In my years of working closely in customer support, I have realized that the core difference between a business and a brand is the quality of customer service.

Let’s take it through an example.

You buy a shirt from a local store and come home only to find it ripped from a corner. You go back to the same store, but this time the representative is a different person.  The representative doesn’t believe your story even after you showed them the bill. After a lot of hassle, the manager walks in and finally replaces your shirt.

Will you go back to this place again? The answer is probably obvious, even though you got your shirt replaced.

Now, think of the same scenario but with a branded store like Nike, Adidas or any of your favorite.
Do you think you would have to go through all the trouble to get it replaced?

This is the reason why customers switch to brands even if they have to pay a little extra; for better customer support.

A study by New Voice Media revealed shocking results when it comes to customer service:

• 58% of Americans never use the same company again, once they have a bad experience with one.
• Every year, businesses expend over $41 billion dollars because of failed customer service.

A study shows that more than 75% consumers believe that self service channel is a better way to resolve issues instantly.

All this data supports knowledge base as one of the best customer service channels. It doesn’t ask a customer to stay on hold, follow an IVR or ask for account/order details. A customer can quickly access it and find information relevant to the query.

So, here are the 4 facts that will prove to you that knowledge base is that missing link in completing your perfect customer support scenery:

Self service knowledge base is among best customer support methods

As per the study mentioned above, 75% of consumers are asking for self service solutions to resolve their doubts and questions. This heavily adds to the credibility of it being one of the best customer support methods.

With a knowledge base tool, you can easily create a repository of all the frequently asked questions. This makes life of customers easy as they can directly search their questions and check for answers.

For product companies, a knowledge base is more useful as they may have troubleshooting steps and other guides to help customers in understanding the product. Providing such information on call is not possible but authoring such user guides on a knowledge base is easy.

Cloud based facility, options of importing external documents and media input options makes a knowledge base easy and efficient. You can not only help your customers with answers to questions or step by step guides but you can also add images, videos and soundclips to improve the quality of information.

You can also personalize the information by using context sensitive help. Providing tooltips, light boxes and popups in the content can really assist customers in grasping the information. Customers can get quick tips and important notes while going through the repository.

So, self service knowledge base is among the best customer support methods because:

• It offers a repository of information from which customers can resolve their queries and issues.
• It saves a lot of customer time and interaction with multiple support agents.
• Options of importing external data and media helps in providing easily understandable information.

Knowledge base improves internal coordination

According to the study by Forrester, 42% of the service agents are not able to provide relevant information to customers due to lack of connected systems, archaic user interfaces and multiple applications.

Service agents have to know almost every aspect of the business as they are the face of the organization. Support agents regularly interact with customers and if they don’t know about changes in the product, policy or can’t answer customer’s questions, then the reputation of the company may hit rock bottom.

To fix such flaws, a knowledge base is an appropriate tool.

Before the information age, when people needed to educate themselves, they used to turn towards books and all the books were kept in a library.

Think of a knowledge base as a library of your company. All the information is updated on it and anybody from the organization can access it and get updated. Not only that, as a knowledge base can be public or private, different teams can share documentation with each other without any hassles.

So, a knowledge base improves internal coordination because:

• It offers a central repository of information to support agents.
• It is a  channel to share information internally.
• Helps in educating new recruits and speed up onboarding.

It creates a smoother workflow with other customer support tools

Customer service deals with multiple tools in order to provide better customer support. From resolving tickets to providing information, a support agent constantly engages with numerous tools such as help desk, live chat and analytics.

When you adopt a knowledge base among these tools and integrate it with your existing customer support tools, it acts as a bridge in providing exceptional flow to your support agents. Here’s how it benefits your customer service:

Integration with helpdesk

Once you integrate knowledge base with your help desk, your customers can directly raise a ticket or query from the knowledge base. A customer may not find your article helpful or it may require an update. This way customers can easily fill in a form and raise a ticket for your support staff to fix it. These tickets are automatically sent to your helpdesk dashboard. It saves the time of your customers in locating a form to raise issue or find a contact information.

Integration with live chat

When your live chat agents are catering to your customers, they may need to answer tricky questions raised by customers. In such situation, live chat representative would have to contact the relevant department and find the answers. All this takes a lot of time. However, if you integrate live chat with your knowledge base, you can access it right from the chat.

Integration with Google Analytics

Once you integrate the knowledge base with Google analytics, you can see what keywords customers are searching for. Also, which pages customers visit the most and which not. This can greatly help in understanding and improving the content of your repository. That way your customers will be able to find relevant solutions from your self service channel.

Knowledge base reduces your overall support costs

Most of the customers prefer a self service channel. Providing exactly what they need should result in less calls, less chats and less emails. This in a longer run should in return reduce your support costs.

To sum it up, here are the reasons how knowledge base can reduce support costs:

• Offers a self service channel, so customers don’t need to contact support team.
• It does not need dedicated team or staff to manage the system.
• No training or periodic investment is needed.

Final Thoughts

The above facts and data makes it obvious why you need a knowledge base in your customer support arsenal. It can play a vital role in improving the overall strength of your support team. You can use it for internal team coordination, providing assistance to customers and making the entire operations much smoother and efficient. It is a repository of information for customer while a library of knowledge for your team members.

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