American). Some of your readers may be using assistive software or have conditions that don't require specialist software but can be supported by a well structured article such as dyslexia or dyscalculia. I wouldn't try to mandate feedback as pressured feedback is usually biased, but make it easy to give feedback and encourage your audience to give it by  promoting the changes you do based on the feedback so your users can see that they have power to change things. It won't be perfect but we are seeing improvements when we do this but still have a long way to go.

[Surbhi Kaushik]

Thank you all for your valuable feedback. This is really helpful 🙂