Best practices for ensuring a fantastic knowledge base

a fantastic knowledge base

Your knowledge base should be created with the purpose of making your customers self-independent while looking for a solution and information about your product and/or services. According to some studies, 67% of customers in SaaS workspaces prefer self-service, with 91% saying that they would rather use a knowledge base than picking up a phone to call agents or send an email.

Here are some tips you can follow to ensure the knowledge base provides fast and reliable information to your customers, making them self-aware and self-sufficient.

Here are the tips to creating an excellent knowledge base:

1. It should be well-organized & easily accessible

A knowledge base is something that should be easily accessible and well-organized so that your customers can save time by finding the answers they are looking for as easily as possible. Whenever we visit a website, we naturally expect to find relevant information with just a click. Similarly, whenever facing a problem with your product or service, your customers would want to find the relevant information with minimalistic efforts. Your knowledge base should be designed in a manner that takes each word of the string entered by the customer in the search box of your knowledge base separately and searches for a variety of articles or forms of information for the customer to look through.

To ensure this kind of accessibility, you must make your knowledge base keyword optimized and ensure that information is properly distributed and arranged in a categorized and subcategorized manner. You should give ease of access for reaching out to your customer support on your knowledge base so that the customers can reach out effectively if they fail to find the information they are looking for themselves.

2. Upload a simple & self-explanatory article

You should make your knowledge base articles clear and concise. It should read well and be able to answer the customer’s question in an orderly fashion. You must make sure that you do not use too much jargon that your customers might not be familiar with. It is always recommended that you rather explain it in simple terms and add walkthrough videos, gifs, or screenshots of information for a better understanding of the customer within your articles. This step is highly recommended for product companies as your customers might want troubleshooting advice from you, and through your knowledge base, you can provide a direct walkthrough for your customers. Your customers should be able to read and understand the articles on your knowledge base without any confusion and find the answers they are looking for in a timely and easy fashion

3. The knowledge base should be updated regularly

The swiftly evolving world and ever-changing customer expectations demand companies to match their pace and provide them with the latest technology, service, and information. You should upgrade yourself with time and keep up with your customer’s expectations. Similarly, your knowledge base also needs to evolve and be kept updated according to the changes in your product or service. You should make your customers aware of all the information regarding your new products and/or services via a knowledge base. You should also keep your existing articles in your knowledge base up to date with all the necessary information available with less effort and minimum time. Remove this paragraph and add a point about how it can reduce your agent’s efforts. Explain how your agents can utilize this knowledge base to be up to date as well as utilize it to share information with the customer.

How can a smart knowledge base unlock an agent's potential?

In addition to being an information treasure for the customers, a smart knowledge base can also help agents be armed with the right knowledge and resources while helping the customers. An intelligent knowledge base helps agents put the most relevant knowledge at their fingertips, so they are always ready to handle uncertain situations or issues. While developing a knowledge base, agents can create a section for the internal teams which includes all the material useful in building and refining their knowledge. This way, the agents wouldn’t have to run to their superiors whenever they encountered a difficult problem. Instead, they can directly leverage the knowledge base articles.