Savvy companies know that customer service is a key way to differentiate themselves from the competition.
As has been mentioned here before, a knowledge base is one useful tool for improving your website’s usability and delivering great customer service.
But a knowledge base does far more than that. It also functions as a job training tool for your customer service agents and helps you to standardize and document best practices across the company.
Here are 5 reasons why you should set up a knowledge base if you haven’t done so already.
1. It reduces the load on help desks
A well written knowledge base can significantly reduce the load on your customer help desk. If your format is easily searchable, divided into appropriate categories, and highlighted prominently on your home page, it will be the first stop for your users and customers looking for help.
With an updated and detailed knowledge base, you will cut down on expenses needed to maintain the help desk while improving customer satisfaction.
2. It shortens call times
In some cases your customers will need to call you to ask for help. Maybe they don’t understand the problem they have and need some guidance. Maybe they are not technically trained enough to be able to hunt down the answer and fix it. Or maybe, the answer is not even there in the base.
In such cases, having a knowledge base would still be helpful. Agents can help frame the question in terms of knowledge base content and mail a quick link to the answer. In case the content is not there, the software will let agents make a note to a subject matter expert so that the repository can be updated.
3. It functions as a training tool
For most small businesses, training costs can cut into operating margins pretty quickly. On top of that, with rapid changes in business environment that might lead to changes in procedure or operations, it’s not cost effective for even bigger companies to run conventional training programs for employees.
This is where a knowledge base written according to best practices delivers its biggest bang for the buck. Once the content is up, successive batches of employees — both help desk or others — can go through the articles and gain a thorough understanding about the company’s products and services.
4. It serves as a repository of best practices
Most organizations have their intellectual capital locked up in the heads of a very small percentage of employees. For example, if you are in the business of cloud storage, your engineers who work on the product would know a lot more about it than the marketing guys.
What happens when such a person leaves the company? Or what happens when the company grows so big that one single person can’t train or mentor the newcomers? This is where an internal knowledge repository comes into the picture. The experienced personnel can note down the best practices, the secret sauce and the important stuff that matters and the rest of the company can improve their product IQ.
5. It’s great for SEO
Having pages of useful content that’s constantly updated means that you will get a Google boost post the Panda and Penguin updates. These articles prolong readers’ time on site, and lead to greater engagement.
Play your cards right, and your knowledge base can actually increase conversions.
Conclusions
A knowledge base is more than a customer service tool; it’s a memory backup, training manual, and conversion machine. How is yours working for you?
