Importance Of Knowledge Base

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Did you know that 91% of customers would use an online knowledge base, if it were available and tailored to their needs?

In today’s world of convergence, everyone wants easy access to accurate information. Customers would rather search their question and get an immediate solution for their basic support issues. Heck, they expect it. Point.

Implementing a knowledge base can have a positive effect on the quality and efficiency of your customer service. However, creating a knowledge base can be a difficult task which takes a lot of work to be managed and maintained.

 🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth  🚀

Since 2017, millennials have become the largest generation worldwide. If you haven’t prepared your business to face the challenges that come with this change, it’s time to speed up the process.

The time is now to create your rich knowledge base.

Picture 1. A knowledge base can be a large contribution to your business

What Is a Knowledge Base?

A knowledge base is a centralized online database of information about a product, service, department, or topic. It supports collecting, organizing, retrieving, and sharing knowledge to customers and employees. You can use it to store data on how a new product, hardware, or software works. It includes FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and any other specific details you may want or need to know.

Related: FAQ Page – The Perfect Way to Power-Up Your Business

A knowledge base serves as a source of self-serve customer service. So, if you’re struggling to keep up with reactive customer service, or if you want to make a more significant customer experience, it’s time to look into creating a knowledge base. Not only does it help customers to find answers on their own, but it also seems like a great money and time saver for your business.

What Can Knowledge Base Offer to Your Business?

You will find a knowledge base as one of the easiest, cheapest tools for improving your customer service. Hence, it’s the ideal way to handle high-volume, simple interactions. And it’s available the whole time, 24/7.

Let’s see what its other benefits are:

1. Improves Productivity

Consider how much time your employees spend searching for information they need in cluttered inboxes, unorganized repositories, etc.? A knowledge base centralizes all the knowledge and makes it accessible and searchable. No more scrolling months back in your inbox for a single document. Therefore, your workers will spend more time on more critical tasks and won’t lose time searching for files.

2. Helps Your Support Team

Furthermore, by providing a helpful knowledge base, your customers can get the answers they need on their own. This frees up your support team to handle more important issues and tasks. By making your knowledge base available to the customers in some sort of an FAQ page, your support agents won’t need to waste time on basic and mostly generic questions. Along with that, you will definitely cut down on your expenses needed to maintain the helpdesk while improving customer satisfaction.

3. Serves as a Repository of Best Practices

Knowledge of your employees can be sometimes crucial for the survival of your business. Above all, that knowledge drives it through every single day. Most organizations have their whole intellectual capital in heads of a few employees. What happens when those employees leave the company? Or they get sick? That’s why having important information in one place with open access is so important.

Picture 2. Paldesk Knowledgebase

4. Solves Problems Proactively

In a fast-changing environment like ours, it is not enough to act when a problem arises. Meaning, the focus should be on being proactive, not reactive.

A high-quality knowledge base can bring added value to your customers through tutorials, step-by-step guides, interactive features, etc. And if it’s set up in a rather simple and user-friendly way, it will keep your customers entertained, while your support teams handle more important issues at the given moment. Think about every single interaction your customer has with your product/service, anticipate their problems, and act before they arise as a question to your customer support.

People Want Instant Help

If we haven’t convinced you by far, here are some more facts and stats that underline the importance of creating a knowledge base:

#1 Fact: no one likes to dial numbers guided by a recorded message, hoping to get in touch with a human.

Stats:  90% of companies are now planning to deploy AI within 3 years. This number is expected to grow to 40% by 2023. (Superoffice)

#2 Fact: Calling or writing long emails is not a good fit for modern customers.

Stats: 90 percent of customers find it important to receive an immediate response to their customer support questions. (HubSpot)

#3 Fact: Most clients just like their privacy.

Stats: 67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative. (Superoffice)

#4 Fact: as a knowledge base is a cost-effective way of providing high-quality customer support, more companies are going to invest in improving their old Help Centres

Stats: By 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI, an increase of 400% from 2017 (Gartner)

Picture 3. Paldesk Knowledge Base Article

How Does Knowledge Base Work?

Knowledge bases are divided into the standard scheme: tiers of categories and subcategories. Mostly bases use keywords and tags to categorize and sort information.

Unlike a FAQ page, you can scan them by the search tool that is built in the knowledge base itself. This kind of knowledge base can be much more efficient than storing office documents in a shared drive or managing an Intranet network. Tags are associated with a ticket or article, which can help identify content, categorize and show the location of specific information.

Knowledge bases are always changing as the contents within them are added, revised, and archived. Therefore, categories should be clear enough and you should avoid including tertiary level categories and below.

Never Stop Updating

If you think that once you have created a knowledge base, you’re done – you are wrong. The truth is that you need to continually review and update your knowledge base. Those updates depend on your company, products and service change.

Implement a system of analytics, so you understand how many people are using the content. Allow users to leave feedback and ratings on the content. Avoid delays and bottlenecks by identifying multiple people to approve content.

Set up gatekeepers who will alarm when information needs to be dropped, added or changed. Avoid sharing outdated articles with your customers on how to set up or fix something. They definitely won’t be pleased. Apparently creation of the knowledge base flows into the ongoing task of knowledge management.

However, once it’s all set, it definitely opens the door to improved customer service, greater productivity, increased collaboration, and a lot less time spent answering the same questions.

Conclusion

Knowledge base software means faster customer service. Period.

A knowledge base should become a central spot for bringing information to your customers. People get their answers when they need it, with no time wasted looking for contact information, calling or emailing. These answers can be anything, from billing to product features and technical stuff.

Therefore, you have to have a plan, because the knowledge base needs to be managed by someone. It can easily take your customer support to the next level. If you focus your efforts on improving your product to meet your customers’ expectations, you’re more likely to have happy customers. So, start today to save your team from the growing pile of support tickets they deal with each day and give your customers a way to help themselves.