Customer support is central to any company, and a knowledge base can turn out to be a great strategy for offering user-engaging content that caters to customer support needs and gives reliable answers. A good and effective knowledge base can work wonders for a company through simple, factual, and actionable information.
But are you doing it right?
Imagine this, a frustrated customer is on the call and demands a solution immediately, but your knowledge base is so badly disorganized that the support agent takes more than 10 minutes to answer this query. Taking this long will not only further infuriate the customer on the line but also annoy the customer support agent while finding the apt content and answers.
So how do you build your knowledge base that empowers your support agents that they can answer? Building a knowledge base requires you to keep in mind some important objectives and points. Take a look:
Plan Your Information
A knowledgebase needs a design and structure that can only be accomplished with planning. A poorly planned knowledge base will increase response and resolution time for the support agents. Without planning and structure, your support agents won’t be able to access the information precisely.
Just imagine if your knowledge base isn’t tailored to suit your internal needs, how can you expect to address customer concerns? It might seem daunting, but building a knowledge base is easier than you think; thanks to cutting-edge knowledge base software that comes equipped with canned responses.
You must understand what information is necessary, what information is highly essential, and how it can be categorized. Planning and categorizing frequently asked questions will separately help in better navigation. If the information is not categorized, support agents will face a tough time traversing the knowledge base.
Make Information Searchable
What’s common among most prominent knowledge bases: A search button!
An indispensable part of the knowledge base is the in-built search button and works similarly as a search engine. All a customer needs to do is easily type keywords or tags and hit search to fetch relevant results. There are two benefits of using a search button:
- Your support agents can look for any query or topic in the search button and get immediate responses.
- Your support agents won’t need to spend hours navigating through existing content to find the solution.
Using a search option also provides you data about the most searched terms and topics that interest the visitors on your website. Based on these, you can tailor the knowledge base content to cater to support agents as well as the visitors.
Provide Unified Information
What’s consequential to a knowledge base is that it has comprehensive streamlined documentation at one place, so that it can become easily reachable to the support agents. If information is scattered, both your support agents and customers will have to jump through pages to look for the required information, which isn’t a gratifying user experience.
Needless to say, your knowledge base must be easy to read or precisely, skimmer friendly for easy navigation. Most of all, it should follow a simple, organized structure, being navigation friendly and available in one space. All information related to a product or customer concern must be present in a single page for which frequent updations might be required.
Choose Admins and Other Roles
Once you are done sorting and structuring the knowledge base, you will have to choose admins and other roles. Choosing an admin will ensure that all changes in the knowledge base are supervised and only customer-centric information is put forward. Doing this will not only help in maintaining authority over the content but will also improve the quality of the knowledge base. Moreover, admins will control the information, preventing frequent and unchecked changes in the content, ensuring uniformity.
Create Relatable Content
While creating your knowledge base, make sure your customers can relate to it. The content should empathize with customers, so your customer support team has quick answers the minute they are asked frequently asked questions. If your content alienates your customers, all your creative efforts would go down the drain. Your knowledge base must answer the frequently asked questions of your customers to cater to their search needs better. Using traffic analytics is a great option as it will help you understand the type of content sought by the target audience that would engage them.
Allow On the Go Access
What’s integral to a knowledge base is that it should be available on the go, everywhere and anywhere. Customer support should enjoy remote access to the knowledge base. The only requirement should be a stable internet connection so the anyone from the customer support team can access any content piece on the knowledge base while on the move without needing any specific access controls. It can be done through cloud storage, which is quite effective at enabling access to editing and reading controls to multiple users from any part of the world.
Start Creating a Cutting-Edge Knowledge Base Today
So, these were the steps that you must take to build your knowledge base. Though creating a knowledge base may appear time-consuming process, it isn’t. Using the right knowledge base tool can make all the difference in your content creation process. Before you sign on the dotted line for a knowledge base, make sure you test the waters first. First, go for a solution that offers features such as easy search ability and context-sensitive help that would be a plus for both your support agents and your customers. A knowledgebase should serve as a training tool, so you should aim for quality; which is only possible with frequent revisions and astringent content monitoring plan.