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Businesses around the globe are always trying to find more efficient means of establishing a better and far more potent position in their industry and the market. Some of these transformations are usually shaped by new technologies and software solutions, as well by the new trends in the marketing industry.
At the moment most of the efforts are being focused on the customers. As a result of this we now have customer centric marketing, new developments in the customer relationship management field and excelled customer support.
Out of these three fields, the one with the highest impact on ROI and customer retention is customer support. And good and efficient customer support is something that can provide a business with that edge it needs to surpass other competitors on the market. If one wants to provide an excellent customer support service, having a good customer support knowledge base is very important.
Here are some tips that could help businesses build customer support knowledge base and raise the customer satisfaction to a whole other level.
Set the Goals for Customer Support Knowledge Base
“Documentation empowers reproducibility of results.” – Eric Anderson, Information Manager.
Customer support knowledge base consists of big chunks of data presented through text. It usually contains valuable information on the company’s products, services and procedures. But all this information can quickly become a trap for anyone to fall into. This is why it is important to set your goals right at the start.
Is the main reason of building and having such a knowledge base just to provide additional information to customers? Do you want to the documentation to be interactive? Will it contain in-depth manuals and guides?
Will it focus only on common issues and problems an average customer might experience when using the company’s product or service? Should it also contain helpful information for the company’s employees and will it be used to speed up the onboarding process?
What will the Knowledge Base Contain
Once there are answers to the questions from the chapter above, it will become much easier and clearer to decide what to document. Since creating documentation and building a knowledge base is a heavy lifting process, in most cases it is strongly advised to have it done in such a way that it contains data that is useful to both customers and employees.
For instance, procedural information related to business processes and employees’ responsibilities can speed up the training process during the onboarding process. When it comes to customers, in-depth guides and answers to FAQs that are within two clicks away are certainly going to improve your customer satisfaction rates.
This way a company will have a knowledge foundation that will increase efficiency and productivity and at the same time serve as a unique and powerful customer support tool.
Take Care of the Document’s and Knowledge Base’s Structure
The general rule here is to start by documenting the simplest of things and work your way towards the most complicated and delicate instructions and guides. Why is this important? Well, this is the best way to make sure there are no gaps in the information a customer support knowledge base contains. Another great bit of advice for this occasion is to bring some diagrams into the picture, because they make it much easier for customers to recognize the items they are reading about.
Also, by grouping documents into categories it will be much easier for anyone to browse through the knowledge base. By having all the data properly structured, you ensure that there will be no frustrated customers.
Use Knowledge Base Software
In the Internet era it is impossible to make something efficient and useful without putting it online. As a matter of fact, it is considered a must for any business that wants to stay competitive. This online documentation is also known as a help center or support center. And the best way to put it to use is to integrate it with an official business website or with any other means a business is using to establish online presence, such as a mobile app or different types of widgets.
This is where knowledge base software solution comes in handy. It can be used as resource center, where employees can share and find information and it can also serve as a help center for customers. What makes knowledge base software so good is that it also supports a search option where customers can look for anything that interests them and quickly access all the necessary information.
On top of that, this software solution is mobile friendly. This means that all of the documentation can be clearly viewed on any screen size.
Implementing Online FAQ Software
Frequently asked questions is usually the first bist of documentation that a customer or employee refers to when an issue with a product or service pops up. This documentation should always be kept updated and it should contain the most frequently asked questions and answers based on the support team’s experience.
What makes online FAQ software and knowledge base software work perfectly together is that businesses can have an insight into what customers are searching for and quickly add those answers to FAQ pages, and also add them to tutorials or guides in different categories, according to the topic.
Make the Help Center User-friendly
When considering using knowledge base software as a help center, it is strongly advised that a business goes with a theme that is pretty simple, yet very functional. There is no need to make the help center complicated. It should serve customers as a problem solving solution, not vice a versa.
The most common outline of such a help center consists of a clearly visible search box, followed by the most popular categories that can allow an average viewer to get started quickly. Also, it is always better to present the documentation in order, based on the complexity of the issue. To make it even more efficient it is best to make “getting started”, “advanced tips and tricks” and FAQ subcategories for each topic separately.
Seeing all these tips on one place might be something that makes building a customer support knowledge base seem like a very hard task. And, yeah, it might be hard in terms of time and effort invested, but in the end a business establishment will have a perfect tool that has impact on several important business relevant issues: customer retention and satisfaction rate and ticket deflection. If this topic has your attention, feel free to expand your knowledge by reading other online articles on this subject
