Talla's Knowledge Best Practices

If you think about the purpose of documentation for your business, it's to answer questions people have in the course of their day of work. Most often, new employees have many, many things to learn, and documenting information in a tool like Talla can help ease the onboarding process. But we all come up with questions even after we're fully ramped up, because we can't possibly remember everything all the time, or there may be new information we never learned, and information changes a lot, too. 

Based on these realities and what we at Talla have observed while working with many business' knowledge bases, we recommend the following practices when documenting your knowledge:

1. What should be documented about our business?

• Consider storing information like internal policies, benefits information, tools and technology available to employees, new employee onboarding documentation, and coaching employees to "Ask Talla" for all of their employer-related needs. 
• Product- and service-related information is especially important to document because it's often complex, changes fast, and needed on-the-fly by teams who work directly with the offering, or with prospects and customers. 
• Start with the most frequently asked questions, invite users to start engaging with Talla, and use the gaps identified by their questions to drive further knowledge buildout. 
• What about tribal knowledge, the undocumented and sometimes even unspoken set of facts and rules that's so hard for new employees to pick up? This is the stuff most people don't think to document ("For these customers on X system, we perform Y task a bit differently"). And this is the most impactful stuff you can use Talla to capture and document.

2. How should our documentation be structured?

Talla structures knowledge into Pages and Blocks. Because using Talla uncovers knowledge gaps, outdated info, and other opportunities to improve your content, meticulously planning what's documented how and where is no longer a required exercise for knowledge managers. A few pieces of advice:

Headers (H1) can be questions or topics

Talla predicts which Headers most precisely match the question asked, but the Header doesn't have to be formatted as a question. Because Talla understands NLP, exact matching isn't important. 

Align Headers (H1) to the typical scope of a question.

• "How do I reset my password?" "Where do I find Account Settings?" "How much does premium shipping cost?" - you could configure one block of text, which includes a Header and an answer in regular paragraph formatting, to correspond to specific FAQs like these.

Consider producing more specific, brief blocks. 

At least some of the time, the answer to a question is as simple as "Yes" or "No".

Block- or Page-level answers

"How do I get started using Microsoft Office?" - for broader questions like this, you could document a brief introductory block, or Talla will learn to return the Page-level result which contains a series of more specific blocks related to Microsoft Office. 

This example of Talla's adaptability explains why you don't have to think so carefully about the structure of every page. Because the only "right answer" to "How do I format?" is whichever format accurately answers your users' questions. And Talla enables the feedback loop that evolves your content into its ideal structure.