10 Best Practices to Increase Customer Support ROI with an Effective Knowledge Base (Part 1)

As per Forrester, “By building a knowledge base (KB) for your support team, you can increase the agent efficiency by 30% and witness 40% average dip in the overall support costs, within a year”.

Companies like Dell, Mazda, Marketo, Alteryx, and United Airlines have reduced their case resolution time and increased CSAT scores, without increasing the agent headcount by deploying a functional and easy-to-use knowledge base.

Building an effective knowledge base is no rocket science. If you are thinking about optimizing or implementing a rich knowledge base, here are some best practices.

1. Understand Your Users
   In a knowledge base, you have to identify the needs of your customers and present them the targeted content. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to achieve this. Below are some simple ways to achieve it-
   • Discover what your users are looking for, identify previous support cases, trends and analyze user behavior
   • Organize knowledge base content within different categories and tags
   • Deliver targeted content which includes messages and actions tailored to the profile of your users
   • Monitor users’ behavior to understand their preferences and regularly update content in your knowledge base
   • Allow bookmarks / personal reading list to make important articles easily accessible

1. Make Search Efficient
   74% of your visitors use search within the knowledge base. If they are not able to find the right article, they tend to create a support ticket/case. You need to ensure that your content gets properly indexed and users can find it easily. Improving and testing the search results of your KB is one of the best ways to ensure that it is being used efficiently. Here’s how you can do that-
   • Implement full-text search for effective content indexing and showing relevant search results
   • Offer Auto-suggest to let your users select predictive search queries as they write; helping them to find information quickly.
   • Create faceted search for your customers so that they can easily refine or navigate through the results.

3. Leverage Social Channels
   Make it easy for users to discover your content by leveraging social channels. Incorporating social media into the customer support mix can be an effective way to reach and understand your customers. Here’s how you can effectively leverage social media-
   • Distribute content on company social profiles like LinkedIn
   • Display social media feeds from the knowledge base
   • Showcase popular content from social channels into your KB feeds

4. Leverage Rich Media Content
   Let your KB design and system go beyond text. Enrich it with videos, podcasts, images and integrated functionality. Here’s how you can expand your KB-
   • Enable images/videos to be embedded into comments/reviews for articles
   • Allow users to add attachments with comments
   • Create a rich video galley

5. Allow Linking of Content
   Make it easy for users trying to find additional information about a particular topic by adding links to related topics. Interlinking relevant content can increase usability for your customers. You can ease the journey of an intermediate user from a newbie to an advanced user through interlinking. Here’s how you can do that-
   • Interlink different articles with each other
   • Provide a guided navigation to the users for content articles

Knowledge Base is a vital asset for any organization, as it offers a first point of call for customers having different issues. A rich KB allows customers to resolve small issues on their own and empowers them to learn more about your products and services, reducing your support costs.

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