Anyone would agree that one of the key things to give amazing customer service is a speedy resolution. Too often, customer support people find themselves putting a customer on hold for far too long. This happens because they can’t quickly find the answer to the customer’s question or problem. Even worse, they may end up giving inaccurate responses. Not only does this hurt customer satisfaction, it also drags down employee productivity. So how can companies like yours do better? Building an extensive library of information about your products, services, and operational processes is a great way to start. This is what we call an internal knowledge base for customer support.
There are several different approaches on building a central source of information for your internal team. As an outsourcing company helping businesses develop and improve their own knowledge base, here’s a guide we’ve put together.
1. Collaborate with your team to capture the most common questions and concerns.
Knowing what customers typically ask and what issues they normally face is a great starting point for creating your knowledge base. Therefore, anyone in the team who deals with customers directly is an invaluable source of information. Work with your team to capture all the frequent questions, concerns, and challenges that they encounter on a day to day basis. From there, come up with how you want those to be answered. Obviously, the answers will not be the perfect response to the same or similar query all the time but they can serve as a powerful guide for team members to use.
2. Use an effective documentation structure for ease of use.
Even if you’ve gathered all the right questions and concerns, having a poor structure in documentation can render your knowledge base for customer support ineffective. So make sure to use a format that’s highly organized and intuitive.
A good practice among companies is to have a table of contents with all the questions, categorized properly. When a question is clicked, the person gets redirected to the answer including any internal notes or special instructions. You can also use keywords, codes, or tags to use as shortcut keys for your team to find the answer they’re looking for at a drop of a hat.
3. Get the right software tools.
With technology being everywhere, it’s a piece of cake to find platforms or software tools to make your experience of building, using, and maintaining a knowledge base, hassle-free. Some of the things you should seek in a knowledge base management system should be the simplicity of organizing topics, quick and easy search experience and ability to grow the knowledge through user collaboration.
To check out a comprehensive list of software to help you manage your knowledge base, here’s one from Capterra with user ratings.
4. Continuously update and improve your content.
As your product and service evolves to meet customer demands, so should your knowledge base. One of the common mistakes in having one is forgetting or not prioritizing the update and improvement of this documentation as the business environment changes. Create a systematic way of how your company can make sure your content stays in order, relevant, and with new topics added as needed.
To do this, have a fixed and repeat schedule for reviewing your central hub of information. In addition, letting your team know about the schedule ahead of time is a huge help. This allows them to individually contemplate about the areas they feel should be improved before going into the meeting.
Conclusion
There are so many operational advantages that spring from having a solid knowledge base at your team’s disposal. Not only can it empower your customer service staff to have the right answers at their fingertips, it also reduces the time they waste in searching for information. All of these ultimately lead to cost-effective use of company resources and excellent customer interactions each and every time.
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