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this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Having run a couple support teams, I get where they’re coming from with the wait time.
Every minute my team wasn’t spending helping customers was spent updating the knowledge base. We invested a ton of effort into it, and 90% of the tickets were answerable in the first interaction with a simple search.
But getting people to actually read the docs was impossible. And maybe if we made them wait they’d get frustrated
But that’s not very nice to your customers or the agents.
When I started at one company I put together a text file with all the different sources of info I found in training. By the end of training I had turned it into an HTML file. Years later we got bought out. Support from corporate disappeared on legacy customs who hadn't moved over to new stuff.
A coworker tapped me on the shoulder "If I were to make a local network web server on one of these computers could I upload your help system to it for everyone to use?"
Next thing you know I'm the default source for all information on every system that has ever existed. Prior to that everyone knew that I had it all in my brain but only a handful of people knew that I also had it all in HTML.
TL;DR I built a pirate help desk knowledge base.
I'm currently struggling with a product that I'd love to use the knowledge base for help but they keep changing their goddamn gui every version so the knowledge base docs never apply to me. "Click on files->database->security", uhhh, there is no "security" under "database" you mother f'ers...
I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I'm not sure it helped too many people. We didn't have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things up on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual's help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.
Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can't even argue with that philosophy.
But most callers just didn't have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn't know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn't know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was "the computer." They didn't know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they'd argue with us about it. "I don't have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks." No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.
How could you tell that people were not reading the knowledge base? They probably didn't need to call if they did, so maybe you reduced the volume by 50%. I get what you are trying to say, but if they make me wait 15 minutes just because, I'm going to be pissed once I reach someone. Then the person who doesn't deserve my bad temper will feel it and I will never buy hardware from you again.
And I'm saying that despite having worked at customer support for years, writing knowledge-base entries and developing the system we used to store it.
Thankfully we didn’t take phone calls. And I knew they weren’t reading the KB because we’d reply with a link to the KB and they’d be happy.
Yes, but I mean how do you know people didn't read it.
You probably didn't see the ones reading into it, just the ones that didn't.
The only time the KB really saved was being able to send them a link to the docs that they should have been able to find instead of retyping the response.
All of the answers were right there and they didn’t see it. And no matter how many articles we added the volume of tickets resolved on the first reply with a KB article didn’t go down. (I know because I tracked this as a KPI for a while until it became obvious it wasn’t budging.)
My only conclusion from this is that there is a segment of people who will always ask someone for help rather than take initiative.
What he is saying is, while a lot of the phone calls you got were answered with the KB, this doesn't reflect the people who didn't call because they used the KB. For that, you would need to track total sales, new customer intake, volume over time, etc. It's quite possible you could have customers who got a KB reply from your support staff in a timely manner and decided if it was that easy for you to get an answer to them, it would be worth it for them to try it before calling next time.
Of course, the reality is quite likely that the main users of the knowledge base you built was the support team, which still isn't a loss.
Thanks 💖
I was too tired to come back yesterday.