Knowledge Management is the practice that increases service desk resolution rates, and improves technical skills and everyone’s experience. Done well, a shared knowledge base will help technical teams and end-users. In this sense, knowledge base articles are a great way to build a library that provides valuable insights into how things work.
By giving access to these articles, we are spreading resourceful information (a great asset!) across the organization. Hence, having a knowledge base brings:
- Informed decisions
- Improved efficiency because there will be no need to rediscover knowledge
- A better understanding of the context and interaction with the knowledge consumer
Let's take a look at how you can use and write knowledge base articles to take your operations to the next level.
Knowledge base article definition
A knowledge base article is a document designed to provide users with helpful information about a product or service. It often includes answers to common questions, troubleshooting steps, and practical tips for resolving everyday issues.
They can be used in many different ways, such as:
- Helping others understand how something works.
- Providing instructions for how to do something.
- Sharing tips, best practices, and other helpful information.
Articles come together in a knowledge base, where content is organized so users can find it quickly. Knowledge Management refers to how teams create, review, update, and maintain that content over time.
At its core, a knowledge base helps sustain organizational knowledge. Instead of relying on individual experience, teams document what they know so it remains available when people leave, change roles, or are unavailable. It also reduces repeated work, since solutions don’t need to be rediscovered or rewritten every time the same issue appears.
Accessible to both employees and customers, knowledge base articles make it easier to find solutions and understand how services work.
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10 best practices for writing knowledge base articles
Getting your ideas and strategy sorted is always the most difficult part when writing a condensed piece of information. That is why we are presenting you some of the best practices to consider so you don’t leave anything to the imagination of your readers.
1. Start where you are
Before reinventing the wheel, look at the knowledge you already have. There’s often lots of useful information hiding in places like incident resolution logs in your ITSM tool, software maintenance documents, or hardware setup guides.
Use all the existing content you can retrieve as a foundation for your articles. It will save time, and you'll rest assured that the knowledge base reflects what your team is already using to solve problems.
How InvGate helps: With the Knowledge Article Creation feature, you can surface past resolutions directly from tickets and turn them into draft articles.
2. Keep it simple
One of the mistakes when creating content is to make it overly complicated. Use simple and clear wording throughout your writing, focusing on short sentences and plain language. To polish the final version, some teams rely on a sentence shortener to simplify complex sentences and refine awkward phrasing.
3. Use links and length wisely
Use anchor links as a table of contents to signpost the reader to the content they need without forcing them to go through unnecessary text or preamble. This is because nothing is more frustrating than a lengthy article with no diagrams, headings, pictures, or links to break it up. Being faced with a wall of text when your end-users are already experiencing tech issues is unnecessary.
4. Focus on recurring issues first
If you're looking for a good place to start, tap into your most common support tickets. What are the things you get asked to fix day in and day out? No matter your organization type, you will always be asked about network, email, and desktop issues.
Make sure you capture that content and have the service restoration documents with screenshots and diagrams to make them easy to follow.
How InvGate helps: Identify common issues through reporting and prioritize them for documentation.
5. Get inspired by customer questions to drive content
You’ve looked at the most frequently logged break/fix incidents. Now, let’s look at service requests and customer questions to add value. Use the customer’s own words to capture the question and explain the answer to focus on what the customer needs.
Also, don’t have static articles that are limited in terms of customer experience (CX). Add links to related articles and content to drive traffic to the right places. Look for opportunities to be proactive, for example, creating FAQs for new services that will be released soon.
6. Document root causes and workarounds
Problem Management is the practice that can identify the root cause of incidents, repeat IT faults, and create solutions and workarounds. Work with Problem Management to capture problems, known errors, and so on. Make sure any workaround is documented, shared, and labeled with the appropriate service or CI so everyone can access it.
As Brian Skramstad (IT Service Management Principal at Allianz Technology) said on the 17th episode of our podcast, Ticket Volume, it is always a good idea to do user experience research in order to identify problems.
7. Share knowledge across support levels
One of our favorite Knowledge Management principles is “shift left.” Put simply, shift left is where more senior IT technicians in the back office make their knowledge available to the less experienced front-office agents, helping them to answer more difficult customer questions.
Ask third-line support for tips that second-line support can use and second-line support teams for tips to be handed to first-line support. If you invest time and effort in your people, they’ll become more engaged, it builds loyalty and a sense of team spirit and delivers the required sharing of knowledge.
8. Encourage contributions from the team
Make your support teams your biggest champions of Knowledge Management by making the submission of quality articles that are worth their while. Whether it’s a dashboard that highlights the top authors or an Amazon voucher for the best submission of the month, incentivize people to submit knowledge articles so that you get a variety of content.
How InvGate helps: Track contributions and article performance, and use gamification to reinforce that behavior. You can assign points for agents that create new articles, have entries marked as helpful, and receive high ratings on their content.
9. Create knowledge articles for self-help
Don’t limit knowledge sharing to technical teams. Open it up to end-users too. There’s nothing more frustrating as an end user than trying to get through to the service desk for what turns out to be a straightforward resolution. Instead, make a searchable knowledge base available for hints, tips, and FAQs.
There’s no point in having great knowledge articles if no one uses them. Have a central place to share knowledge such that your content is visible to all. Make sure your knowledge articles are easy to find and labeled accordingly.
How InvGate helps: The self-service portal gives users direct access to relevant articles, while the Virtual Service Agent delivers answers in a conversational format. You can also suggest or make mandatory reading specific articles based on the request category, helping users review potential solutions before submitting a ticket.
10. Make knowledge sharing part of daily work
Make it easy for your people to create and share knowledge articles and build a culture such that it becomes second nature for everyone in IT. The more a Knowledge Management strategy becomes part of the day job, the more articles you generate, and the potential for helping other support teams and ultimately end customers increases exponentially.
How InvGate helps: Knowledge article creation is an option embedded into the ticket management area and AI-assisted, so documenting solutions becomes routine.
Types of knowledge base articles
As we mentioned above, a knowledge base article is a type of content that is used to provide information about a specific topic of your organization. It can be used to answer questions, provide instructions, or offer tips and tricks. Based on the intentionality, it’s relevant to know what type of article is appropriate for explaining certain topics.
Informative articles
Informative articles help the reader review a specific system, function, or feature within the product. They aim for end users to help explain something they aren’t familiar with and provide an overview of any available features or options.
How-to articles
These articles are typically written for end-users rather than technical teams and are usually structured as a list to give an overview of a single feature like logging in to the system or changing your password.
Troubleshooting articles
These address a specific issue a customer is experiencing and offers steps to resolve it. While you can have multiple different options for troubleshooting, they should all be focused on a single problem and labeled accordingly.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) articles
These consist of a list of common questions using the voice and language of the customer. An example of typical FAQs on a shopping platform could include order questions, shipping timelines, and account management.
Knowledge base article templates
Knowledge base article templates are a great way to create content for your organization's knowledge base. These templates are designed to be flexible and customizable, so you can use them for any topic or industry. You can also change the layout and design of the template to match your company's branding.
Keep in mind that, if you need some assistance to fill them with content, you can check out these tips to write good knowledge base articles.
Informational article template
How-to article template
Troubleshooting article template
FAQ article template
How to create a knowledge base article in InvGate Service Management
Creating knowledge in InvGate Service Management isn’t limited to a single “write and publish” flow. Teams can generate, refine, and reuse content from different points in their daily work, which makes knowledge capture more consistent and easier to maintain over time.
1. Create articles manually
You can always create articles from scratch when documenting a new process, service, or known issue. The editor allows you to structure content with clear sections, add images, and include links to related resources.
Before publishing, you define:
- Categories to organize content and make it easier to find, as well as connect it to your service catalog, so the right content is recommended to users.
- Permissions to control who can view or edit the article.
- Status (draft, review, published) to manage its lifecycle.
This approach works well for planned documentation, such as onboarding guides or standard procedures.
2. Use workflows for knowledge article creation
You can also use workflows when agents want to propose new articles, especially if you need more control over what gets published.
Instead of letting anyone create content directly in the knowledge base, a knowledge base workflow in InvGate can add structure to the process. It guides the article through drafting, review, and approval before it goes live.
A simple approach could look like this:
- An agent submits a form with the proposed article (title, content, visibility).
- The article goes into a review step, where someone checks accuracy and clarity.
- If changes are needed, it’s sent back to the author for edits.
- Once approved, it’s published as either public or internal content.
You can add more steps depending on how strict you want the process to be. For example, include multiple reviewers, restrict who can approve publication, or require certain fields before moving forward.
3. AI-assisted article creation from closed tickets
InvGate can analyze closed tickets and generate draft knowledge base articles automatically, using the issue details, context, and resolution steps already captured. It helps teams move faster from one-off fixes to documented knowledge without starting from scratch.
Treat AI-generated content as a first version. Before publishing, review it to confirm the solution is accurate and tested, adjust the wording so it’s clear for non-technical users, add any missing context or edge cases, align the tone with your organization, and include screenshots or formatting where needed to make the steps easier to follow.
4. Knowledge Snippets as a complementary layer
InvGate Service Management offers the Knowledge Snippets feature to capture small, reusable pieces of knowledge without requiring a full article.
In this case, AI identifies patterns in tickets and surfaces candidate snippets based on repeated solutions and responses. Instead of agents having to spot these manually, the system highlights potential knowledge worth capturing.
Teams will review those suggestions, decide if they’re accurate and useful, and choose how they should be used — whether for internal agent support, end-user responses, or both.
Once approved, snippets become available to support AI-driven features like solution recommendations for agents and answers provided by the Virtual Service Agent. Knowledge snippets won't be part of your knowledge base and are not something users browse directly; they’re applied in context when needed.
Snippets work alongside your knowledge base. Articles remain the place for structured, fully developed documentation, while snippets allow faster capture of smaller insights. Over time, the most useful ones can evolve into full articles.
They also support Knowledge Management more broadly. Since AI depends on having relevant and up-to-date information, snippets help keep that layer current by turning everyday support activity into usable knowledge.
How do you measure knowledge base article performance?
Measuring performance comes down to understanding two things: whether articles are being used, and whether they actually help solve issues. That means looking at both consumption (are people finding them?) and outcomes (do they work?).
In InvGate Service Management, you can assess this directly from the knowledge base by filtering and reviewing articles. These are some of the dimensions you can base your revisions on:
- Views: How many times the article has been accessed.
- Solved requests: How often a suggested article actually resolved the issue and contributed to ticket deflection.
- Rating: Average user satisfaction (1–5 stars).
- Useful / not useful marks: Direct feedback when articles are suggested.
- Last viewed: When the article was last accessed, to identify stale content.
- Attached to requests: How often agents use the article to resolve tickets.
Looking at these together helps you identify which articles to improve, which ones to retire, and where new content is needed.
How do you maintain knowledge base articles over time?
Publishing is only the starting point. Articles need regular review to stay accurate and relevant, especially as systems, processes, and services change. Assigning an owner to each article helps keep accountability clear, while scheduled review cycles and alerts prevent content from becoming outdated.
A simple checklist helps guide maintenance: review articles after major changes, update content with low ratings or frequent comments, check if solutions still apply, and archive anything no longer in use. Keeping content current improves trust and makes knowledge easier to reuse.
I have my knowledge base in place. Now what?
Once your knowledge base is running, the focus shifts to keeping it useful. Look at how content is being used — search queries with no results, article ratings, and how often solutions are reused — to decide what to update, expand, or remove.
A lightweight maintenance routine can help: review high-impact articles regularly, address gaps identified through search, update content based on feedback, and promote reuse by linking articles to tickets and workflows.
If you want to see how this works in practice, you can try InvGate Service Management with a 30-day free trial.
