According to Peppybiz, “91% of customers are willing to try an online information base if it is accessible and matches their necessities.”
What if I tell you that a customer can find information like service manuals and brochures on a company website quickly and also get their issues solved in minutes?
For this to happen, maintaining a knowledge base can assist customers in finding the relevant information sooner satisfying the customers, and leaving you with a good review.
So, what is this knowledge base for an IT help desk? An ITSM Knowledge base is like an online epicenter for information that stores data in its repository in an organization.
It can be accessed by both the customers and customer support agents for information.
The information that’s added to the knowledge base is given by the people with a good amount of understanding of the relevant topic (Usually, written by customer support agents with good writing skills, or tech writers).
Also, the knowledge base can include your business terms and conditions, products, services, hardware, or software.
With that, troubleshooting guides, FAQs, product tutorials, or any other vital details that can help your customers can be added as well.
And what are the best practices of an IT help desk knowledge base? We tell you all about it below.
1. Access Information
In an IT office with oodles of incoming and outgoing data, technical glitches are bound to happen, and knowing how to solve them is the expert’s job.
But, what if the expert isn’t there? That’s where a knowledge base helps and all the documented data will be of actual use.
Similarly, the customers facing some minor issues with the product can be directed to solve it by themselves without the need for customer service visits.
For instance: A service manual download for a specific product can help in replacing simple parts. This can be done by customers without any technician’s help as a DIY practice.
After the DIY if the customer faces issues, even the customer support agent attending to the customer issue can easily solve or direct him to a solution with a manual that is accessible on the knowledge base.
2. Prioritize First call resolution rate
Achieving the 70% or higher first call resolution rates is one big task for customer support IT desks. Time is the prime factor here and taking as little as possible to solve a given problem will get you appreciated.
The knowledge base does that for businesses by offering all the information needed for the customer and customer support executive for an issue to be solved quickly.
To improve the first call resolution rates, a knowledge base can also be connected with the chatbots that respond to customers as per the FAQs.
Solutions like Kapture offer AI-assisted chatbots with knowledge base assistance helps in reaching high first resolution rates and improving customer satisfaction.
3. Adhere to SLA Improvements
A knowledge base can help with improving the terms on the service level agreements offering better customer satisfaction and loyalty.
For instance, if a service ticket has just reached the CRM dashboard, the issue is checked in the knowledge graph to find the solution.
Then, the issue is solved based on the steps given in the knowledge base document and finally, closing the ticket.
The knowledge base is further helpful if the issue is unsolvable by one service agent, the document clearly mentions the team that has to be contacted for troubleshooting and get the issue resolved.
The clear descriptions in the knowledge base document help the customer support agents to assist the customers according to their issues in lesser time.
4. Store all your information in one place
New Policy or a product added to the list? All the documentation can be stored at the knowledge base in one place.
This can be used by the service agents to resolve any issues from the customer no matter how old the product might be.
Keeping the document in the knowledge base eliminates the need to train the customer support agents on the product, saving a lot of time and resources.
5. Achieve Better Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Scores
Articles with solutions are detailed in the knowledge base where a customer can also look and find instructions to their problem.
This solves the customer’s issues without having to pick up the phone to call, email, or text the customer support team.
Then again, if a customer happens to call customer support, the customer support agents can also use the knowledge base to direct a customer to the right article or a manual that teaches them to resolve issues by themselves.
This helps in quick complaint resolvement with no more follow-ups needed and leaving behind a great review for the lesser time taken.
6. Reduce the number of incoming ticket volumes
If customers reaching the website are able to access the knowledge bank and find solutions to their issues or queries, then the need to log a support ticket is not required.
For instance, if a customer is looking to replace batteries on his Tv remote, a simple manual to help him with that would be great. Instead, if he has to contact customer support for the problem, then the time taken to resolve the issue is just extended.
Manuals for simple solutions on the website that can be curated based on FAQs will be beneficial for the customer and service agent in turn saving both a lot of time.
7. Lower call-waiting times
The power of knowledge base accessibility has led to significantly lesser call-waiting times that otherwise took longer hours to offer solutions.
Here, the solution for a problem is either offered by the customer service agent or looked for by customers offering them ready answers on the website. Both, use the data from a knowledge base that is available for everyone.
Also, the knowledge base has withdrawn the need for running through training notes for solutions or consulting experts for the perfect answers for queries.
Instead, the service desk agents search for the information on the knowledge base, locate the right solution, and offer it to the customer in minutes.
8. Non-duplication of tasks
Customer support desks are constantly bothered by the same questions to be answered every day making work a tedious process.
A knowledge base can help you with that by allowing the agent to document the repeated processes and readily offering a self–fix solution to the customer on the website.
This helps service desk agents to focus on different tasks that need high priority and helps them look for interesting tasks to work on that can fully utilize their potential.
9. Less training times
A new customer support agent joining the workforce will take some time to adjust to the processes and will need an additional helping hand to assist them.
This ends up with longer hours being taken by the new joiner to learn things while also wasting the person’s time who helps them to fasten up the processes.
Having a detailed training manual for new joiners that assist them every step of the way will offer on-the-job training without any need for extra training hours or a person for it.
The documentation of the processes on the knowledge base will also motivate the new customer support agent to work harder, learn more, and offer solutions without any assistance from the experts.
10. Low costs
With a knowledge base in place, all the processes for a customer support agent have been reduced drastically attracting a higher customer satisfaction rate.
Processes like lesser incoming ticket volumes and shorter call times have lowered the support costs for the company and replaced it with an efficient, quicker, and high-quality knowledge base system.
Benefits like 24/7 availability, assistance for faster complaint resolution, and reduction in stress levels for the customer support agents have made the knowledge base a go-to solution.
11. Build Your Knowledge Base
As a knowledge base management best practice, the first thing would be to know why you need one in the organization.
After that,
- Gather Content and optimize it with the relevant keywords.
- Customize pages for FAQs.
- Maintain a consistent tone of voice.
- Choose the right tools (For Hosting and Managing content)
- Prioritize Ease of use and keep it updated.
12. Add Visually Appealing Content
A long list of articles that just mentions how to do things will just be texts all over and won’t please the reader to read further.
But, adding a bunch of images, videos, and visual graphics like infographics will get the resources downloaded and referred to in the future as well.
And also, the images and videos represent the examples better and make it better to remember them. Without visual representations, the reader might get confused and would take time to solve his problem.
13. Maintain a constant theme and layout
When uploading a document on the knowledge base, curation of the topics must be maintained according to the theme and layout that aligns with the brand’s color and tone of voice.
The curation of articles and designs with the brand’s color and tone of voice makes it unique and recognizable out of the many.
You can find many templates online for a knowledge base that can be used as inspiration to create your own design.
14. Optimize Your Knowledge base for keywords
The most important thing when writing knowledge base articles for a particular topic is to be found when looking for it by the customer or customer support agent.
Optimizing the articles for Google and website searches is pretty important as the keywords vary for both. SEO optimization has to be done for Google to be found by people searching for solutions online.
A quick metric check can also be done online offering you analytics on people’s behavior on the website. For instance, if there is a video embedded in a Knowledge base article, you can track how many people have watched the video completely or left halfway through.
This gives you an idea about what works out there in the articles and can be leveraged to offer new content to reach new audiences.
15. Create Knowledge base articles that are easy to read
You might be a subject matter expert in the field, but not all of them can understand the articles if they are filled with technical jargon.
So, writing an article that explains processes in a conversational way without any use of formal words will connect the reader better.
A knowledge base should have articles that help people solve problems by themselves and not be confused further.
One important point in mind would be to write the knowledge base articles in a way that shouldn’t invoke any questions in the reader’s mind and solve their problems in a jiffy.
A Knowledge Base for all
Kapture is a customer support automation platform that can offer an accessible knowledge portal for any organization.
With Kapture’s knowledge base in place, you can increase a customer support agent’s efficiency and offer solutions to complaints flawlessly.
The creation of an informative discussion forum and approval of new articles for the knowledge base can all be done in one centralized dashboard.
And, we have more, give us a try here.
About the Author | |
 | Sunith Ramachandra |
| Sunith Ramachandra says, “Content writing is all about using the right words for the right audience”. At kapture he does exactly the same writing content to create conversations and conversions online. | |
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