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best practices for knowledge base

What Are The Best Practices To Build A Knowledge Base?

Akanksha

19 August 2022

A study reported that 91% of customers would use an online knowledge base for their queries, if it were available and tailored to their needs. This is exactly the reason why contact centers must build a self-service tool like a knowledge base. In this article we will discuss the best practices to 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.

What Is A Knowledge Base?

A knowledge base is actually a self service library for customer service built by contact centers which necessarily includes all of the information about a topic, product or a service. With this library, customers can get answers quickly to all their questions without seeking direct help from the contact centers of a company. 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.

Best Practices To Build a Knowledge Base:

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 contact center. 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 into a knowledge base without properly categorising will be of no use. The second step therefore in the process of building a knowledge base should be that contact centers have identify the channels that will bring a customer to the knowledge base. A knowledge base can also be integrated with a customer support system so that agents can fetch information from the knowledge base with ease. Categorising the knowledge base is therefore important to ensure that it is built 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 an appropriate person to prepare content for the knowledge base. 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 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. 51% of customers prefer technical support through a knowledge base

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 contact centers 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 Customers

A contact center should constantly try out various means of improving the knowledge base. One of the most effective ways of doing so is to pay attention to the suggestions of customers. It would 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 to find out exact ways of improvement. Thus, entertaining the suggestions of customers would undoubtedly be an effective way to build up a good knowledge base. A standard feature in Knowledge base tool is 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 improving your contact center metrics like first call resolution. Above tips mentioned would be extremely helpful in building up of a very efficient and effective knowledge base for a satisfactory customer service.

 

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