A company changes its returns window. The policy page is updated the same day, which everybody considers done.
The help centre article still describes the old window. So does the macro the support team uses. So does the answer on the product page, and so does the chat widget, which was trained six months ago.
A customer now receives one of five answers depending where she asked. Three of them are wrong, all of them were correct when written, and nobody knows the situation exists.
Step 1: list every place an answer currently lives
Website pages, help centre, macros, chat, email templates and anything a salesperson sends. The list is usually longer than anybody expects.
Step 2: pick one place to be the source
Which one matters less than that there is one, and that everybody knows which it is.
Step 3: write the answers as facts rather than as pages
A price, a window, a condition, held separately from the prose around it, so an update is one edit rather than five rewrites.
Step 4: separate the durable from the contextual
The fact is the same everywhere and the framing differs by channel, which is what lets one source serve several surfaces.
Step 5: point every channel at the source
Rather than copying from it, which reintroduces exactly the divergence the exercise is meant to remove.
Step 6: name an owner
One person responsible for the source, since shared ownership of a document reliably means nobody maintains it.
Step 7: attach updating to the change itself
Whoever changes a policy updates the source as part of doing so, which is the only routine that survives a busy quarter.
Step 8: audit the copies once
Find the five versions, correct or remove them, since leaving old copies in place means they will be found and used.
Step 9: check what customers are actually told
By asking the question through each channel, which takes twenty minutes and reliably finds at least one wrong answer.
Step 10: handle the channel specific wording deliberately
A chat answer is shorter than a help article, which is a formatting difference rather than a content one.
Step 11: review the unanswered questions
Which indicate what the source does not yet contain, and are the natural queue for what to write next.
Step 12: keep it short enough to maintain
A source of forty answers is maintained and one of four hundred is not, which is the discipline in building a single source of truth for answers.
Step 13: date the entries
So anybody reading can tell whether something has been reviewed recently, which is the cheapest confidence signal available.
Step 14: decide what happens to the old copies
Archived, redirected or deleted, since a superseded help article left published will be found by search and used by somebody long after everybody internally has forgotten it exists.
Step 15: let every channel answer from the same place
An assistant drawing from the same source as the help centre and the support team means a change to the returns window appears everywhere the same day, rather than in one place and not in four others. Set it up through install the widget and train your bot. The recurring volume is described in the same twenty questions every single day, the channel decision in chat versus email versus phone for a small team, and the outcome in from email backlog to instant answers a support transformation. The sector view sits under small business.