Help others to succeed where you have once failed

Sharing knowledge not only helps others, but it helps the entire business function more effiiently. If you have customers of any kind, then you will need customer support. However, you can only deal with so many calls to a Service Desk, or so many e-mails to a support mailbox, or so many posts on a help blog. And even if you do manage to reply to everyone in a timely and efficient manner, you will soon find yourself answering the same question of fixing the same fault time and time again.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind), those who learned to collaborate most effectively have prevailed.
- Charles Darwin -

Sharing knowledge with others empowers them to make informed decisions and fix issues by themselves. There will always be the occasional, more intricate incidents to solve, or those difficult customers who always need hand-holding, but for the majority of customers, if you can supply the information they need at the time they need it, then they will not only not need to call you, but they will feel an extra level of satisfaction with the overall service you have provided.

Also, for those calls that do come through to a Service Desk, a knowledge base is vital to the Service Desk staff. With the varying complexity of calls these staff may recieve, and the varying level of technical knowledge between each member of staff within the Service Desk, having a Knowledge Base where they can quickly 'dump' some text or screen-shots on how to fix an issue, and then link all of this to some search keywords (or a particular system name), is a vital tool in ensuring an entire Service Desk functions as efficiently and professionally as possible.

So it is clear that online help, knowledge bases and context-sensitive help systems deliver great results - reducing calls to the service desk and improving user skills.

What does each tool do?

So, what are the different options and what can each be used for?

Online help This could be a product Wiki, or even something as simple as an section of a company Intranet that contains links to training materials, user guides, e-learning packages, how-to videos, pdf cue-cards, etc.   Knowledge base To make a knowledge base you need two things - content and a search engine to search that content. This can be implemented using great tools like Adobe RoboHelp, or even something more simple like a Content Management System (SharePoint for example).   Context-sensitive help When building an application, each piece of help content (a cue-card for example) should be linked to the section of the application it refers to. If a user gets stuck on a particular screen and there is a Help or '?' button, then they can click/touch this button to see the help for that page, in context. If an application has already been built without integrating the help content, then various tools exist to enable the linking of help content to the correct parts of the application. Other support items to consider: Support blog Somewhere where users can post questions and answer other user's questions. This can also be monitored by the training team, so that they may respond to questions and queries. A support blog can be built on a company Intranet using various open-source CMS/blogging tools. All you need is a webserver on the corporate network.   Team mailbox A group mailbox that everyone on a support/training team has access to. When an e-mail comes in, one of the team flags the e-mail that they are dealing with it before repying. Once they have replied, the reply can be seen by all of the team within the Sent Items folder of the group mailbox.