Building a Solid Knowledge Base for Your Brand

If you know anything about the customer experience, you know it’s essential to make a customer’s interaction with your company as easy as possible. Customers don’t want to waste time talking to an agent when they could have easily found the information online — that is, had it been there, to begin with.

That’s where a knowledge base comes in handy. Establishing a knowledge base helps give customers answers to your most frequently asked questions. If you find that your agents are answering the same questions over and over again, it might be time to think about establishing and maintaining a knowledge base. But first, let’s discuss what a knowledge base actually is.

What is a Knowledge Base?

A knowledge base is a collection of information about your company, products, services and processes that aid customers in getting to know more about what they can expect. It can better be described as a “self-serve online library of everything there is to know about your product or service.” That library is usually easily accessible, and people can find all the information in one, centralized location. Your customers and prospects should be able to access the information any time by visiting your website.

The Importance of Establishing a Knowledge Base

A knowledge base is important for any growing business to develop, because it’s an easy and almost free way to keep customers informed and happy. By developing such a guide, you give customers the freedom and ease of access they need to make knowledgeable decisions about your product or service. A knowledge base helps you provide a better customer experience, because customers won’t have to wait on hold to speak to someone just to get their questions answered.

How to Set Up a Knowledge Base

Setting up your own company knowledge base may take some time, but you can start with just a few articles and build from there. Start with your most commonly asked questions and write articles on each topic. It helps to link to other useful resources and to be descriptive with your content. Write in a clear and concise way that answers the questions as completely as possible.

Choosing Topics

Choosing the right topics to include in your knowledge base is crucial to providing the most value to your customers. Research shows that customers prefer to use a company’s website to get answers to pressing questions and uncover useful information, and there’s an increasing demand for self-service options.

So find out what your customers need to know using surveys and polls. From there, you can formulate topics based on the responses you receive. Another way to choose topics is to think about your product or service as if you were the customer. Then, think about where your customers might be having trouble based on your experiences navigating your own website or interacting with your own agents.

Organizing Your Knowledge Base

In order for your knowledge base to be effective and helpful to those who use it, it needs to be well organized with easy-to-find information. Categorize your information in any number of ways, including by topic name in alphabetical order, most frequently asked questions or a combination of the two. Be sure that it’s easy to navigate and easy to understand.

In the event customers can’t find the information they need, provide a phone number in the knowledge base they can dial up at any time. Most businesses still list their phone number at the top of their website. But when listing your number, use a toll-free number that routes calls in a professional and sophisticated way. Take a look at how major companies around the world route calls to see how it’s done properly.

The Benefits of Having a Knowledge Base

Having a knowledge base means you can reduce training costs and provide more consistent service. You also have the added benefit of higher customer resolution rates upon the first contact, because not only will your customers be able to access it, but your employees as well. That means if agents don’t know the answer to a question, they can simply look it up in the knowledge base, resulting in faster service provided to customers and shorter wait times.

A knowledge base also helps you appear smarter, unified and more professional. It helps you standardize answers rather than having agents give out three different answers to the same question. It also helps streamline training/onboarding and simplifies IT troubleshooting.

The Benefits Speak Volumes

Many companies don’t see the real value in creating a knowledge base, but as you can see, it has tremendous benefits for both your company and the customer experience. As discussed, it can help reduce costs, streamline the customer experience, and create tremendous value for everyone using it when developed intentionally. Don’t buck this trend as so many companies do. Gather the information you need and get started creating your company knowledge base today.