Choose the half the world can see.
The same articles, with a switch. What is internal stays internal, and what you publish becomes a help centre your customers can read and your web chat can answer from. There is no second set to keep in step, because there is no second set.
Not a second document written six months later by somebody else, which is how the two end up disagreeing.
The usual way
Most companies maintain the same answer twice.
An internal note for the team, and a customer-facing article that says something slightly different because it was written six months later by somebody else. The day they disagree is the day a customer is told the wrong thing.
Publishing is a switch on the article you already wrote.
One article, two audiences, no divergence.
Mark an article public and it appears in your help centre. Leave it internal and it is only ever seen by your team and answered to your team. Either way it is the same article, so it cannot drift out of step with itself.
When you publish one
- In the help centreReadable by anyone, on your own branding
- In your web chatAnswering visitors, with the source shown
- Still internal tooYour team reads the same one
It looks like your help centre, because it is.
Your logo, your colours and your own address. A customer reading it should not be able to tell which company built the software, and they cannot.
Yours
- Your logo and coloursFrom the same settings your documents use
- Your structureThe sections you named, not ours
- FindableBy search engines, and by your own chat
Every published article answers twice.
Once for the customer who reads it, and once for the customer who asks your chat at eleven at night. The second one costs nothing extra, which is the argument for writing the article in the first place.
One article, two ways it is read
- Read directlyBy a customer who went looking
- Read outBy your chat, to a customer who asked instead
- Improved onceAnd both get better