5 Key Tips to Create a Comprehensive Knowledge Base
With information being readily available on the web, residents expect to obtain answers to their questions quickly. According to Hubspot, at least 5.8 billion searches are conducted per day and each person performs 3-4 searches every day. With more individuals relying on digital platforms to get instant answers, it’s become crucial to develop a knowledge base that serves as the community’s own search. For this month’s Manager Toolkit, we provide five helpful tips to make your knowledge base a powerful one-stop-shop for all community Q&A’s.
What is a knowledge base and how is it useful for community/property management?
Pilera’s knowledge base is a searchable, online help center/FAQ section. A well-built knowledge base’s purpose can be two-fold:
- Provide residents with the answers they need, increasing their satisfaction with management and their community. Also, empowering residents to obtain answers themselves reduces the volume of calls and emails queued at the management office.
- Serve as an internal FAQ for community managers and board members to assist them with customer support operations. The knowledge base can also be a powerful training tool for incoming managers and board members.
Tips to create a powerful Knowledge Base:
1) Phrase the question the way residents/staff would search for it
Before you start writing your knowledge base article, put yourself in the shoes of the resident or staff member searching for information. How do they ask you questions over the phone? How residents phrase their questions is key to providing an excellent search experience. Adding “What is the guest policy” or “Guest policy” within the title or content will improve the likelihood of residents finding that article in the search results.
2) Add a table to display information
Tables can be added within Pilera’s content editor to convey complex information to residents or staff. Examples include equipment warranty, maintenance responsibility chart/matrix, maintenance contacts for residents, a list of all emergency community contact information, and more. You can format the table to create a professional look with borders, text alignment, cell alignment, text colors, background colors, and more.
3) Categorize with tags
In each knowledge base article you create, you can add tags that will be visible on the right-hand side of the search. Residents/staff can simply select a tag and then all articles with the tag will display. Your residents and staff will appreciate just how easy it is to find the answers they are looking for. Try to keep tags generic such as “Guest Policy”, rather than “# of Guests allowed on the property”. This allows you to maintain a clean look in the knowledge base, provide a good search experience, as well as allow for multiple articles to display for one tag.
4) Set permissions for articles
In Pilera, managers can set permissions for articles to restrict content by the type of user. Permissions help ensure that your knowledge base content is relevant to the resident searching answers. For example, you can restrict lease-related content to only tenants. There are three main permissions for knowledge base articles in Pilera: Anonymous, Owners, and Tenants. If you wish to maintain certain articles for internal purposes only, you can do so by not selecting a resident type and only managers will see the article.
5) Keep adding relevant content, get residents coming back for more!
Once you’ve built the knowledge base, don’t just stop there. Continue to build a list of questions that you receive from residents and create articles to address them. If one resident is asking a particular question, chances are high that other residents will have that question too. Furthermore, keeping your knowledge base content fresh improves resident satisfaction and engagement – they’ll keep coming back to the portal for more!
Implement a knowledge base today!
The knowledge base is a great tool to educate homeowners, tenants, board members, and managers about the community and its policies. A knowledge base that is built well will keep your residents happy, informed, and they’ll come back to the portal for more information. Your managers will also appreciate the decline in calls, which will give them more time to allocate to more important community projects.
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About Pilera
Pilera Software is the premier community and property management suite that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel enhance communications, improve customer service, and manage compliance and operations. May we help your community achieve these success stories? Book a demo to see how Pilera’s community management suite can help your company.
