Best Practices for Creating Effective Answers

Creating useful answers is a straightforward process with a few simple guidelines. Follow these guidelines to enhance the search process for customers by letting them find pertinent information quickly and eliminating the need for multiple searches.

A knowledge base containing well-crafted answers will also optimize the self-learning features of Service that continually index, group, link, and rank the answers in the knowledge base. These self-learning features are the backbone of self-service, enabling you to present the most historically useful answers first, and to suggest answers related to the customer’s current question. In addition, effective answers will make your maintenance tasks easier as information ages and changes.

Use these guidelines to create clear, focused answers.

• Create one-topic answers—Think of each public answer in your knowledge base as one topic or the answer to one question. When a customer comes to your site with a question, they want quick resolution. One-topic answers improve searching and grouping, which enable customers to easily find answers. One-topic answers provide brief, pertinent information without clutter. A knowledge base of unique answers also simplifies management and maintenance.
• Provide adequate detail—Because Service indexes the text of the Summary, Question, and Answer fields into words and phrases for text searching and answer grouping, answers should contain an adequate amount of text that explains the issue. With limited text, there are very few indexed words for the answer, and the words that are indexed cannot fully represent the context of the answer. As a result, the answer may be difficult to find during text searching. With too much text (over two pages), you run the risk of writing about several topics and covering too broad of a context. The resulting set of indexed words may not span the entire text of the answer. In effect, the answer can be found during dissimilar searches in which that answer is not relevant.
• Write a concise summary—The quality of the summary, meaning how closely it summarizes the contents of an answer, is critical to the effectiveness of the answer and affects its display position, how it links to related answers, and how it is grouped with similar answers. On the Answers page, customers will choose to open and read, or skip over an answer based on the summary. Without a concise summary, customers may not open the answer, which directly impacts its display position and how it is linked with other answers. The summary should state what the customer can expect to learn by reading the answer or what question will be answered.

After creating a knowledge base of effective answers, you will want to publish the answers to be accessed by customers. By understanding the factors that determine answer visibility, you can effectively control how and when answers are seen on the customer portal.