What is a customer service knowledge base?
A knowledge base for customer services is a tool that contains ready-made information that is consumed or used to address specific realities or issues without active assistance from the customer service team. It can boast articles, FAQs, picture manuals, and other things that a customer may need to solve some problems that appear when he or she already bought a certain product or service. The customer self-service way not only improves the customer experience but also the efficiency of support processes.
Related read: What is knowledge base
How does a knowledge base for customer support work?
The effectiveness of a customer service knowledge base hinges on a dedicated backend content creation and curation mechanism. The content must be meticulously crafted, with careful attention to language and tone, ensuring it is accurate, easy to navigate, and readily findable.
Once the knowledge base is established, the content can be integrated into various digital self-help service channels, such as chatbots, websites, and applications. This integration ensures that customers have seamless access to the information they need when they need it.
Why is a knowledge base for customer service important?
As the customers interact with the organization, more than 60% of them expect their issues to be addressed the first time they are reported. A well-structured knowledge base helps customers find instant solutions on their own, but its benefits extend far beyond that:
1. Enables ticket deflection: A knowledge base loses a major chunk of tickets raised to agents who can then solve the finer and more crucial problems.
2. Create omnichannel customer experience: The improvement of customer confidence comes from getting the right information from multiple touch points.
3. Reduces operational costs: Web self-service is often found to be more cost-effective than phone call solutions by organizations improving efficiency rates.
4. Improves customer satisfaction metrics: Accurate content knowledge builds a positive impact on some major key performance indicators including NPS and customer effort scores.
Top 10 Advantages of a Knowledge Base
1. Boosts productivity
Employees spend about 11.6 hours weekly searching for information. A knowledge base consolidates essential data in one place, allowing teams to focus on their tasks and enhancing productivity.
2. Shortens training time
An organized knowledge base allows new hires to quickly access training materials and best practices, speeding up their path to productivity.
3. Preserves knowledge
A knowledge base safeguards valuable insights and institutional knowledge, ensuring accessibility even when employees leave.
4. Ensures consistency in communication
With everyone accessing the same up-to-date information, a knowledge base promotes uniform and accurate responses, reducing confusion.
5. Facilitates faster decision-making
Quick access to necessary data simplifies decision-making, allowing teams to act swiftly and confidently.
6. Lowers support ticket volume
An external knowledge base enables customers to find answers independently, freeing support teams to handle more complex issues and improving efficiency.
7. Provides 24/7 customer support
A knowledge base allows customers to find answers at any time, enhancing satisfaction while reducing the workload on support staff.
8. Improves SEO
A well-maintained knowledge base with keyword-rich content can boost your website’s search rankings, helping potential customers find your business.
9. Promotes collaboration
It encourages team members to share insights and best practices easily, fostering better problem-solving and innovation.
10. Increases customer satisfaction
Quick access to accurate information leads to faster, more consistent responses, enhancing the overall customer experience and loyalty.
How to create a customer service knowledge base
Creating a customer service knowledge base can involve various methods for storing information, such as picture guides, decision trees, or simple articles and FAQs. The key is to design the knowledge base in a way that minimizes customer effort, which can involve interlinking different modules, adding visual aids, or embedding videos for richer context.
Step 1: Define the purpose
Understanding the core purpose of your knowledge base is crucial, as it shapes content, structure, and user experience. Ask yourself: What information do you want to provide? Is it for new customers learning about your product, for existing customers troubleshooting issues, or a mix of both? Defining this purpose sets a clear direction for your content.
Step 2: Outline high-level goals
Establish clear, high-level goals for your knowledge base to guide its development. Consider aiming for comprehensive coverage of topics, ensuring accuracy and reliability, creating a user-friendly interface, offering multilingual support, and providing mobile-friendly access. Incorporate analytics to monitor user behavior and feedback.
Step 3: Collect relevant data
Gather customer insights to identify common queries. Look for information in FAQs, product manuals, and customer support transcripts. Engage various departments for unique insights, and gather feedback from your customer service team. Organize and prioritize data to structure your knowledge base effectively.
Step 4: Determine the structure
Outline broad categories based on the data collected. Decide on specific articles within each category to ensure comprehensive coverage and user-friendly navigation.
Step 5: Write and edit the knowledge base
Write clear, actionable articles with simple headings and jargon-free language. Use visuals like screenshots and videos for clarity. Proofread to maintain grammatical accuracy.
Step 6: Manage the technology aspect
Choose a user-friendly knowledge base tool that meets your needs. Set it up securely, migrate existing content, and ensure robust security measures are in place. Regular maintenance and updates are essential for reliability.
Step 7: Make your knowledge base easy to find
Position your knowledge base on your main domain for better SEO. Make it easy for customer support agents to reference, link it to related website content, and promote articles on social media.
Step 8: Design a knowledge base
Design for the branding of the application and make sure it is user-friendly. Make the content easy to read, and link keywords, use multimedia to include relevant keywords for search engine optimization. Having a site hosted under the primary domain is more authoritative, and affords more SEO advantages.
Final Thoughts
A customer service knowledge base needs to be defined not as a place where information is accumulated but as a tool that can affect change in customer service. Knowledge base which not only helps in reducing the operational cost of an organization but also in self-service, managing institutional knowledge, and also in improving customer satisfaction has become a fundamental asset for today’s organization. This means that investing in this resource goes beyond simply satisfying the customer’s expectations of help-desk services, it also positively impacts organizational profit and productivity.
