Knowledge Base: According to Microsoft’s survey, 96% of consumers believe customer service is essential in choosing to become loyal to a brand.
In the digital age, with increasing access to information, customers demand more agile, efficient and quality service from companies. Still thinking about access to information for customer service, a survey by McKinsey & Company revealed that 86% of B2B executives prefer to use self-service tools over talking to a sales representative.
After All, What Is A Knowledge Base?
The knowledge base is a repository of content developed by the company that gathers the most relevant information to help customers solve problems and assist employees in customer service.
Knowledge base contents can go beyond text and be presented in different formats – such as videos or infographics – depending on the strategy adopted by the company. However, the main objective is to gather the most relevant information about the company, its products, services and processes in a single, easily accessible place.
Why Is It Essential To Have A Knowledge Base?
We’ve heard the expression “time is money” a lot, and it’s more than true when it comes to customer service.
A company that takes time to solve customer problems or has a prolonged service process tends to deteriorate the relationship with customers and may lose them due to an oversight that can be solved, in part, with a good and up-to-date knowledge base. Among the benefits that the knowledge base brings to companies, I highlight:
Agility And Quality In Customer Service:
The knowledge base gathers essential information that contributes, in terms of care, to two situations:
- The customer can perform self-service and solve what they need without directly resorting to the company’s support;
- The service by the company’s support team becomes faster and more agile.
These situations are consequential because customers can identify and resolve their doubts and problems without having to open a case with the company by concentrating information in a single place. This fact contributes to a lower number of open calls.
With a lower number of open calls and a knowledge base that contains, in detail, all the processes to be carried out to resolve specific situations, the service team can be more agile and resolve more calls in less time and with better quality.
Customer Satisfaction
Building relationships is not easy. Keeping them is an even more challenging task when it comes to the business world.
In this sense, the knowledge base, in addition to improving customer service and avoiding unnecessary wear and tear in their relationship with the company, is also a way to show customers more transparency and engage them even more.
That’s because they can access much more detailed information about the company’s processes, products and services.
And with this information, customers will not only be able to perform self-service. Still, they will also be able to identify how the contracted company can contribute even more to the business’s success.
Helps In Training New Employees
Can a knowledge base serve as a basis for training? Yea! The knowledge base, as mentioned earlier, is an extensive repository of relevant content about the company. Therefore, it can help – and a lot – in training new employees to learn about the company’s processes quickly, the primary customer questions and how the service and problem solving are carried out internally and externally.
Building Your Knowledge Base In 9 Steps
Building a knowledge base is a task that demands effort, time and dedication. To help you in this process, we’ve separated some practical tips to help build your company’s knowledge base.
Choose Content Sources
Before anything else, you need to understand your sources because that’s where your content is. It is important to emphasize that the authorities must be reliable and consistent with the company’s objectives when creating the content base.
Some sources your company can look for are documentation from the company’s commercial, support and service and customer success teams, feedback from customers and employees, trusted sites on specific subjects and academic articles on certain topics relevant to the company.
Define Your Persona
A persona can be defined as the perfect reader for the content you create. That is, it goes far beyond the generality of defining a target audience. Each persona requires a different form of communication and consumes content with a specific language and a specific call to action (CTA). That’s why it’s essential to know your content base’s persona and always keep it in mind when producing content.
Determine The Flow Of Your Knowledge Base
Whether to help employees in customer service or to help the customer in self-service, it is essential to understand that your knowledge base needs to follow a certain logic of thinking.
That’s because your persona will journey through your content to understand more about the company’s products or services and solve problems.
As An Example:
A journey can be either a segment of the content base with all the questions and information related to product/service X or a piece with customers’ central questions in general and branch out to more specific information. About products/services. And it can mix formats like video, articles, documentation, infographics, tutorials, and more.
Therefore, before creating your knowledge base, it is essential to define how this journey will take place to understand how to organize the production and publication of content more efficiently and to ensure a better customer experience with the final product of all this work.
Assign A Team For The Mission
Creating the knowledge base is a mission that demands time, focus, dedication and, above all, empathy. In addition, of course, knowledge for the preparation and production of content according to the persona and strategy of the company.
Therefore, it is necessary to bring together a multidisciplinary team capable of embracing the mission and producing and reviewing quality content for the company’s knowledge base.
Validate The Contents
After the content production phase, it is necessary to validate if they are by what customers are looking for and need to solve their problems. To validate the content, you can turn to your internal teams, including the groups selected as content sources. But you can also perform validation with customers and partners. Based on the feedback from the first validation phase, make the necessary adjustments and validate again.