We are in a new era. Today's customer is king. Gone are the days when people are willing to wait in long queues to resolve their complaints and answer their queries. Customers are seeking free-hassle solutions delivered on demand. The Customer Knowledge Base delivers the instant, useful, and effective information needed to meet customer expectations today.
What is a Customer Knowledge Base?
A customer knowledge management base is a library of information about organization products or services. It reduces the workload of live customer service agents. Instead of waiting for an agent, customers can find more information and solutions on their own.
A customer service knowledge base compiles frequently asked questions, picture guides, articles, run books, and troubleshooting steps in one convenient portal. The information guides a customer to solve pre and post-purchase problems without having to speak one on one with a company representative.
Knowledge base platforms come in different types. Some are Wikipedia-style databases where users can search for the information on their own. Others use artificial intelligence that easily interacts with user inputs to give solutions, as a form of “live chat”. The customer asks a question and the AI answers in a conversational message.
The Importance of a Customer Knowledge Base
In today's business world, people expect easy access to authentic information. This expectation prompts customers to make phone calls, emails, or any other means possible to get more information. Establishing a rich knowledge base will meet and satisfy your customer's needs and queries whenever, wherever.
Listed below are key pointers of the relevance of the customer service knowledge base.
Instant Solutions
A comprehensive customer-centered knowledge base helps customers find instant solutions on their own. Doing this saves time, energy, and resources for clients, employees, and the business.
Omni-channel Experience
Customers want to enjoy a seamless, effortless, high-quality customer experience when using a product or service.
As opposed to multi-channel marketing, 'omnichannel' enables the designer to create a knowledge platform that addresses every potential consumer encounter and offers a comprehensive solution, rather than focusing just on the most popular channels like websites and mobile apps.
Customer Satisfaction and Retention
A marketing strategy to satisfy and retain your customers is the best. Creating a helpful customer service knowledge base ensures your clients can access the information they need anytime. This expanded reliability often boosts satisfaction and will help retain your client base, keep sales consistent and increase profit margins.
Proactively Managing Customers' Problems
Managing customer problems entails anticipating customers' needs and devising innovative ways to help them achieve goals. Your business should develop ways to notice problems early and help clients avoid them. You can do this by:
- Adding value steps where you teach clients how to use the products and optimize the benefits.
- Make the information readily available for both the customers and your staff.
From the above analysis of the customer service knowledge base, it's clear that a knowledge base can effectively cut down your customer service cost.
How to Create a Customer Service Knowledge Base
Let's explore the best practices for building a customer knowledge base and how it helps achieve the organization's goals.
Design and Structure
This initial step establishes the format, which resembles a traditional homepage for support-based content. How you design your knowledge base will determine its effectiveness.
For example, while a search engine gives customers an efficient way to locate relevant information, it also helps organize your material so that representatives can easily find what they're searching for. Setting up categories and sub-categories is the most effective approach to achieve this.
Valuable Content
Excellent content also adds value to your customer knowledge base platform. You can ensure excellent content by:
- Writing descriptive titles
- Writing descriptive content
- Eliminating typos
- Including the most frequently asked questions (Mostly from your support tickets).
Including helpful visuals helps customers understand what you are referring to and relate to your content. In addition, visuals such as screenshots and animations can help customers follow the steps with more clarity and ease of navigation.
How to Maintain a High-Quality Customer Service Knowledge Base
To maintain a great customer service knowledge base, you ought to do the following:
Understand Your Audience
Understanding and knowing your audience characteristics is the first step to retaining a top-notch customer service knowledge base.
This can be enhanced by creating a buyer persona- A 'buyer persona' is an ideal representation of your customers based on detailed market research and real data from existing customers.
It enables you to simplify technical levels, terms, and language to more straightforward terms that a layperson can understand.
Listen to Feedback
This is an important strategy for understanding customers' interactions with your articles. It helps a business know the areas needing improvement.
It also helps you to know which articles are very helpful to customers and which ones are vague, inaccurate, or unhelpful. An auto-responder can enhance customer feedback by allowing customers to rate the level of help received.
As soon as feedback is received, it should be immediately considered and, if possible, be incorporated to make the guide seamless and easy to use.
Enrich Your Content
You can enrich your content using visuals, audio, and pictures. This ensures the customers relate more to your product and are consistently exposed to new information to solve challenges they may face while interacting with your products or services.
Links also play a significant role in enriching your knowledge base. They enable the users to connect with other help desk articles, which may help guide them in complex, multi-stage tasks.
The content in your knowledge base should reflect the following:
- Accuracy- Information posted should always be accurate and regularly updated.
- Relevance –the posts should address the visitor's needs and be based on one topic at a time.
- Easy to scan – the information a customer needs should be scannable within a short time. Titles and subtitles can help users easily navigate to specific pages.
Conclusion
By incorporating a customer service knowledge base into your customer support plan, you can make the work easier for your support team and enable customers to access relevant information without investing much time, effort, and resources trying to get the necessary assistance.
