Many businesses still remain unaware that offering top notch customer support is the most important thing in the sales cycle. Too many of them simply focus on getting the goods sold and forget about the proper care they should offer for their customers.
In fact, Forbes reported that businesses lost $62 billion in 2016 due to bad customer service. This is because business owners remain too focused on acquiring new customers, which is a more expensive process than keeping an already existing one.
Therefore, if you are looking for a way to build an incredibly effective customer support team, you will need to learn why a knowledge base should be your number one priority and what makes it so effective.
Adapting to modern customer behavior
Technology has changed the way customers behave. Having access to the internet means being able to get information on almost anything. Therefore, people have started looking for solutions to their problems online. This trend is only going to continue, as big search engines are continually changing, to serve the right piece of information to their users.
In order to be able to help your customers, you have to build online customer support pages, something that knowledge base software is perfect for. Without taking this step, you will be losing your customers to the competition who have already incorporated this approach across their support channels.
Using a knowledge base will allow you to meet your customers’ expectations and help them resolve problems within a couple of minutes.
Receive less customer support requests
The more information customers can find on your wiki and FAQ pages, the less customer support requests you are going to receive. Furthermore, when a customer reaches out to your agent, he or she will already have access to a wide array of information he can forward to the customers.
Therefore, not only will a lower number of customers end up contacting you, but your agents will be able to increase FCR (first contact resolution) rates significantly.
Build brand authority
The biggest brands in the world manage to grow because they become an authority in the niche of their business industry. Using a knowledge base to create valuable information for your customers is one of the key ways to start being perceived as an authority.
However, it is important to stay relevant, create helpful content, provide value to your customers, use simple language and take other similar steps to make your knowledge base easy to navigate.
Once enough time passes, customers will start feeling how much you care about them. Furthermore, they will start perceiving your business as an authoritative brand that they should continue buying from. This is a perfect approach to build a community around your brand, one that is always going to go the extra mile and support your business over longer periods of time.
It is cost effective
In the past, ensuring that you are going to have good customer support came at quite a high cost. First of all, it was necessary to hire a lot of people and you needed to purchase a lot of hardware.
What do you get with a knowledge base? Basically, you are paying a single fee for keeping your FAQ and wiki pages live all the time. When you scale this to the number of people who end up reading them, the costs become significant and the gains are vast.
On the other hand, it is no longer necessary to have a customer support team that counts thousands of people. A select number of individuals can easily work on collecting the most important questions customers usually ask. A knowledge base software makes a small team much more effective, as the compiled information is reused with every customer visit, at minimal costs.
It is also important to mention that a knowledge base enables teams of people to work together, no matter if they work in a single office, or are scattered across the world. Collaboration features increase the team’s productivity significantly.
Variety of features
This is one of the strongest benefits of using a knowledge base. The tool can be integrated with a variety of other software solutions, making it even more effective and useful. The following features are particularly useful.
Live chat integration – This is a perfect way to make your knowledge base even more effective. When a customer is reading your FAQ or wiki pages, he can immediately contact your customer support agent through this tool. The agent can immediately offer him or her the help she needs, without wasting any time and putting the client on hold. Furthermore, an agent can use it with multiple customers, making him or her even more effective and efficient.
Analytics – Knowledge base tools function similarly to websites. Therefore, it is also possible to rely on a variety of analytics that provide insights about customer behavior. This can be really helpful when companies conduct the content audit process, as they know what pieces of text, or which pages need work to make the knowledge base even better for customers.
Customization – Consistency is important for every brand, therefore, picking a knowledge base that can be customized is very important. Besides the design, the knowledge base should be able to support image and video materials, giving you more options to optimize the content you are creating for your customers. With this type of customization, making the knowledge base better with every update is much easier.
These are only some of the key features that make a knowledge base an impeccable tool in customer support. As the software packs all these features, you can expect to significantly improve the performance of your customer support department.
Remember that offering high quality customer support should be a top priority for your business. It is not only cheaper to keep customers and attract new ones, but it is the only viable strategy to ensure consistent business growth over a longer period of time.
