What are help articles?
Help articles teach people about a product or service. They include organized information that a reader can go through to learn how to use a product or solve common problems with the product or service.
Help articles can be aimed at many different audiences and can serve different purposes. For example, Saas product company can have help articles that walk end-users through setting up their account and also have help articles for their support agents to guide them through handling tickets.
Help articles come in many different forms, from Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and how-tos to troubleshooters and informational fact sheets. They can be used to meet a wide range of business objectives:
- To provide self-service customer support
- To standardize the service level of ticket handling support agents
- To engage customers and potential leads on blogs and social media
- To ease collaboration with service providers
No matter what the objective, help articles are a necessary tool for providing customers a positive experience while using a product.
The 4 types of help articles
Different types of help articles assist customers throught their customer service and support journeys. Master how to write all of them, and you’ll have the skills to write great educational content for your customers and internal documentation to keep your service teams operating smoothly.
- FAQ articles
FAQ articles list a series of questions that customers commonly ask about a product or service. Each question is accompanied by an answer that is short and to the point. It has a simple 2-part writing structure that you repeat as many times as needed — question, answer.
Different from the other types of help articles, FAQs are less goal oriented. They are not meant to guide the reader to complete a task from start to finish. Their purpose is to give readers quick answers to their most common questions.
2. Informational articles
Informational articles provide facts or explanatory information about a topic. They cover all the relevant details: who, what, when, where and why. Unlike how-articles, they don’t offer instructions on how to do something. Their main purpose is to educate the reader about a product, service or process in general.
3. How-to articles
How-to articles give the reader step-by-step instructions on how to do a task — like set up a gaming console, build a table or do a push up. A good how-to article lists the steps the reader needs to follow to complete the task from start to finish, and in the right order. How-to articles should guide the reader to complete the task as quickly as possible, so only the most essential information should be included.
3. Troubleshooting articles
Troubleshooters help the reader diagnose and solve issues that happen while using a product. A good troubleshooter will ask questions that lead the reader to the right solution, based on their answers. Think of them like little “Choose your own adventure” stories.
Troubleshooters are great for providing end users self-service support and guiding agents through case handling.
