Ruby Newell-Legner, a customer satisfaction expert, says that, “It takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative experience.”  Imagine your customer is trying to reach you for a query or dispute, and you aren’t accessible or fast enough to attend to their concerns? It would leave a negative impact on your relationship with the customer. Recent stats say that 78% of millennial customers have moved their business somewhere else after one single poor customer service experience. As a company that values its customers, this is the last thing you want to happen. So, what’s the fix?  To focus on creating a seamless knowledge base for customer service that would simplify your customers’ journey to navigate through your product. In this article, we will talk about the 7 best customer support knowledge base practices to guide you through creating one. But before that, let’s learn what a ‘customer service knowledge base’ is and how important it is to upscale your business.

What Does a ‘Customer Service Knowledge Base’ Mean?

It is an inbuilt repository of articles, frequently asked questions, picture guides, and solutions about a product to help customers understand and test your product on their own. From setting up the product to troubleshooting steps, it is an all-in-one knowledge base about the product and its features to ease the customer journey. In addition, it acts like a search engine where users can put their queries or related keywords to get solutions instantly.

Importance and Benefits of Customer Support Knowledge Base

It gives customers quick, seamless, and hassle-free access to the product’s information. Customers neither have to wait in queue for the telephone calls with the customer executive nor do they have to wait for responses while texting with a representative. For companies, a customer service knowledge base is beneficial as it saves time and cost, which it would have to invest in hiring and training a huge team of support agents. Also, according to a study by Coleman Parkes for Amdocs, 91% of customers would prefer an online customer knowledge base if it’s customised to their needs.

7 Best Customer Service Knowledge Base Practices

Healthy customer service knowledge base practices are necessary to build a seamless customer knowledge base. From making it accessible and responsive, there is much more to it to suit your customers’ needs. Check out these 7 best practices to make your knowledge base stand out. 

1. Create an Audience Persona:

Before you start the documentation work for your customer service knowledge base, make sure you create an ‘audience persona.’ According to Hootsuite, an audience persona is a fictional but research-based identification of your existing or desired audience. An audience persona will include the following details about your audience:

• Name
• Demographic details, like gender, age, income, geographical area, etc.
• Interests
• The background, which includes their personal and professional goals and details
• Behavioural traits
• Buying patterns

2. Keep your Team Diverse to Identify Blind Spots:

A diverse employee base will help you carry a more inclusive approach toward customers. Employees from diverse perspectives will value differences among the customers as well. They will help bring sensitivity and inclusivity to the tone and content of the customer knowledge base. Eventually, a diverse team will help you understand and serve your customers better and identify the blind spots in your approach.

3. Optimise your Customer Service Knowledge Base and Make it SEO Friendly:

89% of millennials use a search engine to seek answers and information before calling to get customer service. Optimising and making your knowledge base SEO friendly will make it searchable outside your website. You can add important keywords and tags as done in blogs. Interlinking the URL of the knowledge base for customer service makes it easier for search engines like Google to display your content in search results when the right keywords are used.

4. Keep your Content Fresh, Evolving, and Consistent in Tone:

Make sure your content is fresh and adds some value to your customers’ queries. Due to the constant technological advancements today, content has to keep evolving. Apart from articles, you can embed explainer videos, screenshots explaining the steps to use your product, and even links to your own articles to enrich your content.

5. Seek and Accept Feedback:

Always try to seek customer feedback. Check for customers’ reactions through emoticons, thumbs-up and comments to know their feedback on your articles and content. You can also check your dashboard’s performance metrics to check which content pieces are doing well and which aren’t working. It will help you improve your content.

6. Keep an Option for Human Intervention if Needed:

Companies with self-service knowledge base options enjoy 71% greater improvement in customer satisfaction rates compared to those who don’t. According to a British survey, 41% of self-service web application users also had to contact the service provider by phone. Likewise, if needed, there should also be an option of human intervention, as not all customer queries or issues can be solved online or through Artificial Intelligence. A report says that 67% of customers hung up on an automated system due to frustration at being unable to interact with a live person.

7. Choose Your Customer Support Team Wisely

Hoisting your own customer knowledge base can be a good option, but only if you have the resources and skills to manage it 24×7, all on your own. Otherwise, you can look for fully managed customer support and agents as an integrated extension to your internal team. Helplama offers fully managed customer support service to brands and helps them achieve a steep growth in sales and customer experience thereby building a strong customer-client bond. Contact us today to know more.