It’s a continuous struggle to provide superlative customer service. Consumer expectations are rising across the board—not due to a specific industry but from all of the excellent interactions that leading companies provide. A study conducted by Microsoft provided further evidence on the importance of customer service. According to it, 90% of its respondents used customer service as a factor for deciding whether they should do business with a brand or not.
However, in an age where customer expectations keep soaring every other day, actually pulling off satisfactory customer service is no small task in itself. A study conducted by Salesforce proved how easily businesses get the short end of the stick when it found that 76% of customers will keep switching brands until they find an experience that satisfies their expectations.
IMAGE: SALESFORCE
Hitting this inevitable wall can and has thrown businesses into disarray. Overcoming the hurdle isn’t an option when customers expect personalization at every touchpoint of their journey, with as many as 84% of customers desiring it. The solution to this quandary, though, is as simple as the problem is complex and lies in two words. Customer education.
What Is A Customer Service Knowledge Base?
Oftentimes, businesses ask the right questions in how to scale customer support or how to help a greater number of customers quickly without compromising service quality but tend to complicate the solution by looking for overly complex solutions instead of picking the easy way out and create a knowledge base. With customer education, brands can enable their customers to help themselves, automating customer service as they want to.
IMAGE: ZENDESK
A Zendesk survey found that self-service was the new rising trend among customers and that businesses should ensure that they can find the help they need themselves. And according to the survey, 67% of customers preferred self-service over talking to a support representative. You can facilitate this self-service and enable customers to educate themselves with the help of a centralized library of information called a knowledge base.
Most customer support teams can build this library of information in the form of articles, documents, user manuals, FAQs, among others. This can help consumers find the answers they are looking for and quell their service issues, leading to a better overall experience 51% of customers prefer technical support through a knowledge base .
What Is The Need For A Knowledge Base In Customer Service?
As mentioned above, providing superior customer service constantly is no cakewalk. Furthermore, with customers increasingly taking a turn towards self-enlightenment, brands that don’t see a knowledge bases’ advantages, or worse, neglect them, will lose out on numerous business opportunities.
A recently conducted Gartner study found that almost a billion service tickets will be automatically raised by customer bots by 2030 courtesy of their newfound propensity for self-service. As brands look to service these many requests, they are naturally going to turn to automation through artificial intelligence and machine learning. In fact, 25% of customer interactions were already automated through AI and ML in 2019, with the tipped to grow to 40% by 2023.
One way you can vanish the bulk of these requests is by simply educating the customer about your products and services through the right resources. You have to ensure that they have the right tools available to them when they have a problem. With the help of a customer service knowledge base, you can offer responsive service of the highest quality.
You can also improve the success of customer interactions by making the same knowledge base available to your support teams for updated information about your product or service to service more sophisticated queries quickly and effectively. This aspect of a knowledge base makes it the third most important resource that a company should own in the eyes of as many as 62% of customers.
Benefits Of Using A Knowledge Base
If the advantages of a knowledge base mentioned above were not enough, they are capable of much more. Adopting a customer service approach that centers around a knowledge base can help you realize the following benefits.
1. Improved Agent Productivity
Deploying a knowledge base can help you improve upon agent research time and cut back on the time they spend looking for answers. Making it available for internal use will improve agent knowledge and subsequent productivity.
2. Elevated Customer Experience
A knowledge base helps you provide support to customers without them having to ask for help. Not only does this make for a great experience, but it also sets the base for customer success.
3. Enhanced Customer Retention
When your customers are able to find success, they are much more easily retained. When retention rates increase, companies can experience increased profits, sometimes as much as 25-95%.
4. Improved Consistency Of Customer Support
Delivering consistent information across different channels increases trust in the minds of the customers and enhances loyalty. It also leads to the improvement of content quality and information across all channels.
Framework For Building An Effective Knowledge Base
The goal of a knowledge base is to enhance customer service by improving its quality and speed. With the help of the following tips, you will be able to lay a robust foundation for a knowledge base that will allow you to do just that.
- Begin with the structure and design of the knowledge base. Discoverability is the most important factor when it comes to a knowledge base. It should be designed in a way that information is easily available to the user when they need it.
- Enable easy usage of the knowledge base by interlinking resources. After you have formulated your knowledge base’s design, sift resources into categories and hyperlink them contingent on the relevance of the information they hold.
- Standardize articles with the help of templates. Templates are a great method to streamline content behavior and ensure it is consistent in tone and language throughout.
- Include helpful visuals in your knowledge base. Irrespective of the format you decide upon, ensure to include visuals with your content. It helps learners understand the features of a certain aspect of your product or service more deeply.
- Gather customer feedback and improve the knowledge base. This will help you understand how efficiently your resources are so that you can find and better areas for improvement.
Tips For Implementing Knowledge Base
A knowledge base has a few components that are essential for its success. The following tips will help you implement your knowledge base successfully:
- Include an FAQ section. This will act as a guide to the most commonly encountered issues and give customers a headstart on how to use your product/service.
- Provide a Contact Support option. Regardless of how beautifully constructed some knowledge bases might be, sometimes customers can have issues with the simplest of things. It is essential to thus provide a Contact Support option available on the page for instantaneous customer support.
- Include a search function. The search function will act as the window to your library’s search engine. This will enable customers looking for specific information to find what they are looking for without any difficulty.
Conclusion
Creating and implementing a knowledge base can aid you in scaling customer support and customer success while also reducing costs, enhancing customer satisfaction, and increasing overall RoI. Additionally, it allows you to focus on proactive customer service as well through customer enlightenment, leading to a massive organizational win.
Author Bio: Ashwini Dave is passionate about Business, Entrepreneurship, E-commerce, emerging technology, and Digital Marketing. She is working with Acquire as a digital marketing expert. She is a free soul and adventurous scholar who spends her free time with herself, loved once, music, as well as watching & playing sports. She is ocean addicted and on roads being a thrill-seeking traveler to get new experiences as she looks at life as our very own works of art. Linkedin / Twitter
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