Building a customer service knowledge base can be a difficult venture and it takes a lot of work to maintain and manage knowledge base articles. Like this is not hard enough, it takes a lot of time to produce professionally written articles for knowledge base that will have a consistent look, tone and feel.
But, implementing a knowledge base really has a positive effect on the efficiency and quality of the customer service, because the customers can benefit more from interactions with knowledge support staff who know how to resolve their issues fast.
Why customer service knowledge base is important
When it comes to customer service, speed and knowledge play an important role, because customers do not just want their information to be accurate and fast, they demand it.
According to Harvard Business Review, 65 percent of customers want their problem resolved fast and 62 percent of customers believe that having employees that are knowledgeable is one of the most important aspects of good customer service.
And, 50 percent of consumers provide a brand one week to respond to their queries before they terminate their business relationship with said brand.
So, if your business wants to deliver timely and high quality service, implementing a customer knowledge base is the right way to do it.
Many agents working in customer service have a knowledge base in the form of a Word document, and even though this saves them time when they are responding to the questions of the customers, that information is in many cases outdated and inaccurate.
But, with a customer knowledge base, your customer service teams will always have access to recent information and be able to respond quickly.
Do not be afraid that you will be overwhelmed when creating a new knowledge base, because this customer support knowledge base will not only improve the customer relationship, but it will also reduce the time of training new staff and will enable you to cut down your response time.
Benefits of using a customer support knowledge base
Some of the benefits your business can have if it implements a customer support knowledge base are:
- Costs and resources will be reduced – customers will be able to resolve issues by using self-service methods, leading to reduced email and call volume.
- Efficiency will be improved – a knowledge base program that has easy to use processes will make it easier for employees to use and support the knowledge database.
- Customer loyalty and trust will be increased – when you provide consistent information across all channels, you will build trust from your customers in your company and brand, and that will ultimately improve customer loyalty.
- The quality of content will be improved and consistent – if you focus on improving the quality of your knowledge base, the quality of your content will also be improved.
How to build an effective support knowledge base
The main purpose of building a knowledge base is to improve the quality and speed of your customer service. This is why you need to get it right from the beginning.
So, here are some practice tips that will help you in creating a good foundation for your knowledge base, which you can later grow efficiently and quickly.
Know who your audience is
Every knowledge base article needs to be written and edited based on the reader’s needs and preferences. This means they need to be organized, sweet and short and written in a user-friendly way. You can even use some acronyms that are present in your industry, like CRM instead of customer relationship management.
Standardize your articles with a template
You can simplify things for your customer service team by creating email templates that will allow your team to give professional answers. These templates are a good way to make sure that your knowledge base will be consistent in tone and language across every department and for each and every one of your customer service agents.
Make sure to organize your content
While having a search function is an effective way for your customer service agents to find articles that will be helpful, you can organize your content so that your agents can find what they are looking for much easier. The best way to achieve this is to create categories and subcategories.
Users and admin roles
You can use user roles to enable permissions that will restrict new customer service reps from posting a knowledge base article into a live database. This way, not all articles would be published immediately, because they first need to be checked for accuracy.
Make sure to check the quality of the articles first
Before you add any article into the knowledge base database, a quality checker needs to review all the articles for completeness and accuracy. It would be best if this is performed by a dedicated knowledge base manager. Your workflow for publishing needs to go from draft to review to approve to publish.
Use macros
An effective and simple way to streamline the customer service workflows is to use macros, because macros will allow customer service requests to be answered with a standard response that will save you both time and effort when compared to creating a separate response for every customer that experiences the same issue.
Use the customer feedback
Having a knowledge base is great, but if you want to understand how helpful your articles are, you need to use the feedback from your customers. The best way to do this is the set up an autoresponder that will ask if your response was helpful after you have closed a ticket or case.
Once you use the feedback from your customers, you will be able to quickly identify which articles were helpful and which ones need some more improvement.
We hope that you now realize how important it is to have a customer support knowledge base, and as you can see, it is not that difficult to build an effective one. So, use our tips and recommended practices to create a first class customer support knowledge base and deliver a better customer experience to your customers.