What Is a Customer Service Knowledge Base? Benefits, Tips, a Guide

In today’s ever more busy world, your customers aren’t able to wait 24-48 hours for you to reply to their email, or pick up the phone to call you.

Longer working hours and time-strapped customers are looking to ‘Google it’ and expect to find the answer or information they’re looking for immediately.

Let’s take a brief look below at some of the reasons why implementing a knowledge base is a really useful addition to your organization.

What is a customer service knowledge base? A customer service knowledge base allows your customers to self-serve their own answers to their frequently asked questions, reducing the high costs involved in extra workload for your live customer service agents. It will reduce your bottom line and help to retain your hard-won customers.

An effective knowledge base delivers that exact immediate information customers are looking for – in an organized way that’s easy to use.

A customer service knowledge base is so important to your customer experience as it allows customers to get the right information on how and when they want it.

However, implementing a successful customer service knowledge base program requires careful planning. In this article, we’ll show you the important benefits, top tips, and customer service best practices to help you achieve the exceptional results you would expect by implementing an outstanding customer service knowledge base

Why you need a customer service knowledge base

Creating a customer service knowledgebase can be a time consuming and needs a great strategy in order to manage and maintain knowledge base articles. Additionally, it can take time to create professionally written articles for your knowledge base that have a consistent tone, look and feel.

However, putting in the work to effectively implementing a knowledge base can have an extremely positive effect on the quality and efficiency of your customer service.

Customers and also your employees will really benefit from interactions with more knowledgeable support staff, who are empowered to resolve issues with greater speed and consistency.

Speed and knowledge both play a crucial role when it comes to customer satisfaction. Today’s customers don’t just want fast and accurate information, they will demand it, or take their vital custom elsewhere.

In a recent customer service report by experts, it was found that of the 1,000 companies surveyed, the average response time was a huge 12 hours and 10 minutes.

In order to see clearly how customers react to their customer service journey, let’s take a look at some statistics by a recent Harvard Business Review.

• 65% of customers expect a resolution to their issue at first contact
• 50% of consumers are only willing to wait one week for a response to their question before they take their business elsewhere
• 62% of customers think that having knowledgeable employees is the third most important aspect needed for a company to provide good customer service

One of the best ways to deliver responsive and high-quality service is to use a customer service knowledge base. Most customer service agents will have their own knowledge base in the form of their own Word document or notepad file which they have possibly created whilst on the job and learning from customers, or at best a short handout created by customer service managers.

One of the main issues with this method is that information might be inaccurate and outdated.

By using a dedicated knowledge base, customer service teams can find accurate and up to date information, in order to respond to customers quickly and effectively.

“62% of customers think that having knowledgeable employees is the third most important aspect needed for a company to provide good customer service”.

Benefits of using a customer service knowledge base

Organizations that adopt a knowledge-based approach to customer service can very quickly begin to reap the benefits of implementing a knowledge base such as those listed below.

• Improved efficiency Implementing a knowledge base program with user-friendly processes, which encourage agents to use the knowledge base database.
• Reduced resources and costs A knowledge base can help customers resolve issues themselves, which leads to reduced call and email volume.
• Increased customer trust and loyalty Providing consistent information across all channels help to builds trust from customers in the brand and company, which ultimately will improve customer loyalty.
• Improved content quality and consistency Focusing on improving the knowledge base quality will improve the quality of content and information across multiple service channels.

When combined, these operational improvements can have an extremely positive effect so that organizations to optimize the customer experience.

Tips for implementing a customer knowledge base.

Maintaining an effective knowledge base will reduce stress and workload within your customer service teams as more customers will opt to find the answer themselves.

Rather than making a call to your uber busy contact center, or sending an email to your customer service team, your customers will be able to find the answers to their questions much more effectively.

Using a knowledge base will have a significant effect on your bottom line as your customer requests move more seamlessly onto your digital resources.

Applications like CommBox enable you to grow a large customer knowledge base without endless administration requirements and providing customers a quick and easy route to finding answers – as well as saving your staff time and money.

Let’s look below at 5 key points that will contribute to the success of your CommBox knowledge base and ensure that it contributes to your customer experience and ultimately reducing your overall costs.

1. Make your knowledge base easy to use

Although it may appear obvious, it’s vitally important and an absolute requirement to an effective knowledge base.

If your knowledge base is too lengthy and complicated, with too much information, customers will simply give up and not use it.

Make sure that if you decide to go through all the effort of setting up the knowledge base, make sure it’s not full of difficult to navigate information. The most important thing to remember is that your customers are looking for quick access to information.

Online self-service should be the fastest customer service contact channel in your organization. Customers should be able to find their solutions quickly, and certainly more quickly than going through the standard customer service channels, such as email or phone.

Requiring customers to register or sign up, enter product numbers, or limit how or when they can comment on articles could be a barrier to the success of your implementation.

Your customers will become frustrated by being required to register and fill in a huge amount of detail, in order to get their questions answered.  Customers need to be able to comment or ask a question on any area they need to, without a long overly protracted entry.

2. Make your customer service knowledge base easy to find

if you’re dealing with a popular knowledge base software for your website, by using our high-quality CommBox software tools and solutions, you can guarantee an easy journey for your customers when they’re looking to find your knowledge base.

However, there is more to being able to find your knowledge base than simply getting Google to view it. For instance…

• Is there a link to your knowledge base prominently shown on your important customer service pages?
• How are you letting your customers know that they can get customer service from your knowledge base?
• Have you included a plug-in to advise your customers that a knowledge base option is available to answer their customer service questions?

3. Make your knowledge base easy to read

Simply adding links to technical documents or filling it full of technical jargon will confuse and add more frustration to your customer’s quest to find answers.

A customer service knowledge base that really contributes to the customer experience, is one customer will enjoy using, be easy to read and simple enough that anyone can follow and understand.

If your customers can’t understand the answer to the question they have, it could result in an upset customer to deal with, which adds extra workload and stress to your regular customer service contact channel. The last thing customers want is a failed service communication channel.

It’s best to focus your written language to a level that will ensure that your content is straightforward and easy for anyone to read, regardless of their language or educational background.

4. Your customer service agents should contribute to the knowledge base

Finally, no knowledge base can be an effective source of service that contributes to an exceptional customer experience if it isn’t integrated into your whole customer service strategy.

Simply adding a few articles won’t be enough. Give some thought as to the frequently asked customer’s questions currently, appear to be popular, and create enough material to cover the major points. Call center knowledge management tools can help you decide the information that is best to include.

The most effective customer service knowledge base is: 

• Full of articles and new content added
• A knowledge base where customers regularly interact with your customer service experts
• Where your customers will get the help they need
• Where you are able to communicate information about working with your product or service.

Make sure your customer service agents frequently interact and add to the knowledge base. That could be by adding new customer service articles or answering customer questions. Your agents need to be able to know where to find important answers to many of your customer’s most frequently asked questions.

5. Educate your customers on your knowledge base

There are several reasons why you should use your knowledge base as a marketing tool to promote. In order to discuss the advantages of using a knowledge base as a marketing tool, we are going to assume that you have already created a good knowledge base for your product.

• Customer retention According to experts Almost 70% of the identifiable reasons why customers left typical companies had nothing to do with the product. The main reason for moving to a competitor was the poor quality of service.

• Happier customers A lower number of tickets also means that customers are happier. They will be able to take advantage of the self-service support to find a solution to their problem or question much faster than if they called or emailed your support teams. In today’s digital age, your customers expect instant support to be offered to them.

Also, customers are more and more looking to prefer self-serve rather than communicating directly with an agent. Enabling your users to find answers themselves will help to retain them and keep them happy. By allowing them the freedom to search and find answers could also greatly reduce customer churn while leaving your teams to be more focused on attracting new customers.

• Reduced employee overheads If your customers know of the existence of your knowledge base, they will be able to use it as a self-service support tool, therefore decreasing the number of support tickets, which in turn will lower costs. This will enable you to maintain a smaller team of support people.

For a startup or a medium-sized business, this can give you more time and more importantly more budget to focus on development and research.

And finally…

Delivering an effective customer experience can add so much to your customer service strategy. Great digital customer experience is so important in today’s technologically connected customer focus world. Utilizing the vast array of benefits a customer service knowledge base adds to experience that customers that today’s customers have come to expect.

By incorporating a customer service base into your strategies, you can be sure that you will retain your hard-won customers, grow your sales and remain competitive.

If you would like any more information on how to begin the prices of integrating this useful digital tool into your customer service strategy, get in touch with one of expert and friendly team here at commbox.com and start your enhanced customer service journey today.

“A great digital customer experience is so important in today’s technologically connected customer focus world”.