A knowledge base is one of the most underrated tools not only in customer support but also in business. Sure, it looks simple and boring. It looks like something that a librarian would love to take care of. The truth is that there's more to the picture than meets the eye.
This seemingly simple repository of information, if managed well, can transform numerous areas of business starting from workflow, communication, customer service, ending with operational efficiency of your business and the well-being your support agents.
Let's have a look at ten benefits of knowledge base.
Improved morale
Customer service is about people on both sides. Without your happy agents there won't be any happy customers, so let's start with your people on the frontlines.
Without a knowledge base software, customer service sometimes can become a non-stop cycle of answering the same questions over and over again. It's even worse when it is raining incoming queries.
This can be mentally tough for your team and lead to burn out sooner rather than later. Such days or weeks quickly drain motivation which can negatively affect the performance of your people, and, in the long run, the quality of customer service your business offers.
A well maintained knowledge base prevents this. It contains help articles, guides, instructions, and videos videos for solving the most frequent customer problems. Your agents don't have to craft the same explanations word by word all over again, or waste time browsing through knowledge resources scattered all around the place. It's all there, ready to shared with a customer.
Investing in a knowledge base will not only speed up resolution times, but, most of all, make your agents' lives easier. Happy agents make happy customers.
Improved productivity
Managing customer service requests can be a challenge if requests pile up and your customer support team is overwhelmed. Without the right resources, your customer service agents may not be able to keep up with incoming requests, leading to extended resolution times and, in the end, frustrated customers.
It's not only the volume of requests that hinders productivity. Your agents probably get lots of repetitive questions, need to write answers from the scratch, or contact other people in your company for answers. These and other factors also poorly reflect on the total number of handled support tickets.
With an internal knowledge base in place, your agents are able to quickly find ready-made answers, sometimes even without leaving a chat, and use it to answer customers' queries. This massively lowers response times, decreases the ticket resolution times, and lets your agents handle more support tickets.
Lower costs for customer support
Customer service is essential for customer satisfaction and long-term success, but it can generate significant costs. The need for support staff, their hiring and onboarding, the maintenance of ticketing software, and other tools that ensure smooth support add up quickly.
Not only do these costs strain financial resources — they also take the time that could be spent innovating and finding new ways to generate value.
Every support ticket requires resources that must be invested in order to solve it. This includes staff, time, and tools. Depending on the volume of tickets and the size of a support team, this can generate significant costs.
A well-structured knowledge base will do a great job in lowering costs of customer service. It frees up support staff from tasks that can be addressed by an external knowledge base. Empowering customers to resolve their issues on their own helps you to save on your team's headcount and the number of support requests.
When self service does not take place and your agents are involved, a knowledge base lowers the time spent on tickets, because your team can quickly find and send relevant answers.
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Consistent customer support
One of knowledge base benefits is consistent customer service. It's a few things that a knowledge base will help you achieve.
One of them is availability. By having your external knowledge base available online 24/7, your customers can find the answers they need without waiting until your team gets online. It's a great solution for business operating across different time zones.
Another aspect of availability is about how easily your customers can reach your support. A knowledge base software lets your customer seek support using their smartphones, so they can do it anytime they want, anywhere they are. Most knowledge bases offers mobile-friendly and responsive help centers, so browsing them is smooth and easy.
Consistency is also important when it comes to information. A comprehensive knowledge base helps you manage information, make sure it's all up to date, accurate, and available. It also encourages to cover as much knowledge areas as possible, including FAQs, product manuals, troubleshooting guides, how-to articles, and other topics that might come useful.
Improved customer experience
Happy agents, more productive and available customer support department pay off and improve the overall quality of your support. It's really no surprise that customers value it.
These days, customers expect quick and effective customer service. Whether they are calling a hotline or visiting a brick-and-mortar store, they want fast issue resolutions. The same happens online, where expectations are even bigger and competition is a few clicks away. Experience is a product these days.
A knowledge base software is one of the best tools to improve customer experience because of its availability, easy navigation, in-depth knowledge, a frictionless process, and faster resolution times. It's probably the fastest way of solving your customers' most common problems.
All of these ultimately lead to a better customer experience.
Improved retention
A well-designed knowledge base can be a valuable asset for any business, but it is particularly important for companies that offer software as a service (SaaS). Customer retention is important for SaaS businesses, because it is much more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one.
SaaS tools can be complicated. Because there's plenty of features, options, use cases, depths of use, and problematic scenarios, such tools require in-depth help resources that will lead users out of the dark.
A proper knowledge management process will not only save your team from answering hundreds of tickets, but it will also help users find out how to get the most out of the product. A knowledge-packed help center that covers as much areas of a product is a great way to improve customer retention and loyalty.
Customers are more likely to stay with you if they can take full advantage of your products.
Improved internal communication
In any organization, internal communication is key to ensuring that everyone is on the same page and works towards the same goals.
A knowledge base can be a valuable tool in improving knowledge management and knowledge sharing. By providing a central repository for information, a knowledge base software makes it easy for employees to find the answers they need. No matter if they are looking for specific policy details or simply want to know who to contact for help.
In addition, a knowledge base can help to reduce duplication of effort by making it easy for employees to see what has already been done or said on a particular topic. This can significantly reduce the time it takes to gather information and make decisions.
Knowledge base documents at fingertips also help in onboarding. Whether they work in a customer support, sales, or marketing team, new employees can quickly get up to speed on important aspects of the business and be productive faster.
Overall, a knowledge base can greatly improve internal communication by making it faster and more efficient for employees to access the information they need.
Improved search visibility
An interesting side-effect of maintaining a knowledge base is increased visibility in search engines.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any product or service, and should be a part of every digital marketing strategy. Your knowledge base can be a great way to increase your search visibility.
Help articles by nature are relevant, helpful to a reader, well-organized, and get views. All of these are a strong signal to crawlers that this content is valuable. This makes it easy for search engines to understand what the content is about and index pages. This, in turn, can help to increase your visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The more visibility you have in SERPs, the better chance you have of attracting potential customers who might visit your website and learn more about your products or services.
Insights
I'm sure you're somehow familiar with analytics. It's almost impossible not to come across any sort of analytics while working in online business.
Data analysis give opportunities to make better decisions by understanding patterns and trends in data. By making sense of data, you can optimize performance. Additionally, data analysis and insights tools can help you to better understand your customers and hear what they want.
When it comes to a knowledge base software, analytics can help you understand how your customers interact with your help resources. You can track what they look for, what the most popular reads are, what questions have no answers, or what the satisfaction score is.
This information can then be used to improve the content of the knowledge base articles, improve search, structure, or fine-tune particular articles, making your knowledge base more user-friendly and efficient. Analytics helps you to identify knowledge gaps, allowing your team to add new content to fill those gaps. By tracking analytics you can make data-driven decisions to ensure that your knowledge base is relevant, delivers satisfactory experience and, in the end, is useful both for your team and customers.
What's more, data from your knowledge base will show you the areas of your business, product, or service that generate the most friction and force users to seek help. This can be inspiring when it comes to any changes or improvements in your product or service.
Improved authority in a niche
Any business, whether small or large, start-up or enterprise, needs to establish some sort of authority in its niche if it wants to be successful. Good product, service, or content marketing is one thing and might not be enough to gain recognition and stand out from your competitors.
Another area of business you should hone is customer service. By providing great help resources you prove your expertise in a field and build trust with your audience.
A knowledge base software can be a powerful tool for establishing authority in a niche.
Building your knowledge resources shows potential customers that you're passionate about your product or service, and that you're willing to put in the extra effort to make sure your customers are successful. It also demonstrates that you have a deep understanding of your product or service and that you're confident in your ability to provide valuable guidance, and commitment to accuracy and detail.
Conclusion
Setting up a knowledge base for your business has many advantages.
The ultimate benefit of having a knowledge base software is that it saves both your customers and customer support team a lot of headaches. Though self service, customers get what they want, when they want, with no need for human interaction.
Your employees have fewer calls to take, spend less time dealing with repetitive tasks and can focus on more important issues.
When it comes to other benefits, a knowledge base can improve your search engine optimization, provide data insights, and help you to establish authority in a niche.
All in all, your business performs better. In the end, this translates into happier customers, employees, and more profitable business.
