Best Practices for Help Content and Creator Education
A well-crafted help content strategy is crucial for delivering a positive customer experience (CX) and empowering users through self-service options. Whether it's a traditional user manual or a comprehensive online knowledge base (KB), help content plays a vital role in ensuring customer satisfaction and reducing the burden on support teams. This article explores best practices for creating and managing effective help content and educational resources for creators, ultimately leading to improved customer outcomes and business growth.
The Importance of User Education Content
In today's experience-driven world, customers increasingly prefer self-service solutions. A comprehensive KB not only saves time for customers but also enables support agents to focus on complex issues rather than answering basic questions. Clear and effective user education content ensures that customers know exactly what to do and how to do it, leading to significant time savings and improved efficiency.
Building a Comprehensive Help Content Strategy
1. Multimedia Content Strategy
In the past, text was the primary medium for delivering help content. Today, customers expect a variety of media, including video, for instructional content. Different users have different learning styles, with some preferring textual instructions and others requiring visual aids. Therefore, it's essential to cater to these diverse learning needs by implementing a multimedia content strategy.
While the level of detail can vary, video is often perceived as an instant solution, allowing you to dive directly into the how-to. Text-based articles, on the other hand, can provide more background information and context. Audio, while not ideal for instructional content, can be used for informative content such as use cases, customer stories, and general insights.
2. Content Organization and Segmentation
Help articles often cover multiple tasks related to a single feature or functionality. Therefore, it's crucial to organize content logically and break it down into different segments. Utilize heading styles effectively in online KBs to segment articles.
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This approach should also be applied to videos. On platforms like YouTube, use the Video Chapters functionality to segment content, allowing customers to quickly jump to the most relevant section.
3. Establishing a Robust Review Process
In the early stages, a single person may handle multiple roles, including writing both marketing content and help articles. However, as your offering gains traction, it's essential to establish a dedicated user education team. Most importantly, collaborate with a technical editor to ensure that help content is clear, accurate, and unambiguous.
A technical editor can evaluate content from a newcomer's perspective and determine whether the instructions are easy to understand and follow. Even without a dedicated user education team, hiring an in-house technical editor or outsourcing the review process can significantly improve the quality of your help content.
4. Adhering to a Style Guide
A style guide helps establish a consistent style, tone, and structure for all user education content. Following a style guide makes it easier for writers to understand customer expectations and deliver the right type of content. You can draw inspiration from resources like the Chicago Manual of Style or the Microsoft Writing Style Guide to create a guide that suits your organization's needs. A technical editor can also assist in establishing and maintaining a style guide.
5. High-Resolution Visuals
Any visual used, whether it's an image or screenshot accompanying a help article or a full-fledged how-to video, must be of high quality and clarity. Low-quality images can create a negative experience for customers and imply a lack of care and effort. If high-resolution visuals cannot be included, it's best to refrain from publishing them altogether.
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6. Clear Visual Cues for Important Areas
When referring to elements on a user interface or parts of a physical product, it's important to mark important areas with clear visual cues. Highlight the relevant portions or blur irrelevant sections to quickly draw customers' attention to what matters most. This eliminates guesswork and ensures clarity.
7. Gathering Customer Feedback
Collecting customer feedback is essential for gauging whether help content meets expectations. Key methods for gathering feedback include like-dislike metrics and comments. Like-dislike metrics provide insight into the types of articles and level of detail that customers appreciate. Comment boxes allow customers to share specific feedback on the content. Regularly check metrics and comments and make changes as needed to continuously improve your help content.
8. Multilingual Knowledge Base
Consider setting up a multilingual KB to cater to customers in different regions. By publishing help content in the major languages spoken in those regions, you can enhance the self-service experience for a broader audience. While English is widely spoken, a multilingual KB can significantly improve customer satisfaction and consistency.
9. Easy Access to Knowledge Base and Help Resources
An online KB can only provide effective self-service if customers can easily find it. The easier it is to access your KB, the more likely customers will use self-service options. Consider innovative approaches such as QR codes on physical products that direct users to the KB or downloadable PDF files with setup and troubleshooting instructions.
10. Providing Contact Options for Additional Support
Any self-service option, including a KB or chatbot, should provide the option to contact a human agent for further support. Help articles primarily address expected behaviors and common issues. When customers face unresolved issues, they should be able to easily contact the helpdesk for assistance.
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11. Keeping Content Updated
Whenever your offering undergoes a change or upgrade, it's crucial to update all relevant content in the KB, including both text and visuals. This ensures consistency between the UI or user operations and the instructions provided to customers. If you have a multilingual KB, ensure that content is updated across all supported languages.
12. Double-Checking Hyperlinks and References
For digital help content, it's essential to ensure that all hyperlinks and page jumps are accurate and point to the correct articles or sections. Meticulous attention to detail ensures that customers receive the right information and are not left to figure things out on their own.
Content Marketing in Higher Education
Content marketing in higher education involves creating and distributing valuable content to attract and engage prospective students, alumni, and other stakeholders. Unlike traditional advertising, content marketing focuses on building trust and delivering value through storytelling, educational resources, and authentic narratives.
Key Strategies for Effective Content Marketing in Higher Education
Develop a Clear Content Marketing Plan: A robust content marketing plan serves as the foundation for success. Begin by identifying institutional goals, audience personas, and measurable outcomes.
Create Content for Every Stage of the Student Journey: Create awareness-stage content like blogs and social media posts, consideration-stage resources such as program guides, and decision-stage materials like testimonials and webinars.
Use Data-Driven Insights to Optimize Content: Leverage analytics tools to track audience engagement and content performance. Use these insights to refine strategies, ensuring that content resonates with prospective students and achieves desired outcomes.
Leverage Social Media Platforms Effectively: Feature alumni and current students in your campaigns to provide relatable and inspiring narratives that prospective students can connect with.
Best Practices for Content Creation
Focus on Storytelling: Highlight student success stories, faculty achievements, and community impact to build emotional connections with your audience.
Prioritize SEO for Visibility: Conduct keyword research to identify high-impact terms and optimize your contentâs metadata, headers, and internal links.
Use Visual and Interactive Content: Incorporate videos, infographics, and interactive tools like virtual tours to capture attention and keep audiences engaged.
Digital Learning Content Creation
Creating effective digital learning content is crucial for engaging modern learners. Companies must develop specialized instructional design and multimedia development skills with the rising demand for e-learning content and mobile platforms.
Key Principles for Digital Learning Content
Understand Your Target Audience: Defining your learner audience is crucial when designing digital learning content. Align content with the audience's level and background, consider accessibility requirements, research demographics, and develop user personas.
Establish Measurable Learning Objectives: Well-defined learning objectives are key to digital learning success. Set aligned goals, connect objectives to assessments, map objectives to actual content, and define evaluation methodology.
Apply Core Instructional Design Theory: Learning courses must align with knowledge around memory, critical thinking, and motivation to ensure retention, skill-building, and behavior change. Scaffold complexity, reinforce through repetition, manage cognitive load, and motivate with interactive elements.
Incorporate Engaging Multimedia: Use diverse media for enhanced engagement. Infographics, video, and audio quickly communicate and reinforce ideas. Simulations and interactive content enable application, experimentation, and skills practice.
Incorporate Universal Design: Employ inclusive design from the outset to increase equity and avoid costly remediation down the line. Pursue ADA/WCAG alignment across interfaces and content types, and provide multimodal content.
Test With Representative Users: Conduct ongoing validation from real users to ensure that learning solutions resonate once deployed. Recruit individuals who match the target demographic and persona attributes.
Content Curation for eLearning
Content curation is the scrapbookerâs approach to eLearning design. Curated content should have defined goals, and you need to know your audience in order to connect with them. Look for quality sources only.
Methods of Curation
There are different levels of curation, ranging from easy to complex.
- Timelines: Organize your content to show how it developed over time.
Curating content for eLearning is more than just gathering the best content in one single place, or changing around a few sentences or adding a simple comment. Taking this step takes you from simply gathering content to truly adding value. Be Picky and Add Value.
Best Practices for Content Curation
Relevance and Actionability: Strive to make all of your content relevant and actionable.
Quality and Trustworthiness: Create a checklist to ensure content is of high-quality and trustworthy.
Accessibility: Make it easy for your audience to find your content by putting it into a system or platform they already use.
Permissions: Get permission and check if youâre allowed to share content.
Managing Video Content in Higher Education
The use of video content in higher education has become indispensable.
Best Practices for Managing Video Content
Clear Learning Objectives: Start with clear learning objectives when integrating video content into your curriculum.
Interactive Video Content: Incorporate discussions within your videos to create an active learning environment.
Analytics: Track metrics such as view counts, engagement rates, and quiz performance to gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your videos.
Community Building: Encourage students to share their thoughts, collaborate on projects, and participate in discussions related to video content.
Creating Inclusive Content
Adopting inclusive course design can help create a more inclusive, accessible, and equitable learning environment.
Key Principles for Inclusive Content
Color Contrast: Use high contrast and avoid problematic color combinations.
Formatting: Use simple fonts, built-in layouts, and large, bold fonts on uncluttered pages.
Tables: Identify column headers and labels, use clear layouts, and utilize color contrast concepts.
Bullets and Numbering: Use the built-in bullet and numbering tools.
Content Management Systems (CMS) in Education
A content management system (CMS) is often a central tool in an educational institutionâs tech stack. Educational content must be geared toward more than just current students. Audiences can include prospective and current students, parents, faculty, and staff; alumni, both active and inactive; and even decision makers from the public.
