When thinking about customer support, what comes to your mind first? Is it phone support? Or, chat widgets on a website where customers can talk to someone who’s a real person? Maybe it’s support agents who are doing their best to answer tickets?
For any company that strives for customer support greatness, know good customer service is vital throughout each customer’s journey. However, there’s more to it than what most business owners realize.
Allowing your customers to help themselves is, sometimes, the best solution. All you need to do is to give them access to ready-made knowledge base. A knowledge base system helps customers learn without requiring personal assistance.
In this post, you’re going to learn about knowledge base-how it works, why your business should have one, and how to create an effective knowledge base system to benefit your business.
What Is A Knowledge Base System?
Knowledge bases will help you to provide quick answers to your customers’ questions. Having them is vital for your business because most customers don’t like waiting for information on the phone. You should have a customer support knowledge database so that you can provide answers to questions regarding products and services, and even give a quote. Doing so will make your customers happy, thus, increasing your chances of generating more sales.
You can develop a customer service knowledge base platform for your business through a variety of methods. One way to do it is through the use of an effective knowledge management software.
If you want to create an effective knowledge base, here are best practices to follow:
1. Decide On Your Knowledge Base’s Core Elements
Your knowledge base should contain these three core elements:
- Search Function – A search function should be found before your full knowledge base article list. It works like Google’s search bar. Note that customers who’ll visit your knowledge base vary. Some will treat it as a homepage, just looking around trying to learn more about your business’s product or service. However, others will be looking for something very specific. If you want them to easily find what they’re looking for, incorporate a search function into your system.
- FAQ – The FAQ section is the first place that customers generally look for in your business website if they have a basic question regarding your product or service. Have one readily available so they don’t need to exert effort to get the answers they need.
- Contact Support Option – Sometimes, knowledge bases don’t cut it no matter how amazing they are. That’s why you should have a contact support option made available on your page or the actual article. Once customers realize they need personalized support, it will be the first thing they’ll go looking for.
Of course, you can include other elements outside of these necessities. What’s most important is that your knowledge base’s structure and components have already been figured out even before you start writing the content.
2. Choose The Content For Your Knowledge Base
Trying to decide which help topics to write seems like an overwhelming task. How do you judge a topic’s importance? What should you be writing about? How do you know exactly what customers need help with?
Start small, as with any overwhelming task you’ve encountered before. No time-consuming behavior or customer research is needed if you start with these two topics:
- Getting Started – You’ll write about the basic process for onboarding and setup that each customer goes through as they start using your product or service. You’ll have to break everything down into steps here.
- Basics – What do you think are the questions that a complete stranger would ask about your product, service, or company as a whole? Address every one of them here.
From the basic topics above, you can, then, go more in-depth to cover everything within your knowledge management database’s separate sections.
3. Agree On Your Knowledge Base Articles’ Structure
You’ve already realized the importance of language and structure in your knowledge base. First, you have to focus on your help content’s structure scaling. What you can do is to create a simple template that you can use for every article.
As an example, the articles in your knowledge base can contain these things:
- Topic or problem
- Step by step process to solve the issue or complete the task
- The result after the completion of the steps
- Related resources
Next, prioritize the workflow and use cases of customers. A set process is most likely included in most of the articles in your knowledge base that users can follow. Try to make the process as smooth as possible by doing the following:
- The most important information should be put first.
- Follow a chronological order so that each step makes sense.
- Put the easiest ones first if no chronological order is present between tasks.
- Avoid distractions by structuring the instructions in a manner that won’t interrupt their
Conclusion
After following the tips above, you can start writing the knowledge base articles and adding visuals to your content. Lastly, it’s time to publish your knowledge base. A knowledge base not only helps businesses in improving customer service quality and achieving higher customer satisfaction levels, but it also reduces costs. Of course, you have to prepare additional resources through new software and marketing. The abovementioned best practices should help you create a customer service knowledge base system that’s world-class and is able to deliver the best customer service experiences.
