Help Articles and Writing Strategies in the Age of AI with Leslie O'Flahavan

We’re talking with Leslie O’Flahavan, owner of E-WRITE and writing expert, about how customer support teams can write better help docs in the AI era!

AI is changing the way customers find answers, but that does not mean we should forget about the humans reading those answers. Leslie explains why great knowledge base content still comes down to plain language, clear structure, and accurate information, whether the reader is a person or an AI tool pulling from your help center.

We discuss:

• How AI uses help articles
• Why outdated or vague documentation can create bigger problems faster
• Ways support teams can improve their knowledge bases

Leslie also shares practical writing tips you can use right away! These tips include how to write clearer article titles, when to use summaries, why “notes” and “read more” links can cause confusion, and how to revise your most-used articles without overwhelming your team.

So, if you write help docs, edit AI-generated support content, or manage a knowledge base, this episode will help you make your writing more useful for customers and more reliable for AI to pull from!

Links mentioned in this episode: 

• Leslie's LinkedIn Profile
• E-WRITE
• Help Scout article/webinar: Why Analytical Reading Is a Must-Have Skill
• LinkedIn Learning

We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!
 
To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com. 

Thanks for listening!

Transcript

Help Articles and Writing Strategies in the Age of AI

Priscilla 0:00

Welcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people of Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooks. In today's episode, we're focusing on our writing skills in the AI era. Specifically, we'll talk about how AI is changing the way we develop our help guides and knowledge bases and how to balance writing for AI without forgetting your human readers. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. So, Jordan, there is so much conversation these days about AI. And I know we've done a couple episodes about AI and how to use AI to make yourself more productive, how to automate tasks. But today we're gonna look at AI from a different angle, which I'm really excited about. Yeah. We're gonna kind of look at how to write our content to help AI instead of how to use AI to help us. Oh, I love this. So I'm really excited because joining us today is Leslie O'Flahavan. She is a writing expert and the owner of eWrite, a consultancy that she's led for like 30 years since 1996. She specializes in helping customer support teams improve how they communicate with customers across email and chat and social media. And she is working with them to create even better customer experiences. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and organizations around the world. She is a LinkedIn learning instructor whose courses have reached over a million learners. She has worked with over a million people to help them write better. Priscilla, you didn't tell me we had a celebrity on this podcast. No, I know. I was looking, I was like, holy cow, what that number is crazy. She brings this really practical, hands-on approach to helping teams write better. And I saw something on a bio that I read that said something about how she likes to take any and all writers and make them excellent writers. And it doesn't matter your education, it doesn't matter your writing status, but you can be a great writer and she can teach you how to do that. And I thought that was so encouraging, especially for so many people who feel inadequate when it comes to writing. So anyway, we're talking about you like you're not here, but you are here, Leslie. Thank you for coming. Hey, hey, big group hug.

Leslie 2:08

Thank you. I mean, a million people, over a million people. Over a million people. Yeah.

Jordan 2:14

I can't even believe that.

Leslie 2:16

I know. I gotta say thanks to LinkedIn Learning, though, because they know how to put the right course in front of the right learner at the right time. And oh my gosh, I have heard from so many of these people. And I love knowing that for a lot of them, the training I offered slipped in right when they were getting promoted, or they were just about to get promoted, or they wanted a new job. I love knowing that some learning offerings that I had helped them get to the next place in their career.

Priscilla 2:46

That's incredible. That really is incredible, the timing of that and just how impactful writing and writing skills can be on your career.

Who Made Leslie's Day Recently

Priscilla 2:54

So before we jump into all of the writing fun questions I have for you today, we always like to kick our episodes off with some positivity. So who has made your day recently, Leslie?

Leslie 3:03

Well, I have to tell you who has made my day is my grandson's first grade teacher. Okay. And I'm I she's quite a private person, so I'm just going to call her Mrs. C. But um I'm a volunteer in their classroom, and I've been with her and with my grandson numerous times this school year. He's in first grade. Here we are, April, first grade, you know. And I am just marveling at the holy magic of teaching a person who doesn't know how to read how to read. Yeah. There's a method, obviously, there's a pedagogy, there's numerous practical activities that lead to this outcome. And then there's the magic. And, you know, I have been with people in their stages of learning for my whole working life. I was a high school English teacher for nine years, I was a college writing teacher for about three or four years, and then I've owned my own business, as you said, for 30 years helping people learn to write. But I'm telling you, these people, these little people with the dimples in their elbows, they start first grade and they cannot read, and they end first grade and they can read. Yeah, they can decode a magic hieroglyph, they can read. And it's happening to my grandson. I saw him take his little pencil out and he read something, and then he wrote down Hulk Smash, and he spelled both words correctly. Oh, and you know, because he can read, and it's amazing.

Priscilla 4:35

That's so precious, and it's because his teacher is taking the time to shepherd him through that and to teach him how to read.

Leslie 4:43

Yes, and teaching him how to read in a way that makes sense to him, and then the other 16 kids need a different way. And I I just I just have to hold her in my esteem every day, but especially because you asked me.

Priscilla 4:57

Teachers deserve all the positive encouragement and kudos. Their job is so important, but it's so hard.

Leslie 5:05

Yeah, it is hard. It is, and the children are um, many of them are absolutely off the rails. There's there's one child, there's one child who must be held in all all during the school day. She sits on the teacher's lap all during the school day. And the teacher's like kid. Yeah.

Jordan 5:23

I think my daughter's in your grandson's class. Right.

Leslie 5:27

Well, if you need to be held, I'm gonna hold you.

Jordan 5:30

It's amazing what teachers do.

Leslie 5:32

Uh just amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

Priscilla 5:34

So,

Why Support Writing Needs Training

Priscilla 5:35

Leslie, when I first heard about you, it was a couple years ago. Our success team was going and doing like a team meetup. So we were all getting together. We rented a beach house. It was great. We were all doing some professional development stuff together as a team. And we watched a webinar that you did with Matt Patterson over at Help Scout about analytical reading. And it was such a great webinar. And we then immediately turned around and did like a little exercise as a team and did some analytical reading like exercises. And it was so encouraging. And I think everyone who was there would say that that really made them a better writer. And we spent maybe three hours on it total. It was so cool. And it really has impacted how all of us write now and how we read emails when we're working in the queue. So you've spent years working with support teams and helping them communicate. How did you first find your way into this? And what makes you passionate about writing?

Leslie 6:32

I found my way into the role I have helping support teams write well to customers through just being in business as a writing training and consulting company. So my business partner, who has since passed away, we formed eWrite in 1996, which you know because there's a hyphen after the E.

Jordan 6:51

Yes.

Leslie 6:51

No one uses a hyphen after the E. But we did and we're sticking to it. Yeah. So we formed this uh company because in 1996, workplace writing was undergoing a revolution of sorts because we were using desktop computers to write and previously had not. And so we knew people would need help switching their writing skills to meet the needs of the job, especially writing web content, because web content is hyperlinked together and the order is kind of uh user-created. The sequence is user-created, and that was a big, big difference. But somewhere around Y2K, we both realized that some of the least empowered writers in all the workforce, namely frontline customer service or support agents, were being asked to switch from phone service to email service. And those folks work in what I would call as an assembly line of communication. You know, the elite communicators, you know, like the head of PR, doesn't work in an assembly line. Yeah. But a frontline customer service agent who is writing important message after important message does. And being a phone agent does not prepare you for being an email agent. And so we knew these folks are going to need help. And as a matter of our moral compass pointing north and saying, some of the most distressed and least paid amongst us need help. We can help. And we can show their managers that they can learn. Yeah. And that they they mustn't be called on to do the job without training. So that's how it started. Really, probably one of us, Marilyn, my partner, or me, one of us, you know, called to complain and then realized we could email to complain. And then we started to think, who's answering this? And that's that's how we that's how we made that switch. And it was a long time ago. It was 2000, 2001.

Priscilla 8:47

It's such an important intersection to focus on this idea that you have people who are really good at communicating in a verbal sense or really, you know, they're people pleasers, they are good with that emotional connection, but might not be as strong with communicating that via email or writing things down. I have seen times where I have written an email that I thought conveyed my feeling and it was not taken that way. And I went, man, I don't feel the way that they've taken it, but I clearly didn't do a good job of translating that correctly.

Leslie 9:19

I wouldn't draw that conclusion. Yeah, the email is a terrible channel for conveying tone. Yeah. The channel itself is frail.

Priscilla 9:28

Yes. You can have all the personality and the feeling and the empathy in your person, but you have to be able to translate it in a written way to the people you're working with in order for it to succeed. And so I think it's cool that you come into that place where people might not have the strong writing skills and help them develop those so they can better represent themselves in their company. And I think that's a really important place to be. And so kudos to you for doing it. I I think it's really wonderful. And I know a lot of people who would benefit from it and have benefited from it. So it's really great.

Leslie 9:59

It is. And there's a lot of reasons why that switch from phone service to email service doesn't go smoothly or from phone service to written service in any channel doesn't go smoothly. And partly because people who self-select to talk to unhappy customers on the phone as their job, those people like to talk. Uh-huh. And they're good at talking and listening. They're like baseball pitchers with one really big arm. You know, they're they're talking, their talking and listening skills are overdeveloped. But let's think about that. Who chooses to talk and listen for their work? It's people who don't like to write. Yeah. It's a choice, it's the selection. And so when we ask them to start writing, we need to be ready to help them. It's it's immoral to put someone in a job that they're not prepared to do.

Priscilla 10:50

Yeah.

Writing For Humans Plus AI

Priscilla 10:51

So let's talk about AI, everyone's favorite topic these days. But I feel like over the last two or three years, when I am in these conversations about AI, one of the big things we're talking about is how AI can do the writing for you. And how now, not only do you need to know how to write well, but you also need to know how to edit well because you're getting these drafts that you need to now edit, or you need to know how to write specifically for AI models to get them the information they need. So there's this shift of I need to know how to communicate well with a customer to I need to know how to write the best help doc so that my AI assistant knows how to find the right information. And then I can go in and edit their response. So that's kind of what I want to focus on today. How have you, Leslie, seen with the rise of AI, how have you seen that change the way we're writing in support?

Leslie 11:40

As you were laying it out, Priscilla, two images uh popped into my mind. One was a hall of mirrors because we are writing for AI and we are writing with AI. Both. Yeah. Right. So that was the hall of mirrors. And then I don't know if you can remember in Dr. Doolittle, you know, that that creature called the push me pull you. It was like a llama with two heads. That's another image that I have, you know, of both this bi-directional way that we're using AI. The written products in support, such as knowledge base articles, other kinds of documentation, macros, email templates, those kinds of things. These kinds of writing that I think about as ingredients in a pantry almost. We are writing them for humans, but we are also writing them to power AI. So that is a big change. Because if we were talking five or six years ago, you know, my mentor would have been the knowledge article, you know, KB00736 is only a good knowledge article if the people who need to use it can understand it and act on it. And by the way, those two measures, can they understand it with a reasonable, not extraordinary amount of effort? Can they understand and can they act on it? Those are the main principles of plain language. We know a piece of writing is written in plain language when the intended reader can understand it and act on it. But we were only talking about humans. Now we're not. We're talking about humans and AI tools, right? But the blessing is mostly humans and AI tools want the same thing. Thank goodness. I'm wiping the sweat from my brow. Yeah. Thank goodness they want the same thing. Yeah. So I'm, I think we might be in something of a golden era here. Or I may, let's make it all about me. I may be in a golden era because I have been nagging for 30 years straight that you have to write well for that human user. And many, many support organizations are like, yeah, yeah, they can suck it up. Yeah. Or yeah, yeah, if they have to contact us twice because the help content was wrong, oh well, they'll contact us twice. But now, if the help content is wrong or difficult for the AI to read, it's gonna super quickly and repeatedly retrieve wrong as results, wrong answers, which we have the world's most comical euphemism for. We call them hallucinations. I think that's yes, hilarious. That's like calling a fart, I don't know, like a broccoli wind or something. It's just it's just ridiculous. Hallucination is just it gave you the wrong information because something that the tool does that you could have contributed to more accurately, you didn't contribute to. And now it's giving wrong information.

Priscilla 14:35

So let's dig into that a little bit. How are those AI models using this content?

Leslie 14:41

I'm gonna tell you in the um the way that won't pass the AI sophistication accuracy test. I'm gonna tell you the way I understand it, which is pretty good, but also I can't protect you from an eye roll from an expert. That may happen.

Jordan 14:55

That's okay. You're speaking our language, though. Yes.

Leslie 14:58

So the we know that AI search tools like ChatGPT use they're trained on natural language. They're trained on not the keyword style searching that we were doing with Google several years ago, where if we wanted a campsite, wanted to book a campsite, we would say campsite old gunpowder state park July 2026. We would put that in. Now we ask, we type, how can I book a campsite at Old Gunpowder State Park this summer? That's how we would type our question. Well, if you think about it, where at Old Gunpowder State Park's website does that language appear? It appears in an FAQ or it appears in a knowledge base article. So the reason that the AI search tools want to match the way the human user searched it to that kind of content, generally called help content or knowledge content, is partly because the queries are so similar. And then the answer in the KB or in the FAQ, the FAQ is going to be shorter, how to book a campsite. The FAQ answer will be shorter than the page that the state park has on how to book a campsite. So already it's going to prefer the writing that's shorter, especially with knowledge articles, which we're not likely to see a knowledge article on the example I gave, but maybe how do I change the account permissions in my online account or something like that. If we go to a knowledge article, those are segmented. They're often presented in discrete sections that don't overlap, and that really helps. So there's a title, there's often a kind of a summary or an overview in a knowledge article, then there's a procedure, then there's where to get extra information. And so the fact that the knowledge is structured that way helps the search tool retrieve, it helps them match more easily. Yeah. And retrieve, and because it's going to present the search results as accurate even when they're wrong. Because it's got, you know, a surfeit of swagger. It has way too much. Agreed. You know? Yeah. Yeah. It just thinks it's right. So that's partly why the AI search tool relies on this kind of modular and more explicit content than it does on other types of content. For example, if your CEO writes a blog post about how supply chains are harming your ability to deliver your product, or if there's some much shorter content about, you know, if you put it in your FAQ, which is a weird place, you know, UX-wise to put information about supply chain problems, but if the the AI search tool will find it easier and summarize it better there.

Priscilla 17:54

I think that's really interesting. I was having a conversation with someone the other day, and we were talking about just that. Like, um, how much should we be writing for AI? Is it about just putting as much information out there as possible? Is it, you know, keeping things succinct? And it sounds like what you're saying is sometimes the succinct and efficient responses are sometimes better for AI to grab than a long, drawn-out, super detailed, rich response or article.

Bite Snack Meal Knowledge Design

Leslie 18:23

Can I introduce a metaphor that I've used in my web writing trainings for many, many years? And actually, some gifted librarian in Canada made a Wikipedia page about this. It's the bite, snack, and meal approach to writing content. And I made this up in 1996 when we were talking about writing web content for human readers. Is you can't know whether your reader needs just a summary or just a tiny bit, a bite, a snack, a summary, or a meal, all the content. You can't know. Yep. First of all, you don't know every single reader, and second of all, even an individual reader changes. Sometimes I just want a bite, just the headline, and sometimes I want all the detail on the very same topic. So we present all three sizes. And I think the AI tools need all three sizes. But when you present the meal, you have to put a whole lot more signposts in it than you could for a single human individual reader whose very high-level interest you've assumed, right? Because the AI tool needs a whole lot more headings, lists, tables, because we want it to be able to see each unit, the smallest unit of meaning at a time.

Priscilla 19:41

Yeah. So what's at risk for companies that are not thinking about writing for AI, that aren't changing the way that they write help articles? What's at risk there for those companies that aren't adapting?

Leslie 19:52

Well, it would be like having had a really, really slow waitress who was ready to go to retirement who was serving awful food loaded with E. coli. And now you have like three athletes who are super strong and super fast, and they're serving awful spoiled food that's loaded with E. coli. If because the AI tools are so much faster, so so pervasive, they cross all of your systems, you know. And so they're just able to deliver bad or wrong or hard-to-read information faster. And that's awful. Yeah. I think that's maybe if you look it up, I think that's the seventh circle right there. I think so.

Priscilla 20:38

Well, and it it is a good reminder that with knowledge bases and with help articles, it is even more important now that that is 100% accurate or as accurate as you can make it be, because you're not just talking about people coming and looking for a specific question, but you're now talking about content that is being scraped into AI and used to teach and for them to learn. And you go, it really needs to be right because it can get to so many people. And if it's wrong, that can really be a problem.

Leslie 21:06

Indeed. And we know anyone who manages a knowledge base is struggling to keep it accurate and current. And I actually hope that the speed of AI's ability to deliver knowledge stored in a knowledge base will help people scale their knowledge bases back, or they'll get better at archiving information where they, you know, they put it in the storage unit that they rented at the U-Haul. You know, they they just are gonna get it out of live play. Because I always want to think about knowledge content as having physical weight, you know. And if you think of it that way, then those articles that, you know, the the top three articles are getting a thousand hits a week, but the bottom three articles are getting three hits a year. And if they have physical weight, just jettison them, you know, and if you can't delete them because it makes you scared. Archive them, get them out of the AI's site.

Priscilla 22:03

Yeah.

Jordan 22:04

I think this happened to me recently because I was having an issue with my daughter's um Apple pencil. And I just I went to ChatGBT because it's great for troubleshooting things. And it gave me this like crazy outdated information. And I looked at like the source and I realized it was from one of those like forums that Apple has, and it like provided an answer, but the answer was like years ago.

Leslie 22:25

Yeah.

Jordan 22:26

And like the operating system's not even the same.

Leslie 22:28

Yeah. Take it down. Yeah. Put it in, put it in the U-Haul storage unit. Yeah.

Priscilla 22:33

Well, and that's a great point, Jordan, because and I didn't even think of this, but all of the community forums that are public that people can write any kind of information, whether it's right or wrong, and that can be pulled in as fact into, you know, AI and be delivered up as a response. Right. Something from years ago or something that was never true to begin with because it was a community forum. And how do you then go? So now you can't just go and post a response that says this isn't accurate. You need to find a way to make sure that only the accurate stuff is staying online and available to people. So, you know, we talked about this a little bit. When it comes to writing for AI, when I first reached out to you about doing this episode, you said something that I thought really hit the nail on the head. You said the phrase without inconveniencing your human readers. And I thought, yeah, that's it. It's not that you want to write for AI and fully forget them. Obviously, you don't want to do that. But you also don't want to make it written in a way that makes it hard for them to understand and take action, like you were saying before. And so there's this balance that you have to have when you're going in to write for AI and for humans. And so I want to talk about that balance a little bit. And you were talking about how they really are not that different, which is good news for us. But I've seen so many companies recently with this AI first strategy that they put out there. They say AI first, everything is AI first. Is that the right move? Is are there any risks if you go full in on that AI first? Or is it something that because they're so similar, you don't have to worry too much about that?

Leslie 24:02

Well, they're similar in heaven, you know, they're similar in philosophy, but AI first, I don't even really know what that means. You know, I think that means we're getting pressure to quote, implement AI. So we've spent a lot of money and for the near term, for the next 18 months, we're investing all our efforts on supporting this AI tool. But but what does that really mean? If the AI tools draw on the information in your knowledge base that was to date probably created by humans, but ultimately meant to serve information to human users, then I mean, I don't the source material is the same. You know, I think the metaphor of your of your knowledge base is like a pantry. I think that's a good metaphor. So we we still have to go in there and get the ingredients out to help people. So I think we need to keep talking about humans. I think that's probably the greatest harm of an AI first mentality is that we're for however short or long, we're going to stop talking about human needs. That's the risk to me. It's not, as I said, I think most of the ways that we need to write for AI tools also serve human users. There's a few that might not, but most, most of the ways do work for human users, but we have to still talk about their needs.

Priscilla 25:28

Yeah. I think that's one of the things that when AI was first, you know, on the scene and becoming this really big talking point a couple of, you know, three or four years ago, one of the things that I kept seeing was this AI first. We're AI first, our company is AI first. And I kind of always felt icky about that because it makes me feel like what you're saying is AI is the most important thing. But at the end of the day, the customers are the most important thing. And what you're doing is using AI to better serve the customers. So in my mind, it feels weird because I still see these like AI first in the slogan of things. And I want to say, well, it's using AI to put the customers first. That's what you're doing. Right. Um, what does that really mean, AI first? Aren't we talking about customers here and keeping the human aspect of at the end of the day, we are trying to find better ways to serve humans. We're not trying to better serve AI.

Leslie 26:22

Right, right, exactly. Even though our conversation is in some ways about serving information to AI, which is a legitimate thing to talk about, without, I mean, I think it's um I've I've watched this kind of industry-wide, I'm not going to call it hysteria. I guess it'd be like uncontrolled excitement or something like this. I've watched it. This is what I feel is my third chapter. So chapter three is AI, chapter two was social media, and chapter one was uh desktop web publishing. Because when I started my company, there were, you know, somebody was using front page to create the website, and the one server was under the IT guy's desk, you know. But this is different. This is different in scope, and it's taking us, I think, longer to calm down because it is different in scope. But I'm ready for the calm down.

Priscilla 27:19

So

Practical Tips for Making Help Docs More AI Friendly

Priscilla 27:20

I want to talk a little bit about like the writing tips that you have for all of us who are listening who want to be better at writing help articles, who want to be better at editing those responses in the inbox. What are some of the specific writing techniques that you can give us that can improve help documents and make them more AI friendly?

Leslie 27:38

Sure. So if you're writing a knowledge article, I can give you at least four. And once I get going, probably 24 tips for writing a knowledge article. The first thing is you should write a clear title, probably a title that has a verb in it, because verbs drive meaning in a way that nouns and noun strings can't. So don't call your knowledge article something like admin account user. You call it add an admin account user, or how do I add an admin account user? The verb add, it will, you know, help the AI tool unite the search to that content, but it's also a great practice for human users.

Priscilla 28:23

Those kind of strategies are like exactly what I love to hear. Like the very specific use a verb in your title.

Leslie 28:30

Yes. The practice of adding a verb to the title, whether your title's written in question form or whether the verb is in gerund form, like adding an admin account user. This helps the human writer, or if you're having the AI tool write the knowledge articles, it helps the tool figure out what the scope of the article will be because your adding a user may be different from changing your account status, right? So you don't want any of that to slip in. You named it adding an admin account user, and that's all that it should be. The next thing is to write that meal. So the heading is the byte, and the first couple sentences should be a summary of the information that follows. This is a common practice in knowledge-based writing. This is already a practice in place. Some organizations do it better than others, but you use a sentence or two that summarizes what the article will be about. And that is, you know, we we see those summaries march right off of the source content, right into the AI search results. But you have to write one in there if you want it to uh show up in the AI search results, or the AI will make one for you and it's not likely to be what you wanted. Some organizations write an introduction instead of a summary, but I'm saying no, the next best practice is to write a summary at the beginning and keep it short, a couple sentences or three sentences. Then you're moving into the steps on how to do this. Use technical writing, best practices from 1954 to write those steps. So if there's steps in a sequence, number them. Begin each step with a verb, and this is really hard to do, but really important to do. Scrub out notes or that point where you say important colon because those are throat clearings. Those are the person writing the procedure, not quite sure of where to put that information. So don't do that. That is that is a very vague name for a little piece of info, note. Yeah. What does that tell the human reader? Not much. And and it won't tell the AI much either. And the AI is dumber than us, right? Yeah. So we don't want to give it a note. It doesn't know what to make of a note. So you have to figure out is that note a step? Does that cue you that you need another section in the procedure? And it's actually two sets of six steps, not one set of 12. But you know, you you say to yourself, I'm drafting this or I'm using an AI tool to draft this. If the note lingers there, that's fine. But before a human or a bot uses it, I have to fix it and get rid of those notes.

Priscilla 31:17

I'm laughing because our help guide is riddled with notes. And I know this because I wrote a lot of those articles and I put a lot of notes in there and a lot of pro tips. Right. You know, I'm like, oh, I don't want them to forget this little piece of information. So I'm gonna put a pro tip down here or a note, like, because I want to make sure they know that you have to be on this certain plan in order to use this certain thing. So I'm gonna throw it in as a note. And we use those all throughout our help articles, and now I'm just my wheels are spinning going, okay, I gotta go and revise some of these help docs and get those notes clarified. Well, which is better, note or pro tip? I don't know. You tell me. It's 50-50. Go for it, guess. I mean, I feel like they're equally bad, is what I would know. Is that what I would okay?

Leslie 32:03

A tip is, you know, if we asked 10 people on the street now, what is a tip? The tip is a little bit of advice about how to do something or how to get what you want. Okay. So so I think a tip is probably better, but what is a note? Yeah, what is it? It's too generic. And actually, your articles might have some kind of internal strong architecture or the knowledge base might have this kind of internal strong architecture. If every time you wrote a note, it was the same type of information. And then I would say, awesome, leave them in there, but let's give them a different name. Yeah. You know, so maybe every time you wrote a note, it was about whether such a change would cause a charge. Yeah. Note if you use this app, it will you have to be on the silver plan, not the bronze plan. Let's and if you did that every time, then I'd be like, first of all, what an orderly brain she has. And then second of all, let's just call it something different. It then we're only talking about the word now.

Priscilla 33:08

Yeah, like pricing consideration or something more specific. Right. It's funny, I feel like I can feel the people listening to this who manage the help documents. I mean, I think of the person on my team who manages them, but then I also think of people who are listening to this going, okay, I got some projects in front of me. I got some things I gotta update because it's just so it's just so practical. And it's it'll take time, but it's an easy thing to go in and update and change, and it's gonna make a big difference for the way people access your information.

Leslie 33:39

Yes, it is going to make a big difference. Yeah. Absolutely. And then the next section you want, and most knowledge articles have, is uh access to other resources, or the the very system sets up links to other resources. So all we'd want to be sure is that it's named properly, right? So read more is not a good name, and this is definitely not a good name for AI. Right. They are not smart enough and they're not inferring, but they have seen read more often enough to know what it leads to. Yeah. Right. But for human users, we want to say something like more information on adding users or related information to adding an admin user. So that's the best practice right there. And that's helpful for humans and for AI tools also.

Priscilla 34:30

Yeah, I was gonna say one of the first things. So when I started, I was the first support person here at Buzzsprout, our head of marketing was the one who was really training me because he had been doing support and marketing. And so he was giving me some training. And one of the things that he told me on my first week, which I remember it has like solidified in my head, was when you're in an email and you're gonna link to a resource, make sure that the words that you're linking are describing the resource. So it's not just saying click here or learn more, but it's saying check out this video about adding users, and then you link to the video. And it's one of those things that's stuck with me for the last decade is that the importance of being descriptive when you're linking out, because people are much more, I mean, humans are much more likely to click on a link if they know what they're going to.

Leslie 35:22

Right. And a link is like a little door. Yeah. It's like a door in the content. And if you're gonna walk out a door, you should know where you're going. Yeah. You know.

Priscilla 35:30

So what else? Are there any other strategies? We've gone through resources. So that's the end. When you've got the resources, you link out to those other places, the other ways to learn. One thing we do at the end of all of our help articles, and you can tell me if this is a good strategy or not, is that we always put our email at the bottom. We say, if you still have questions, here's our email. It's in every single article because we never want people to finish an article and not know how to get in touch with us. Yeah. Do you think that's overkill?

Leslie 35:56

That's a good thing. No, no, that's wonderful. If I had to lay out a continuum, how are we going to serve human users who did not get the help they need? Over at the far right side is here's our email, contact us, what you're doing. And over at the far left side is those stupid thumbs up, thumbs down. Did this help you? I hate those. Yeah. They're so stupid. They don't help anybody, they don't help the team get better. Yeah. What does it mean, thumbs down?

Priscilla 36:26

And and when you're in the middle of trying to find an answer to a question, you're really not concerned with letting someone know that their help article was not helpful. You're like, well, no, this wasn't helpful, but I'm I'm still looking for my answer. So I'm gonna keep looking. I'm not gonna answer your survey right now. Like that's how I feel when I see those. So yeah, I'm right there with you. Yeah. We always put there, if you still have questions, or if this didn't answer your initial question, here's an email directly to us. And so yes, I think that's a good strategy for making sure things stay human.

Leslie 36:56

I want to add one more point that's I think really interesting. It's very interesting to me as a lifelong writing teacher. The tone of the articles and the tone of the content that we write for humans and for AI should be a conversational tone. So what's because the search queries are coming in in a conversational way. Yeah. You know, nobody's querying as pursuant to my lease. You know, what addenda should I review? You know, nope. So nobody's doing that. So all the plain language practitioners who are in my cohort of life, we have been urging people to use a more conversational tone in workplace writing for many, many years. And by conversational, I simply mean business writing that is more similar to the way we speak than it is to some of the kind of vaunted academic and legal tones for writing that are dissimilar from the way we speak. I'm not saying write the way you talk to your friends, I'm saying move closer to the way you talk. So use contractions, throw in a fragment every once in a while, because when we're talking to each other, we sometimes say no way. Yeah. Yeah. Or we say, what now? You know, and those kinds of phrasings can go into our business writing without harming our authority or our authenticity. So the tools are trained on diction, conversational diction, because so much of the information they imbibe is conversational. So our writing in the knowledge article should also be conversational.

Priscilla 38:33

Yeah. I think every single person I've trained on my team over the last decade, I have had to talk to them about not talking in a way that they think they're supposed to talk, but leaning way more into the easy conversation kind of talking. And I feel like I see it the most in people who are a little insecure about their writing because they're trying to write in a way that they think they're supposed to write to sound smart. And I have to go, hey, I'd rather hear how you talk than hear you use words that people don't use in their regular life.

Leslie 39:09

This is a little different challenge in knowledge articles than it is in email responses because the incoming email may be from somebody who's quarrelsome or upset. So sometimes the agent, the support person, kind of draws themselves up and like a puffer fish, you know, I'm gonna make myself big, I'm gonna make myself sound stern and authoritative. So you'll stop asking me the same question I told you no already. But in knowledge articles, that's not the relationship we have with the reader. And so conversational writing, even warm writing is appropriate there.

Priscilla 39:46

Are there

What AI Fixes And What It Can’t

Priscilla 39:47

any strategies that you used to teach people that now in the AI era you don't teach anymore? You leave out.

Leslie 39:54

I thought about this question a lot, and I'm gonna say something's gonna get me kicked out of the English teacher world. Like, I would be like, son, if you don't know how to use an apostrophe now, you have gray streaks in your beard and you don't know how to use an apostrophe now, it's over. Don't learn it. Yeah, because AI can do that for you. AI is so much better than Microsoft Editor, you know. It's a good copy editor, yeah. Yeah, you it really is a good copy editor. And how did you get to be 36 and not know how to use an apostrophe? There's lots of reasons. I don't know your particular reason, but life is short. Give up. Give up. Give up. Stop worrying about it. But make sure that you know, you can tell the tool. You know, you couldn't tell Microsoft Editor, I'm terrible at apostrophes, but you can tell the tool, I'm terrible at apostrophes. So true. So check specially for apostrophes. Or you could tell the tool, I'm a terrible proofreader. For example, I have a client who was telling me that the proofreading they're doing, contact enter is slipping through when they mean contact center, because of course enter is a word. Yeah. Oh. Right? Yeah. So you can tell the tool, you know, don't let me make a mistake where both words are spelled correctly but don't make sense. Yeah.

Jordan 41:17

I feel like this is in the same vein as like math teachers saying that you are never, you're not gonna have a calculator with you at all times, and so you have to learn math. And like it feels like we're in that same vein here where it's like you have to learn punctuation because you're not gonna have like an editor with you all the time. It's like, well, yeah, what can I do? Yeah, yeah, you've got calculators on your phone.

Leslie 41:40

Now I got sweaty, Jordan. I didn't, I said if you have gray in your beard and you don't know apostrophes, stop worrying about it. I did not see it.

Priscilla 41:49

You're advocating for some take it out.

Leslie 41:52

Yeah, no, I am not. I absolutely am not.

Priscilla 41:55

Yeah.

Leslie 41:56

You need to know them, but for whatever reason, sir, you slip through. Yeah.

Priscilla 42:00

So well, and I think the same goes for their, there, and there, and your and your, you know, these same ideas of like, if you've gotten to be this age and you don't know it, then AI can help you. Yeah.

Leslie 42:14

Yes. And and the reason you don't know it, if you've gotten to be in your 30s and you don't know it, the reason you don't know it is very likely because you have some language-related learning disability and you're you're absolutely coping a hundred percent of the time. And the fact that you're uh kind of a fluent, even charming writer, and your spelling and punctuation uh is atrocious, right? Props to you. Yeah. Use the tool. Yeah, you know, use the tool. Or you had an inadequate education for whatever reason. Right. But that I'm very happy about. That I'm really happy about.

Priscilla 42:54

Because it can take writers that are good at the communication, but maybe don't have all the technical details, and it can make them so much better. And that really is a very encouraging thing for all of us.

Leslie 43:06

Especially in our industry. Especially in our industry, because our industry on the pro side is an industry where people with less than conventional academic credentials can get promoted. That's one thing I love about our industry. It's like this person was a great frontline agent for three and a half years. Now what? Manager? Now what? Director? Oh my God, that's great. But a lot of times people in our industry flatline because they don't have, you know, business professional writing skills. And they they the exposure costs them that next promotion. And AI tools can smooth that out. And that's really beautiful. It is.

Priscilla 43:50

Mm-hmm. So you talk about this a little bit in your strategies, but I had a question on here, and I want to make sure we fully flesh it out. Things like headers and that structure that you talked about, that is all. The very important in AI era because the AI tools are looking at the headings and they're looking at the subheads and the notes and all of that and using that as they are delivering these responses.

Leslie 44:13

Yes, absolutely. And they want the H1, H2, H3. They want the formatting and the structure to be built a certain way so that they can find and prioritize the headings. And they want modular content written briefly in a conversational style that's accurate, you know.

Priscilla 44:34

You know, you talked a little bit about keywords and how we used to be so focused on keywords. And now is it not as important to have keyword-rich articles?

Leslie 44:44

Again, I'm gonna give my answer, but I want to give it modestly because, you know, imagine that a marketing person is listening to this and a marketing person who developed their chops, a marketing person, an SEO pro who can turn to a prospective client and say, Yes, I can get you on the first page of Google, right? That's not me. Yeah. That's not me. AI tools don't search keywords in the same way that we used to, you know, thinking back into the keyword stuffing era and how bad it was for human readers. Terrible for human reasons. You know, where the page would say, our cashmere sweaters have more cashmere than any other cashmere sweater that a cashmere loving shopper could buy, you know, that kind of thing. So um I I think we're in another era where uh natural language and uh human sequenced strings of words are uh how we're searching.

Jordan 45:39

I am looking forward to that hitting the uh recipe blogs. Like in where it's just the information's at the top and I don't have to like scroll through like their family history.

Leslie 45:49

Yeah, oh my God. Uh and those are definitely AI written, and they were slop when people created them themselves, and they're just slop right now.

Priscilla 45:58

It's so hard.

Leslie 45:59

Jump to recipe. Jump to recipe.

Priscilla 46:01

Yes.

Leslie 46:03

Yeah.

Using AI Drafts Without Losing Judgment

Priscilla 46:04

So we're talking about creating these help articles, but we're also kind of talking about using AI to create the articles. So, what are your thoughts on the help article managers? So the people who are managing those knowledge bases using AI to create the articles that are going to be used by AI. Is there danger in that? Like we've talked a little bit about them, but what kind of strategies do you recommend for people who are using AI to develop the articles that AI is going to then use?

Leslie 46:33

Hall of Mirrors and So I'm an English teacher, I'm a writing teacher, and I just want to say on behalf of my profession, we need a hug. Yeah. We need a hug. It's a little bit like being a bank teller the day they installed the ATM. We're worried. Yeah, we're worried. So um, but also I'm over that because there's so much opportunity for people to do great work as writers using AI tools. So, yes, of course, write the article using AI and then serve it to AI. But here's the thing um that I I worry a lot about. Um, when you are a person using AI tools to write for humans or for other AI tools, you become something like the food tester to the queen. So the AI tool made the draft knowledge article, and there you are, and you are responsible. You are the quality control. You're the one who stops it and says, Don't let the queen take a bite of this, it'll kill her, or you're the one who says, Go ahead. And if you were born an analog writer like me, like both of you, and like nearly, but not everyone we know who's listening to this, if you were born an analog writer, you have developed the skills to evaluate a piece of writing by producing it. Yeah. But we're looking at a workforce, the youngest amongst us in the workforce, who haven't and won't be called on to produce a piece of writing, but they're still the food taster to the queen. They still have to be able to decide whether it's ready for the human reader and for the AI reader also, the AI tool. I have a great way that all writers, but we'll talk about writers in support and service, can be helped to build skills that will enable them to critique and improve an AI-generated draft. Okay. Okay. And that is that they have to be helped to know more of their customers and have their customers' reactions to the written products of their company something that they have access to. So what I dream of is some kind of, I don't know, customer expression group and not survey results, absolutely not survey results, videos or live contact with customers where the customers talk about what is it like to read this knowledge base article? What is it like for me? Or where they talk about how they liked or didn't like that email response. Because I do believe if an AI trained human writer can imagine the customer's reaction, it will strengthen their abilities to edit what the AI tool has generated. But there's no replacement because if we're not learning it, if we're not learning our editing skills by editing, then what we need is to make the reader come alive to us in a way that it's kind of expensive for companies, but there's no substitute for it. Yeah.

Priscilla 49:50

Yeah, I think that's really, I think that's really interesting. What is one takeaway that you want people listening to this who are maybe those people who are managing their knowledge bases? What's one takeaway you want them to take from this as they go and start editing and revising their articles? What do you want to them to focus on?

Leslie 50:09

I want them to focus on the top 10 or 7% of their articles. So I don't even want to whelm them, much less overwhelm them. I want to empower them and to support them. So if they're sitting there and thinking, God, I wish I hadn't listened to that. Now I have an insurmountable to-do list and I feel like I want to quit my job, you know. No, no, that's not what I'm saying. Those knowledge articles, any kinds of stored knowledge, are used frequently or not at all, right? Yeah. Some are used way frequently and some are used not at all. So if you focus on the ones that are used really, really frequently and you improve the writing of the top three most frequently used, you can teach the AI tool to write like that. And the AI tool can probably edit a lot of the other ones. So I would say don't get overwhelmed. Nothing I've said is something someone hasn't heard before. You know, I'm just saying it with more enthusiasm. I don't know. And just focus on the content that affects the quality of the experience the most. And we know what that is. We have all the reporting we need. Yes.

Priscilla 51:22

You can find that information and you can tackle those first three first. Indeed. Indeed. And I love that. There's no need to get whelmed or overwhelmed. Right. Yeah. Overwhelmed. Right. I love it. I love it. Well,

Where To Learn More And Closing

Priscilla 51:34

thank you so much for taking the time to be here, Leslie. I mean, I feel like we talked about a lot of things in this, but I think we have some really, really incredibly practical takeaways from this conversation that I'm really excited to implement on my team. And I got to go get those notes out of there. That's right. But I just I think there's some really great information here. So thank you so much for coming and sharing that with us. For anyone listening who wants to level up their writing and they're like, okay, how do I become the next person in your in one of your courses? How do they get in touch with you? How do they get access to that teaching?

Leslie 52:08

Well, they can always come join me on LinkedIn. They can definitely take the LinkedIn Learning Trainings. And I don't know if folks know this, but if you have a public library online account in the US, if you can log into your public library online, you can get LinkedIn Learning Training for free.

Jordan 52:23

Oh, I didn't know that. I did not know that either. I love libraries. Oh my gosh.

Leslie 52:27

Yeah, it's called LinkedIn Learning Patron or something like that. LinkedIn Learning, and you can get the classes for free. Cool. But I would be more than happy to look at a sample of anyone's knowledge article. And if they want to say, just give me some feedback, you know, including you, Priscilla, if you want me to look at your notes, I would be thrilled to do that. And then one other thing is every month I do a LinkedIn Live broadcast with my colleague uh Kim Saido Campbell, who's a professor at the University of North Texas. And the broadcast is called Fix This Writing. Two experts show you how to make bad writing better. And I'd love it if you join.

Priscilla 53:03

I love that. That's so great. Well, we'll link to that in the show notes. So anyone who's listening, they'll have access and links to those things and quick access to get in touch with you. Well, thank you again, Leslie. This was really wonderful. So if you have any questions or a topic that you would like us to cover in a future episode, you can shoot us a text or a voicemail using the Send Us Fan Mail link in the description. As always, if you liked this episode, please share it with someone who works in customer support or someone who's just trying to level up their writing skills or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We would love that. Thank you again to Leslie O'Flehaven for joining us today on today's episode. Thank you all for listening. Now go and make someone's day.