Gone are the days when telephone calls were the only option to solve customer queries. Customer expectations are continually evolving and they expect their questions to be answered at once and as a result, at times, the customer support teams are overwhelmed and struggle to provide instant support.
The best solution to tackle this is to offer your customers a self-service solution in the form of a robust online knowledge base.
What is a Knowledge base?
A knowledge base is an online self-service library that has information about a product or a service. It may contain the most sought after questions (FAQs), guides and video resources that can potentially help customers troubleshoot themselves. Customers get actionable insights for their problems by referring them.
You can create an organized database of your official documentation with images, videos, and file attachments to help your customers have a better understanding of your product or service.
By establishing a self-service model, you can reduce your support investment and improve your customer experience.
An effective knowledge base has to be simple, relevant, easy to access and understandable to be able to solve its purpose.
We are sharing 5 tips for you to build a kick-ass knowledge base for your company.
1. Knowledge Base Information architecture
A knowledge base can greatly help you achieve customer satisfaction and improve customer loyalty. It should be easily adaptable and flexible. Structuring and organizing your knowledge base may look like an overwhelming task if it is your first time in building one.
- A powerful and predictive search bar on the knowledge base home page would help them search and locate the exact articles they need. This search function should be able to auto-complete the keyword that is being typed by the user.
- Categorize your knowledge base articles by the ones that matter to your customers.
- Link to other self-service options like Ticket Submission and Live Chat would help customers get help without them feeling directionless.
- Display the path of the accessed article in the form of a breadcrumb – The Section > Sub-section > Article, so that users can navigate to their desired areas within your knowledge base easily. For example, you could create a section called “Getting started” and list all the product’s onboarding articles under it. This way, you can simply share it with your new support agents.
- Not everybody should have access to everything. Specifically for creating and editing, have one or two members with access so that your knowledge base is always accurate and free from errors.
You can refer this page for more information on building a knowledge base system from scratch.
2. How to write Knowledge Base Articles
When writing knowledge base articles, give clear instructions in simple language for customers to understand. If you have an ocean of content in the knowledge base article, it is very easy for the customer to lose context and get distracted and hence,
- Organize your content by having a short and a relevant title and most importantly give step by step instructions in chronological order.
- Have relevant information in the article that is maximally useful to the customer. Keep things clear and easy to follow for them. It has to be as descriptive as possible so that it is easy to be ranked and displayed by the search engines.
- Include screenshots, links to video tutorials and GIFs wherever applicable. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words!
- Link to other useful resources like FAQs and other related articles can significantly benefit the customer and your team in solving the issues. It will help onboarding your new customer support team members.
- Form a knowledge base article out of the frequently asked customer queries. This way you can avoid drafting the same reply for the customer questions. Your support staff can route basic customer queries to the knowledge base.
- Decide on the type of article: Articles are consumed by both internal support agents and customers. You should have a provision on the knowledge base software to choose which articles to be made available to the public.
Internal Articles: These are visible to your help desk agents only.
External Articles: These are visible to support staff and your customers.
3. How to continuously improve knowledge base articles
Creating a knowledge base content is a continuous process. Your employees and customers will not be benefitted from it if you do not regularly update it. By continuous improvement, your customers can look for solutions in a targeted and useful manner.
- It should evolve and grow along with your company and product. Also, it has to be updated as and when you create a new product or new feature.
- Your support staff has to be encouraged to review information frequently and provide suggestions for improvement.
- Keep a tab on the common questions and support tickets. Create articles for them and list them on the page.
4. Knowledge Base Quality Check
This is an important step as this determines the quality of your knowledge base.
- Every article has to be carefully reviewed by a Subject Matter expert before publishing it. This way, a great-quality Knowledge Base system can be achieved.
- Periodic review of the articles has to be carried out to check the articles’ validity. Your company’s reputation will be at stake if it is not done.
5. Incorporate Customer Feedback into your Knowledge Base
Customer is the King. It is essential to know how your knowledge base is serving them to continuously improve your content.
- Having an option for the customer to upvote or downvote the article is a useful feature. You can make improvements to the articles accordingly.
- Your support team can be encouraged to share the relevant knowledge base article along with every response email and also get to know if it was useful to them.
- From the feedback, you can instantly know which articles are the most helpful and which items need tweaking.
HappyFox provides you with a simple online knowledge base tool that’s beautiful, searchable, mobile responsive and social media-ready.
To know more about HappyFox Knowledge Base – Click here.
Speak to our knowledge base and help desk specialists. Get a one-on-one demo tailored to your needs.
