Making a Knowledge Base: How to Build and Manage Effectively
Introduction
Without a centralised pool of knowledge, distributing information to your customers can prove to be quite a hassle. 📚 A structured knowledge base empowers self-service and enhances customer service with speedy information retrieval. 🕵️♀️ Utilizing dedicated knowledge base software is crucial for efficiently creating, managing, and optimizing your knowledge base to meet specific business needs.
Why Knowledge Base?
A knowledge base is a central hub for all your customer facing documentation such as articles, videos, tutorials and more. It enhances customer experience by making information instantly accessible through well-structured knowledge bases. 🌟
What & Why of Knowledge Base
What is Knowledge Base?
Knowledge base is essentially a self-service library that consists of in-depth information about company’s offerings – its products or services. It is different from a FAQ as it is a logically organised repository of articles, how-to guides, videos and other sources that enable customers to quickly find answers to their questions without assistance. 🤔💡
Effective knowledge management plays a crucial role in organizing content within a knowledge base, ensuring clear titles, categorizing articles, and separating topics for the best user experience.
Why build a Knowledge Base?
A knowledge base enables you to consolidate all your company’s information in one centralised location for easy access. Customers who value self-service like to solve their queries by themselves and find immediate answers without having to talk to a support agent. By providing well managed knowledge base articles you can improve customer satisfaction, reduce support related costs, and relieve the burden on your customer support team. 🛠️
Benefits of Knowledge Base:
Self-Service : 67% of consumers prefer to use self-service options instead of talking to a representative. 👥
Fast Resolution : Instant answers with minimal waiting time. ⏱️
Productivity : Prevents recurring questions from becoming a support ticket. 📨
Knowledge Sharing : Promotes knowledge sharing within the organization, preventing knowledge loss and reducing the costs associated with reacquiring lost information.
How to build a Knowledge Base?
Where do you start?
Start by listing out all the common questions, topics and subjects your customers usually inquire about. Leveraging customer data and tags from support tickets, along with input from your customer service team gathering common support documentation and FAQs, can help you prioritize the articles that you will need to create initially. This will allow your knowledge base to cover the most common customer issues right away. 🎯
What format to choose?
Knowledge base format
Determine how you want your knowledge base to be structured. It can be incorporated within your website’s help center as a high level overview of your products and services with in-depth articles covering various topics. For instance, Route’s help center enables customers to search through frequently asked questions, get in touch with the support team or quickly resolve specific issues. 🖥️🔍
Choosing the right knowledge base software is crucial as it should align with your organization's needs, integrate with popular applications, and offer user access levels and a rich authoring system for efficient content creation and importation.
How to write good knowledge base articles?
There are a few important steps to creating valuable knowledge base articles:
Use a Conversational Tone : Your support agents speak directly to customers in a conversational tone, write accordingly. This makes the content more relatable and easier to digest. 🗣️
Leverage Customer Data : Tags from support tickets can help in mapping common questions and recurring topics. This allows you to create relevant and useful content. 📊
Clear Titles and Tiered Content : Articles should be easy to read with clear headings and subheadings, improving overall readability and allowing customers to scan and find what they’re looking for. 📄
Feedback Mechanism : Requesting customer feedback allows you to constantly refine your existing articles and identify aspects where you can improve the knowledge base as a whole. 📝
Most knowledge base software comes with SEO settings that can be configured to specific preferences, enhancing the visibility and effectiveness of your articles.
Build a comprehensive library
A well-equipped knowledge base must contain articles of various types:
Articles : In-depth explanations and step-by-step tutorials covering common topics. 📜
Videos : Visual guides proving useful for complex procedures. 🎥
FAQs : Quick responses to frequent questions. ❓
Glossaries and Dictionaries : Explaining industry specific jargon. 📖
Case Studies : Successful implementation stories used by your customers. 🏆
Deploying the best knowledge base tools is crucial for publishing the self-help platform on the web and mobile devices, allowing customers to access the knowledge base in various formats.
How to organise knowledge base?
Taxonomy and Categorisation
Categorise all your knowledge base articles logically. To start off, consider broad categories based on common customer queries such as:
Getting Started 🚀
Account Settings 🔧
Technical Issues 🛠️
FAQs ❓
As your library expands you can create subcategories to logically organise content within each section.
This enables customers to easily browse through your knowledge base. 🗂️ A well-prepared knowledge base structure is crucial for organizing content based on the audience and user roles, making it more accessible and user-friendly.
Optimising for Search
For a hassle free navigation experience through your knowledge base, optimise your articles for search. This can be done by using simple language, regularly publishing and updating content and other accessibility considerations such as alt text and clear font sizes. Additionally, optimizing your knowledge base for search engines like Google is crucial to make it easy to find and increase online visibility. 🔍
Maintaining and Updating Knowledge Base Articles
Updates have to be made to the knowledge base to accommodate new information. Develop a maintenance routine for reviewing and updating knowledge base content to ensure that the information remains relevant and consistent. Updating content based on seasonal or trending topics is especially important. For instance, creating knowledge base articles for products or features that are updated regularly. 🔄
Effective knowledge management plays a crucial role in organizing and updating content within a knowledge base, ensuring clear titles and proper categorization for the best user experience.
Feedback and Iterations
Request your customers to provide constant feedback on your knowledge base articles. This allows you to identify aspects where you can improve and make updates accordingly. This method of constant iterations in itself speaks about the effectiveness of your knowledge base as a whole, over the periods of time. 🗣️
Additionally, fostering knowledge sharing within your organization can prevent knowledge loss and reduce the costs associated with reacquiring lost information.
Improving User Experience with AI
AI can be used to make your knowledge base more accessible by providing on-demand information to customers. AI based tools assist support agents by allowing them to quickly search through the knowledge base articles and recommend relevant results improving response time and customer experience. 🤖✨
Additionally, integrating knowledge base software with AI can further enhance the knowledge base by optimizing search capabilities, tracking performance, and customizing the software to fit specific business needs.
AI Integration Benefits in Knowledge Base Software
Automated Responses: AI can automatically send relevant knowledge base articles to customers based on their queries. 📩
Efficiency: Reduces resolution times and improves agent productivity. 🚀
Predictive Assistance: AI can analyze customer queries and suggest relevant articles even before customers finish typing their questions. 🧠
Integrating AI with a robust knowledge base tool is crucial for organizing and presenting documentation effectively, leading to better customer support.
Implementing AI in Your Knowledge Base
To leverage AI effectively, consider integrating AI-powered search and recommendation tools. These tools can help customers find the information they need more quickly and reduce the workload on your support team. 🔧🤖
Additionally, having a proper knowledge base solution in place is crucial for efficiently supporting customers and saving time for the support team.
Conclusion
A well-organized knowledge base is essential for providing high-quality customer support. By centralizing information and enabling self-service, you can improve customer satisfaction, reduce support costs, and enhance overall efficiency. Integrating AI can further leverage your knowledge base, making it a powerful tool for both customers and support agents. 🌟
Building and maintaining a knowledge base is an ongoing process. Regularly update your content, seek customer feedback, and leverage technology to ensure your knowledge base continues to meet the evolving needs of your customers. By doing so, you’ll create a valuable resource that enhances the customer experience and supports your business goals. 📈
If you’re interested in learning more about how AI can enhance your knowledge base and improve customer support, let’s chat. Book a free IrisAgent demo and see how a Knowledge Base can do wonders for your organization. We’ve helped numerous companies optimize their customer experience, and we can help you too. 🌐
