Customer service is the building block for any business. CenturyLink customer service is the epitome of consistently proving how excellent customer support is crucial for any brand and how much their reputation is reliant on it.
It is not an easy job dealing with customers, however, if you end up doing it wrong, well, the word gets out in a jiffy. This will end up affecting the sales, even slightly no matter how much you try not to. Just like marketing, which relies on relationships with the audience and potential prospects, a company’s customer service department must also rely on the relationships with current customers. Companies face competition in the front of customer support just as they would in the quality of the product and sales.
Recently a new tool entered the arsenals of customer care representatives all across the world; customer service knowledge base.
Customer Support Knowledge Base
In concept, a knowledge base is akin to an encyclopedia. It’s a collection of articles organized in a hierarchy, divided into sections by subject or geography. However, the focus is on your product and the ways to use it. It might, for example, include all from the basic setup to expert power user skills, there are no size restrictions
The majority of businesses opt to fully connect their knowledge bases with the primary websites. That means the page title, URL, along general design will blend smoothly into the design concept of your website, and no one will be able to tell you didn’t create it from start on your servers.
Search, on the other hand, is easier than a decent structure. A knowledge base has similar aspects to those of search engines in that you enter a concern or query and receive a list of articles relating to that question. The search bars, on the other hand, have been fine-tuned expressly for help and related searches.
Steps To Ensure Quality Customer Service Knowledge Base
Let’s discuss the seven customer support knowledge base best practices that will be useful for the business.
Knowing The Audience
Beginning with documentation necessitates a thorough grasp of your target audience. Creating the buyer persona that breaks down all of your audience’s key qualities is a wonderful method to do this. It’s all about assisting your clients in assisting themselves in the customer knowledge center. That is to say, the content of your knowledge base for customer assistance should be influenced by what your customers desire to know.
Diversity of Voice
Many people entrust the entire knowledge base project to a single technical writer or a copywriter. This can be good if you have hired someone who knows their way and can produce knowledge base articles around the keyboard. But it can also be a disadvantage when it comes to portraying all that your clients might require. Although the knowledge base may appear to be a minor component of your overall operations, keep in mind that almost all of your customers will engage with it at least once. As a result, getting it correctly is incredibly important. You must make every effort to include people from all levels of the firm and different departments, asking for their input on the most significant article themes to include. People’s viewpoints will inevitably diverge and add inclusivity.
Setting The Proper Tone
The brand you have created and the tone you set for it, in addition to what you’re selling, are what your buyers associate themselves with. It’s crucial to never lose sight of this when writing articles for your knowledge base. It can be difficult to integrate your personality into discussions regarding your return policy and invoicing information. However, maintaining a consistent tone is essential for maintaining an overall, consistent brand identity with which your customers can identify and connect.
Look Out For Feedback
A sequence of reactions appears at the bottom of each article, whether smileys or thumbs up or down, allowing the user to say whether they liked the article or not. Many platforms even allow users to leave a short comment about what they didn’t like. This is solid gold when it comes to figuring out how to improve your customer care platform.
Keep It Fresh
It’s critical to have a dedicated knowledge base individual who is responsible for keeping your knowledge base up-to-date when your rules or responses policies change. If you don’t, and you risk giving your clients contradictory responses depending on what they will look at and where they might go for solutions.
Keep It Simple
If you have a big number of articles in your customer support knowledge base, consider categorizing them into basic, broad categories so that your consumers aren’t overwhelmed by a long list of articles to read. You may also help people find what they’re looking for by putting your most commonly asked questions upfront.
Check For Updates
When you make a product upgrade or introduce a new feature or an upgrade, you will want to have documentation ready as soon as feasible. People look to the Internet for help with new features the most, and you can also link to your knowledge base articles immediately from your updated blog post. This integration isn’t difficult to accomplish, but it’s something to be aware of because it goes under the system much more easily than you might think while you’re all getting ready for the new launch. These upgrades may not break anything, but that is where the danger lies. As your articles are not updated for longer periods, readers will notice references to the buttons that don’t exist or have different identifying names, causing their trust in your help documentation to erode.
Conclusion
The aforementioned are the seven customer support knowledge base best practices and they will come in handy for you for enhancing your customer experiences if implemented right.