Preloader
Best practices for building a knowledge base

Best practices for building a knowledge base

Akanksha

07 December 2021

The study also reported that 91% of customers would use an online knowledge base, if it were available and tailored to their needs. This is exactly the reason why a business must build a self-service tool like a knowledge base. In this article we will tell you how you can build a knowledge base for your customers.

But before we dive deep into the requirements to build a knowledge base, let us first understand what exactly is a knowledge base.

Definition - Knowledge Base

A knowledge base is actually a self service library for customer service which necessarily includes all of the information about a topic, product or a service. With this library, the customers can get answers quickly to all their questions without seeking direct help from the customer service department. Thus, a business needs to make sure that the knowledge base should be build in the best possible way so as to ensure hundred percent customer satisfaction.

Let us now look at the best practices for building a knowledge base for customer service.

Tracking the Most Popular Queries of the Customers

The first point to consider at the time of building a knowledge base is to decide what it would be containing so that it offers the best help for the customers. Now, to effectively do this, it is of immense importance to keep a track of the most popular queries of the customers. For this, having a look at the chat history of customers on live chat or with a chatbot would be necessary. It would also help to listen to call recordings to identify the top concerns of the customers reaching out to the service department. This would serve great purpose in being the starting point for the planning of what all content to put in the knowledge base at the time of building it.

Proper Organisation is a Mandate

Throwing in multiple information in a knowledge base without properly categorising it will be of no use. The second step therefore in the process of building a knowledge base should be to identify the channels that will bring a customer to the knowledge base. A knowledge base can be integrated to either live chat or chatbot, it can also be integrated with a customer support system so agents can also fetch information from the knowledge base with ease. Categorising the knowledge base is therefore important to ensure that the knowledge base so built is extremely easy to navigate. This can be easily done by tagging the articles using specific keywords or search terms which accurately describe the content. The creation of user friendly self service portal with the help of proper graphic designs can also be a great choice since it would enhance the user experience to a great extent.

Getting the right person to write

The next thing to consider is to get the appropriate person to prepare the content for the knowledge base so that the content written is good in all aspects. Irrespective of the types of content produced, it is important that everything is easy to read and understand particularly in case of technical topics. Having the right person prepare the content for the knowledge base will ensure that the instructional content so fed in the knowledge base is accurate, free from any kinds of jargons and quite straightforward in nature. In this way, some of the most complex content can be explained in quite simple terms thereby making it convenient for the readers to understand. Remember you are making the knowledge base for the masses.

Updating the content is essential

It is quite a common fact the business processes, product offers, policies as well as services keep on changing on a regular basis. Thus, for providing the customers with an updated and accurate information all the time, the businesses should make sure that the content of the knowledge base or self service portal gets updated regularly. The content of the portal should be always up to date but care needs to be taken that no information should be included in it that has not yet been finalised.

Entertain the suggestions of the customers

A business should constantly try out various means of improving the knowledge base. One of the most effective ways of doing so is to pay a lot of attention to the suggestions of the customers. It would also be a very good idea to conduct a formal survey among the customers regarding the self service portal. The results of the survey so conducted should be carefully analysed so as to find out the exact ways of improvement. Thus, entertaining the suggestions of the customers would undoubtedly be a very good way to build up a very good as well as effective knowledge base. A standard feature in Knowledge base tool requesting the reader whether it was helpful should be regularly audited. It provides a good feedback on the usefulness of the knowledge base.

Conclusion

A knowledge base is a great self service tool not only for your external customers but for internal team as well. Creating and deploying a good knowledge base can help in increasing your call center metrics like first call resolution. Following the tips mentioned above would be extremely helpful in building up of a very efficient and effective knowledge base for a great as well as satisfactory customer service. If you have some more tips in mind, please share them with us.

 

Subscribe to our Newsletter.

Recent Blogs

Subscribe to our blog post