A good knowledge base software integrated with your business website is important for your daily workflow to run smoothly. The major reason for this is that when faced with a roadblock, employees can quickly refer to the knowledge base and immediately know the next steps to follow, thus enhancing efficiency at work.
Without a good knowledge base, employees are left with no other option than to consult seniors or managers when they face a bottleneck. Thus, the turnaround time for a project increases by leaps and bounds, which is bound to hurt customer satisfaction in the long run.
Maintaining a good internal as well as external knowledge base is essential for increasing customer satisfaction towards your business. Read on to find comprehensive guidance on what a knowledge base is, what makes a knowledge base good, and finally, learn some useful tips and best practices to implement in your business.
What is a Knowledge Base?
A knowledge base is a centralised digital repository of materials meant to help users find answers to their queries as they navigate through the website. Maintaining a good knowledge base is important because 70% of customers expect brands to have a self-service section on their portal. An optimised knowledge base also helps users to
- Know things quickly and make purchase decisions without the need for direct assistance, which is time-consuming
- Self-troubleshoot and feel that they are in control of the product or service that they have invested in
That being said, knowledge bases need to be integrated with a customer messaging platform, and Atidiv has a good service to provide if you are looking for one.
Furthermore, knowledge bases are of two types:
- External knowledge base, which is meant for the general traffic that visits your website
- Internal knowledge base, which is meant for the employees of a business to refer to while they solve customer queries or perform an internal process
What Features does a Good Knowledge Base Have?
A good knowledge base can be recognised with the help of a few distinguishing features. Let us take a look at them one at a time:
An Easy-to-Understand Layout
The key function of a knowledge base is to act as a repository of knowledge for users. The goal you should have in mind while designing the base is that users should be able to find the information they require with ease and comprehend the contents without resorting to external sources. These are the ways you can ensure this happens:
- Mark clear categories under which you group content
- The labelling of each group should be straightforward
- Avoid too many choices in the layout, as it confuses users
If you keep these points in mind as you build your knowledge base, it is sure to benefit users when they are looking for information.
Information Must Have Clarity
The end objective of creating a knowledge base is that it should be of help to the users, whether it is the employees or customers. Therefore, it is imperative to
- Have a human-centric approach to the presentation of information
- Have the text written with lucidity so that it is easy to grasp
- Present the text in short sentences to enhance readability
- The logical flow of information must be maintained throughout
The importance of clarity cannot be overstated, especially when self-service costs businesses a mere 0.10 USD per interaction as opposed to 12 USD for live support.
Prioritised Search Feature
Data reveals that 89% of customers try to solve their problems on their own by searching for solutions on the internet. Therefore, you must have an SEO-optimised knowledge base integrated with your website so that customers are readily redirected to the relevant web page. Furthermore,
- Your business must have a strong online presence so that you are easily detected by search engines. The easier you are to discover with searches, the more positive impact your brand value has on the customer.
- The knowledge base must be adequate enough for your employees to direct customers towards a self-service page/instructions through messaging support. Thus, the number of tickets issued every day will be reduced, requiring you to have fewer workers to deal with tickets. You cannot let go of this opportunity of cost-cutting and enhancing customer satisfaction simultaneously.
Regular Updating of Knowledge Base
Since a huge chink of customers depend on the knowledge vase for self-troubleshooting, you must update the pages regularly. Doing so is important because business operations need you to bring changes in your service/software/product to the end that the previous solutions are made redundant. Failing to update your knowledge base software regularly would lead customers to believe you have less regard for their time, resulting in customer churn.
What are the Best Practices and Tips for Maximising a Knowledge Base?
Knowing the knowledge base best practices allows you to create a user-friendly information repository that proves useful for your employees as well as your customers. These are some tips that you cannot ignore:
- Defining Your Goals for the Audience: While you curate content for your knowledge base, it is important to know whom you are addressing. Since knowledge base materials tend to get technical at times as they might have instructions on troubleshooting, the content must be worded lucidly. The logic of the instructions should be easy to follow, otherwise, the customer will need to contact your live chat outsourcing, defeating the purpose of building a knowledge base.
- Investing in a Powerful Search Mechanism: It is important to understand that customers have little time on their hands, so more often than not, they try to self-troubleshoot. In this context, an AI-powered search feature can help customers save time. AI tools that are equipped with potent machine learning mechanisms can predict the required page as the customer hits the search button. Without this mechanism in place, customers have to look elsewhere for solutions, impacting customer satisfaction negatively.
- Incorporating Good Backlinks: Customers go through the content that you offer on your website. Besides being SEO optimized for better discoverability, these articles should have backlinks redirecting customers to more useful resources. It is especially useful when the customer makes a related search that yields an article that does not directly offer a solution.
- Optimising Multimedia Usage: The traffic directed towards your website might not be comfortable reading through chunks of text. Furthermore, it is difficult to express certain information through text. Therefore, short animated videos and tutorials improve the quality of your knowledge base. Structure best practices in a manner that makes it easy for you to implement and optimise your content.
- Aligning Knowledge Base with Business Goals: Ultimately, the external knowledge base is for providing support to the customer, enhancing customer satisfaction, and roping in more customers. Therefore, the knowledge base should be designed for sales, with call-to-action buttons on every page offering issue resolution. Thus, you can also drive sales from the resource pages themselves and generate revenue.
- Fostering a Culture of Collaboration: It is a given fact that experienced employees who have seen the initial days of your business have considerable knowledge of what works for your business. Therefore, you must engage such seasoned employees to take part in the designing of knowledge base resource pages and even structuring the content in a user-friendly way.
- Reward When it is Due: The best way to upgrade your knowledge base is by preparing your employees to update the knowledge base effectively. If you reward employees for efficiently contributing to the knowledge base, they will stay motivated and improve the quality of resources.
FAQs On Knowledge Base
1. How do I maintain clarity in complex technical instructions for my knowledge base?
Maintaining clarity in the resource pages is a must, otherwise, it defeats the purpose of a knowledge base. To bring clarity to your content pages, make sure the text is structured, optimised for SEO and readability, logically sound, and written in a lucid language. Lastly, it is important to understand the audience for whom the resource page is meant, and streamlining the text accordingly is always a plus.
2. Can a knowledge base increase employee efficiency?
Yes, a knowledge base can certainly increase employee efficiency. The internal knowledge base instantly guides the employee on the steps to be followed in a particular scenario. Thus, there is hardly any need for consultation with a senior, effectively reducing the troubleshooting process and the turnaround time.
3. How do I achieve cost-cutting through a good knowledge base?
A good knowledge base will gradually help you reduce the number of tickets raised every day for service requests. Your customers will be used to self-troubleshooting their issues, allowing you to bank on fewer customer service personnel, thus saving a considerable amount of salary annually.