7 Proven Best practices to improve your knowledge base
Having a knowledge base that is often improved and updated is very important to the success of your support team and your customers. Using resources such as tags, auto search, auto suggest, optimization tools, and visuals can improve the quality of your knowledge base. A great knowledge base should be informative and relevant to end users. It should give answers, provide solutions, and proactively address the concerns of both clients and the support team.
This blog discusses why companies need a knowledge base in their help desk software and ways to improve it to deliver the best customer service.
Reasons why a knowledge base is important
Companies benefit in many ways when their support team provides information to clients and agents through a knowledge base. The reasons that follow explain why a knowledge base in help desk software is vital for customer service:
Improves customer retention rate
With a great knowledge base, clients can resolve their issues on their own with little or no help from agents. This helps build their trust in the company. It shows that the company has put considerable thought and effort into providing help resources in places customers prefer, beyond just documentation. Fast resolutions or responses from support agents due to quick access to information in the knowledge base also leaves clients satisfied with the experience. As a result, they are loyal to your brand. They will even advocate your brand to others.
Reduces marketing and customer service costs
Satisfied customers become very good marketers for the company through recommendations to others. For this reason, a well-regarded company witnesses more sales and increased profits.
Improves support agent productivity
A knowledge base holds information in an organized, centralized space. This makes access to the information easy. Auto-suggest and auto-search features also make it easy for the support team and clients to find information fast. When agents spend less time finding the information they need, it spares them time to focus on more urgent tasks or issues. In addition, when clients resolve issues on their own, it allows the customer support team to work on more pressing or complex tasks.
Ways to improve your knowledge base
An excellent knowledge base is optimized with the best features to suit the clients’ and agents’ needs to their satisfaction. It should be informative and provide all possible solutions to issues likely to arise proactively. A knowledge base can be improved in the following ways in order to enhance its functionality:
1. Optimize the content in your knowledge base for search engines
For your content to reach a vast population of internet users looking for similar products, you should optimize your knowledge base software for search engines. How do you do that?
First, you should make it accessible and easy to find through search engines, mainly Google.
Secondly, consider using keywords in your content that your customers are likely to search for in order to attract more readers. These keywords can be identified by research and analytics of commonly searched words. The right key phrases and meta descriptions will make your content appear among the top articles in Google’s search results.
In summary:
- Include keywords and meta descriptions.
- Make it accessible and easy to find through Google.
- Have a good search feature.
Optimizing your content for search engines is a great marketing strategy. It enables customers and potential customers to find the information they need from you quickly. This easy access to information increases their satisfaction level.
2. Organize your content in a logical manner
You can optimize your knowledge base content by logically organizing articles into categories and collections. For instance, you can categorize the articles by similar or related keywords, frequently asked questions, how-to videos, and many more. The following is a summary of the main tips to organize your content:
- Include a search feature or button, preferably at the top of the page, to enable easy and fast access to information on the issue.
- You can also have a “common searches” section for frequently asked questions.
- Categorize articles into collections with a navigation window.
- Display important articles on the main page, such as the main categories and featured articles.
Organizing the content helps the support team and clients access any information they need fast and with ease. As a result, they can resolve issues swiftly, thus enhancing customer experience as well as agent productivity.
3. Make the content easy to navigate
Customers should be able to navigate through your knowledge base with the least effort possible. For this reason, all the articles need to be easy to access. This can be possible by using the following tools:
- Add tags to articles to make them easy to search and find.
- Add links to external pages or other related articles when you need to explain a topic more.
- Have a navigation pane to allow end users to navigate back and forth across different articles and categories within the knowledge base as needed.
The less effort used by agents or clients, the better the experience, thus increasing satisfaction levels.
4. Allow customers to provide their feedback on articles
The only way to know if your knowledge base is helpful is through feedback from end users. The feedback section in each article can be in the form of a comment or a rating box. Client reviews offer great insight into the best information to include in articles.
This feedback can help you sample the best answers or solutions to common issues. Other end users can also use customer feedback as proof that the information is accurate or their solutions work.
Positive feedback boosts the confidence of other clients in the brand and boosts client retention. Negative feedback also helps product leads and customer support agents act on sections in articles that need updates, changes, or removal.
5. Provide regular content reviews and updates
With companies constantly releasing new products and innovations, information in a knowledge base will require changes or updates to address the new features. For this reason, the content needs to be reviewed and updated often to maintain relevancy.
In addition, you can track the performance of knowledge base articles based on the number of views. You can then make changes to the least viewed articles to make them more relevant. Common questions that clients raise in the comment sections of each article can signal that the content of those articles needs to be updated to answer those queries.
6. Have a specific style guide
Establish a style guide for all your articles and use it to keep the writing voice familiar, regardless of the authors. The tone and the approach used in your articles should be similar. Some points to consider for your style guide to stay consistent include:
- Use clear titles and subtitles: Your audience should be able to predict what your article is about before they actually read it.
- Attach related YouTube videos to articles: You can embed short videos to each of the articles to explain the content in a simpler, more consumable way. These videos help end users to understand complex information that would have taken long to read through.
- Include visuals: Include images in the articles, such as screenshots of products. They help clients have a better view of how things work or how they can resolve issues.
- Write clear words for SEO and readability: The content should be easy to read and search. So, use clear, concise words and sentences that less-literate readers can understand with ease.
- Break down your article into subheadings, paragraphs, and lists (both bulleted and numbered). This makes the content easier to browse and read.
- Add reference links to other related articles with more information to help clients get answers.
The main benefit of a writing style guide is that it keeps the uniformity across all articles. It ensures clients have an easy time as they browse through the knowledge base.
7. Set up knowledge base analytics
Always strive to keep your knowledge base updated and its articles relevant. You can measure and analyze metrics about the knowledge base to gauge the performance of each article. This is a great way to know the value your content adds to the company. Some of the things you can analyze include:
- The total number of articles your support team creates, updates, and utilizes.
- Common terms that clients search for in the knowledge base search bar.
- Feedback and ratings on articles, whether negative or positive.
Analysis of your knowledge base helps you know the main interests of your audience and thus ensures the content team creates relevant articles. It also helps you gauge how easy it is to use your knowledge base software in general. These satisfy customers as the information they need is easy to access and accurate.
Conclusion
To improve your knowledge base, you should optimize it and its content for search engines. In addition, make information easy and fast to access, understand, and use by making it as relevant and informative as possible. Maintain a simple and clear format. In the long run, all these tips will increase the productivity of your agents and enhance customer satisfaction.
BoldDesk offers the best knowledge base software as a self-service option. Try the BoldDesk free trial to experience the best self-service tool for your support team and customers. Contact the BoldDesk support team if you have any inquiries.
Originally published at https://www.bolddesk.com on November 17, 2022.
