When executing any task in a system or application, questions and doubts can come up. And if the user is unable to find a quick response to a question, there is a substantially higher chance they will give up.
In today’s world of convergence, everyone wants easy access to precise information. Customers and uses would rather research their own questions and find an immediate solution to their basic problems than calling on a support service.
So this is where a knowledge base comes into play. Implementing a knowledge base can have a positive impact on quality and efficiency in customer service, whether internally or externally. However, creating a knowledge base can be a difficult task, since it requires some management and maintenance work.
What is a knowledge base?
A knowledge base is a centralized online database of information on a product, service, department, subject or topic. A knowledge base provides support for collection, organization, recovery and sharing of knowledge for customers and employees. Data can be stored in the knowledge base about how a new product, process or system works. FAQs, troubleshooting guides and other pertinent specific details can be included.
The data in your knowledge base can come from anywhere, but it usually comes from a variety of employees with significant knowledge of a given matter. Providing information in a knowledge base serves as a source for self-service services. It not only helps users find answers on their own, but also ensures major savings on time and money for your business.
What can a knowledge base offer your business?
Using a knowledge base is an ideal way to handle simple and high-volume interactions. It is available all the time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
See some benefits:
1. Increase productivity
Think about how much time your employees spend looking for the information they need in e-mail inboxes, disorganized repositories and more. A knowledge base centralizing all knowledge, making it accessible and searchable. Your employees will spend more time on more critical tasks and will not waste time searching files.
2. Help your support team
In addition, by providing a useful knowledge base, you are also allowing your customers to find the answers they need on their own. This frees up you support team to deal with more important matters and tasks. By providing your knowledge base to customers, your support service representatives will not need to waste any time on basic and generic questions. With this, you will lower costs related to maintaining technical support and will improve customer satisfaction.
3. It serves as a repository for best practices
Your employees’ knowledge can at times be crucial to the survival of your business. All of the intellectual capital at most organizations is kept in just a few employees’ heads, which represents a risk. That is why keeping knowledge in one open-access location is so important.
4. Promote collaboration
Start by publishing short and directed articles that discuss questions that people want to respond to. Then build your knowledge base from there. Involve others who know more about the topic and encourage collaborative creation of knowledge. By providing an opportunity for people to leave comments, you can let coworkers and customers have the chance to help resolve each other’s problems. This makes it so that everyone involved feels a true sense of community.
Challenges to maintain your knowledge base
Creating and maintaining a knowledge base also has its challenges. Check out a few tips to make your work easier.
Find an appropriate tool
You start with a bunch of pdf files on a server and your knowledge base grows from there. After gathering your information, check whether you have the right tools to host and manage your knowledge base Based on the frequency of content, this all changes how customers and users interact with your information – this should all be included in your decision.
Make use easier
After it is up and running, remember that your knowledge base is a self-service operation. You need to guarantee that your knowledge base is easy to navigate and easy to use. Give employees access to models to use for data entry. Use markers to categorize information and make it easier to locate articles. Organize content to fit your audience and keep your content under control.
Maintain relevant and current content
If you think your work is done after you have created a knowledge base, you are mistaken. The truth is you need to continually revise and update your knowledge base. These updates relate to how your company, products and processes change. Implement an analytic system to understand how many people are using the content. Let users leave comments and score content. Empower key users to indicate when information needs to be removed, added or changed. All to keep content consistently relevant and up-to-date.
SoftExpert Knowledge Base
The SoftExpert Knowledge Base is corporate software to help provide users with fast solutions to everyday problems. Using an intuitive workspace, the solution helps to efficiently gather, organize and publish knowledge, making it available to users, teams and even customers.
