We’re living in a day and age where time is more precious than money for customers. As time-strapped customers, we don’t like to wait for 72 hours to get a response to our queries. We want it instantly and in an organized way.
In such a scenario, what can you do to step up your customer experience game? Simple, a knowledge base can help you here – adopt a knowledge base customer service approach.
Having said that, we understand building a knowledge base for different types of customer service is a demanding task that requires immense work in managing and maintaining knowledge base articles.
Not to mention, it takes substantial time to write professional articles having a harmonious tone, feel and look for the knowledge base.
Today, we’ll resolve this concern for you, along with helping you understand the benefits, do’s and don’ts, and the tips to create a great knowledge base. Come along to achieve extraordinary results by applying a solid knowledge base customer service strategy.
Table of Content
Benefits of Having a Knowledge Base Customer Service
A truckload of benefits comes your way when you implement a knowledge-based approach to Customer Service. Some are listed below:
- Improvement in content quality and consistency
When organizations pay attention to improving their knowledge base quality, it results in the improvement of their content quality and information available at multiple service channels.
- Minimize cost and resources used
A well-executed knowledge base helps in resolving issues of customers using proper self-service methods. This results in the reduction of cost and resources used in handling calls and emails every minute.
- Puts human capital to better use
It takes time, effort, and money to train customer service agents so that they can resolve customer queries. Knowledge bases can eliminate this investment – especially for small businesses.
This lets your talented employees direct their efforts to more pressing problems while your knowledge base delivers unparalleled customer support.
- Enhanced customer trust and loyalty
When consistent and quality information is provided to customers and their queries are resolved even before they ask, you build customer’s trust and win their loyalty.
The cumulative application of these operational advancements has an unwavering effect. Thus making it viable for organizations to boost the experience of their customers.
Build an advanced knowledge base for your customers and give them answers fast – real fast.
Take your app and help center to the next level with CloudTutorial.
Do’s and Don’ts of Knowledge Base for Customer Service
With that said, here we’re sharing some do’s and don’ts you cannot skip while creating your customer service knowledge base-
Best Practices
Do maintain Standardization and Consistency
Maintain the same formatting and tone as your brand – consistency is the key.
Also, make sure you combine the articles that talk about the same thing. Make it as intuitive as you can and don’t throw a lot of unnecessary information on the face of your audience.
If your organization has evolved, change or rewrite your knowledge base for standardization.
Do update your knowledge base constantly
While you’re paying attention to persistently upgrading your product or service, don’t leave behind your knowledge base outdated. You certainly don’t want your customers to follow outdated instructions.
The best solution for such a situation is making sure your customer service team pays attention to updating the existing knowledge base constantly.
Do use graphics and text for making it easier to understand
Do you know a dense wall of plain text is your worst enemy in a state of self-service?
For being visually appealing, use both texts as well as graphics. If your product is tangible, go for more pictures. Alternatively, opt for graphics with catchy text if it is intangible
Always remember, your customer has a lack of time and patience. So, design your strategy accordingly.
Do use chatbots
Chatbots are an AI product that helps in automating the initial contact with the customers. Unlike humans, chatbots work 24*7 and can search for information faster than humans.
In case the customer’s solution doesn’t fall within the existing database, chatbots can raise a ticket automatically on the customer’s behalf or provide the contact details to talk to a customer service executive.
What To Avoid
Don’t go for data dumping
Naturally, you want to provide a solution to every issue. But don’t go for quantity over quality.
The major mistake organizations make is that they put as many pages as possible for every imaginable problem but that’s a wrong strategy to follow.
Firstly, answer limited questions and see what’s working. You have to find out what brings traffic to you.
Don’t try to sell inside your knowledge base
Don’t keep pitching your products inside knowledge base articles.
Your customers are looking for genuine answers and if you provide them a solution as a paid product/service, they’ll be annoyed.
In many instances, the best solution for your customer is to upgrade to a better service. That’s acceptable but this can’t be a universal rule. Don’t turn around every article as a mere sales pitch, focus more on real content.
Don’t stuff unnecessary jargon
Using all new-age industry jargon can make you look knowledgeable and sophisticated but it’ll make the information super hard for an average user to understand.
You’ll have users falling under different skill sets, and to cater to them well, avoiding unnecessary jargon is the key. If you’re still using them, either explain quickly or add a direct link to the glossary.
Don’t camouflage the support button
Never hide from your customers.
Your knowledge base should include different options like phone numbers, social media, email tickets in a noticeable place on your support page.
ABC Enterprises tries to reduce costs by hiding from customers so that customers can’t raise issues easily. Don’t be like them.
8 Tips to Create a Knowledge Base for Customer Service
These 8 best tips will help you build a solid knowledge base and serve your customer better-
- Organize your content
The more cluttered and disorganized your content is, the more your customers won’t find it worth their time and efforts. So, organizing plays a key role.
Divide your entire content into multiple categories and organize articles by subject matters, themes, and sub-themes.
Each part should cater to only one question/problem. Provide full information to customers but place it in different categories and subcategories making it easier for them to access.
Make navigation simple and effortless by pinning or linking related articles to usher your customers on a precise path.
With CloudTutorial, you can create your knowledge base with an easy and clean UI, customized as per your own needs. The software has an unlimited categories option, designed specifically to organize content.
- Know your target audience
Knowledge base articles must be written keeping the audience in mind. Keep these articles easy to grasp, short but content-loaded, and present them in a user-friendly way.
- Create macros
What are macros? Macros are single standardized responses that are sent to customers asking for similar information.
This allows customer service requests to be answered quickly and saves time and effort of making new, separate responses each time for the same topic. Macros are an easy and practical strategy to streamline customer service workflows.
- Admin and users
Fixate admin and user roles to check any repetitions in customer service articles before making it live. Remember it isn’t necessary to publish all knowledge base articles which are already there on the internet.
Provide information that is specific to your business and can serve your customers the best.
- Make use of templates
Templates are a quick and easy way to make sure your knowledge management database is uniform in tone, language, and content.
Usage of templates simplifies the task of the customer service team to provide professional answers to customers’ queries.
CloudTutorial has SEO-friendly knowledge base templates you can use to ease the process, maintain consistency as well as rank well.
- Set up a reference system
Establishing a quick reference system will help in simplifying the process. You can allot a unique generated ID to all your articles.
Make use of acronyms, abbreviations, sections, numbers, categories for single records.
- Collect customer feedback
It’s recommended to collect feedback from your customers to understand the relevance of your articles in the knowledge base.
Setting up an auto-responder is the best way to do so. It will ask for the customer’s response once a raised ticket is closed.
Customer feedback will let you know which articles are knowledgeable and helpful and which ones need further improvement.
With the help of CloudTutorial knowledge base search analytics, you can act on customer feedback easily as CloudTutorial suggests what new products/services you should work on next.
- Quality assurance
Before adding any new articles to the knowledge management database, a quality check is a must to know the level of relevancy and comprehensiveness.
For this, knowledge base managers come in handy. They can review every article draft before publishing it. This process is lengthy but it will provide quality assurance.
Build an advanced knowledge base for your customers and give them answers fast – real fast.
Take your app and help center to the next level with CloudTutorial.
Create a Free Customer Service Knowledge Base
- Knowledge bases are the most significant self-service tools. Your customers can utilize a knowledge base article and find solutions to questions – without taking the help of any customer service representative.
- With knowledge bases, customers don’t have to invest time and energy in connecting to a customer service representative, tech support, or raise support tickets to gain specific information or get problems resolved.
- Also, a knowledge base article is extremely easy to read. The speed and ease with which customers find the answers to problems, ultimately lead to a great customer service experience.
CloudTutorial is the simplest tool/way to create a knowledge base that customers love. With it, setting up a basic knowledge base with live chat and support ticketing systems is just a few minutes away.
It’s flexible for every type of industry and offers a customized knowledge base to serve your customers well. On top of that, you can create up to 25 articles for free on CloudTutorial.
This platform adds articles to the knowledge base and also conducts surveys to check the freshness of the article.
Rather than creating your knowledge base and leaving them in the dust, this platform adds new information into existing knowledge base articles to keep them up-to-date and helpful to enhance user experience.
Make it easy to use with the help of FAQs
Here’s one of the most important tips you’ll receive with regards to your knowledge base and eventually your business success – Make it easy for your customers.
- Make it easy for your customers to explore your knowledge base – follow the best practices like that of adding a FAQ section. And deliver nothing but the best customer service experience.
- WIth bifurcation in categories and subcategories and interlinking between relevant articles, the FAQ page results in saving your customer’s time when they’re searching for a specific query.
- These FAQ pages are crucial because they help organizations serve their customers better. How?
- When you make the efforts to provide solutions in the form of an FAQ page and resolve queries even before the customers ask, it proves that you understand your customers’ pain points.
- Additionally, an FAQ page helps you rank better on google.
CloudTutorial platform is one of the best ways for companies to create FAQ pages on their website and answer customer service questions with ease. Thereby enhancing customer experiences, garnering customer trust and customer loyalty.
Go for CloudTutorial if you wish to create a FAQ page and knowledge base for your customers which is useful, easy to navigate, interlinked with other related articles, broken down into categories based on the requirements of your content, equipped with a search function/search bar, and ranking on google.
FAQs
Conclusion
As businesses are becoming more customer-centric, an effective knowledge base is the need of the hour to enhance the overall customer experience.
By implementing a customer service knowledge base you can retain your customers, increase your sales and stand competitive. CloudTutorial does exactly this for you. We aim to provide solutions to customer service challenges and build a self-service culture. It provides higher levels of customer satisfaction and improves the quality of customer service with the benefit of cost reduction.
Try it out before you decide.
Create a test article NOW!
Using this tool, all you have to do is add your first test article and see how it looks. Now, you don’t have to sign-up or login into CloudTutorial software just to check how your first article appears.
