Start with your ticket history
Write the articles your customers already ask for. Sort the last two months of tickets by topic, take the five that come up most, and write one article for each. Ten good articles beat a hundred nobody reads.
Title it with the customer's words
Customers search for “change my email” not “Account identity management”. Use the phrase from the tickets as the title, with the common variants in the first lines so search finds them.
Answer in the first two sentences
Give the answer first, then the detail. Someone with a quick question should be done in ten seconds, and someone who needs more should find it below.
Write steps as steps
When the article is a procedure, number the steps and start each with a verb:
- Open Settings and choose Profile.
- Click Change email.
- Enter the new address and click Save.
Say what to do if it did not work
End with the next step: a related article, or how to reach a person. An article that dead-ends sends the customer back to the ticket form annoyed.
Group, link, and date
Put articles into a few categories customers recognise (Billing, Shipping, Account), link related ones, and review them on a schedule. A wrong article is worse than none, and it also teaches an AI that reads it to give wrong answers.
Let the tickets tell you what is missing
Each question your team answers by hand twice is a candidate for an article. If your help desk reports the topics tickets cluster into, check which ones have no article.