Last Updated: April 2024
Do you know that providing excellent customer service is not always linked to having excellent agents, bots, or software to handle your phone support, live chat, or emails? A significant amount of customers prefer self-service to relying on agents.
In fact, 70% of consumers like to use a firm’s website to obtain responses to their problems rather than using emails or phone calls.
That is exactly why you need an excellent knowledge base for your business website.
With a well-structured and informative knowledge base in hand, you can deal with common customer questions and take a workload off the shoulders of your customer service team.
But, is it that simple to build a knowledge base? After reading this post, you should find it to be a simple task if you follow all of the steps we outline.
The contents of this post are as follows:
So, without further ado, let’s get started on creating a knowledge base for your business!
Why Do You Need A Knowledge Base?
A knowledge base can function as an online encyclopedia or library wherein your customers and employees can find answers to common questions related to your business’s products and services through guides, tutorials, FAQs, and videos.
In short, it is a comprehensive repository of pretty much every fact your customers and employees need to know about your brand.
Still not sure about the need of promoting self-service? Then, take a look at the four benefits of having a knowledge base.
Improves Employee Productivity
As per data, an average employee spends 20% of their time searching for information that is scattered across different platforms. Don’t you think it would take a serious toll on the overall productivity of your team?
This won’t happen if you have a knowledge base in hand. Customers would get ready-made and instant solutions to basic problems they face. Meanwhile, your agents will get the time and liberty to focus on more serious issues that need attention.
Leverages Customer Satisfaction
Irrespective of your type of business, every customer expects a speedy resolution to their issues. For instance, 57% of the calls you receive are from customers who first visited your website. Astonishing, isn’t it?
So, it is evident that they expect a self-service solution on the website itself. If you design a knowledge base well in advance, they would definitely feel that your brand values their time, which in turn would help you in leveraging customer satisfaction.
What’s more, having a knowledge base is a round-the-clock customer support mechanism!
Brings down Ticket Volume
Tickets are a great way to resolve your customers’ issues. But before a ticket is resolved, it is transferred between departments and agents 1-2 times on average, depending on the business’s internal processes. This means tickets take up a lot of your company’s time before it is closed.
When you provide self-service options, customers won’t raise tickets for simple queries. This way, you can slash your ticket volume to a considerable level.
New Hire Onboarding Is Simple And Painless
So far, we have discussed the benefits of having an external knowledge base. Nevertheless, you can also set up an internal knowledge base designed especially for your employees.
When you hire a new employee, if you familiarise them with your internal knowledge base, they will get easy access to company policies, organizational structure, SOPs, and internal process updates. In fact, with an ideal internal knowledge base, employees can save 35% of their time wasted on searching for information.
Additionally, you can also save a substantial amount of time spent on agent training.
Now that you understood the advantages of having a knowledge base, you are probably considering creating one for your company. To help you, we’ve broken down the entire process of creating a knowledge base into six simple steps.
Have a look at the complete guide on how to set up a company knowledge base!
How To Create A Knowledge Base In Six Easy Steps?
1) Identify The Purpose Of Your Knowledge Base
As we have said earlier, your knowledge base may be focused on your employees or your customers. You can also design a knowledge base that serves both. It is completely up to you to decide.
Whatever type you intend to create, keep in mind the importance of having a knowledge base.
Before you start building a knowledge base, try asking yourself the following questions:
- What are the common questions your support team receives the most?
- How much handle time does it take to answer such repetitive questions?
- Does agents are well-informed about company policies?
- Is there any company information or updations that some of your employees are missing out on?
All these are just some examples.
For an external knowledge base, you can get further insights from your customer-facing sales, marketing, and support teams.
On the other hand, if you are creating an internal knowledge base, don’t miss out on filling in the missing lines from your employee management and HR teams.
Either way, you can discuss more on such topics, and finally, you will have a handful of answers regarding the purpose of your knowledge base.
Once you are ready with the purpose, you can move on to the next step.
2) Decide On Your Knowledge Base’s Core Components
Rather than just documentation, your company’s knowledge base acts as a guide for your customers. If it is not sorted out, you will be missing out on the whole point of such a powerful tool. So, you must initially decide on its components while designing your knowledge base.
Have a clear idea of what must be included and what must be avoided to improve its readability.
Here is an illustration of the major components a knowledge base must contain to improve its usability:
- FAQ Section – To deal with the most basic and essential queries related to your products and services. It would be preferable if it were divided into sections based on product categories, services provided, or alphabetical order.
- Search Function – Every knowledge base design should have a search bar so that users can easily navigate to the particular area they need help with. To put it in another way, a search bar can give your knowledge base a Google-like design. Keep in mind that it should be placed in a position where the users can easily get attention. Lastly, it should be efficient enough to recognize the keywords that users may enter and provide relevant results.
- Contact Support Icon – As you know, a knowledge base can handle only the basic queries. Nevertheless, there may be times when customers come up with some complex issues that need your support team’s attention. To make it easier for customers, it is always advisable to provide an icon to redirect them to your customer support.
These are just some of the basic components. Depending on your company’s area of function, you can also add manuals, troubleshooting guides, and much more while creating your own knowledge base. You can also include top-rated articles, related articles, and most-read articles to improve customer engagement.
3) Build A Strong Yet Simple Structure
Having a strong structure is essential for your knowledge base to be user-friendly. Do you know why? Users cannot easily navigate or crawl through pages without it. However, while designing the structure, just make sure it is not too complicated.
Now, let’s go through some techniques to create such a structure:
- Add Categories – You can organize your company’s knowledge base content in a variety of ways. For example, you can categorize as per product type, user roles, processes involved, etc. Anyway, the ultimate aim is to make the knowledge base more user-friendly.
- Add Sub-Categories – To pinpoint the customer to the correct solution, you can add sub-categories to the categories.
- Table Of Contents – This is also yet another way to make your knowledge base more searchable and less messy.
Once the structure is detailed, you can proceed on to the next step, which is adding content to your knowledge base.
4) Adding Content To The Knowledge Base
Content creation is the heart of any knowledge base.
But, how would you get an idea of what needs to be added?
If the content is for your internal knowledge base, a brainstorming session with your teams and departments is the best option. This allows you to easily identify where the knowledge gap exists and what needs to be added to fill it.
On the other hand, if you’re creating an external knowledge base, the best and simplest solution is to analyze customer support tickets and saved responses that your agents frequently use. You can also have an open discussion with your customer-facing employees to gain deep insights.
Keep in mind these points while formatting to make your content readable:
- Title – Have a clean and concise title.
- Content Tone – Follow an easily understandable and to-the-point content tone.
- Bold and Italics – Highlight the main points using bold and italics.
- Links – Instead of repeating the same points and improving the flow, add enough internal links to related articles.
- Visuals and Icons – To avoid bulky and boring paragraphs, include eye-catching visuals and icons.
5) Make Your Knowledge Base SEO-Friendly
The whole point of building a knowledge base is to make it visible to your intended users, right? For this, you have to make your knowledge base SEO friendly.
An SEO-friendly knowledge base is also a way to boost the organic traffic of your website and improve the discoverability of your brand.
Now, let’s go through some tips you can use to optimize your knowledge base for SEO:
- Add relevant keywords and tags to the article headlines.
- Add meta tags, meta titles, and meta descriptions.
- Create descriptive page URLs with keywords in them.
Now, you are all set to move on to the final step!
6) Review, Refine, And Publish
At this stage, you will have a final draft of your knowledge base. But, we would say no to publishing it right away!
Like any other documentation, before publishing, you must proofread, review, and edit it to make your knowledge base error-free.
So, what are the things you must check before publishing? Here is the list:
- Check for grammatical errors and typos.
- Assign either a domain or subdomain of your website to the knowledge base.
- Assign user-specific roles like author, co-authors, admin, editor, etc.
Once you have completed these steps, your company knowledge base is ready to go live!
Publish your knowledge base!
Note: You’re mistaken if you believe this is the full and final step in creating a knowledge base. An effective knowledge base is constantly updated in response to consumer feedback, upvotes, downvotes, and other factors. So, to keep your knowledge base current and relevant, keep an eye on its performance metrics.
Long Story Short:
We have covered all the stages of knowledge base development in 6 simple steps. Take your time to carefully follow all the steps when you build a knowledge base.
Alternatively, you can also give the duty of building a knowledge base for your brand in the safe hands of Saufter. With our efficient and user-friendly knowledge base software, you can create both internal and external knowledge bases for your company.
Additionally, if you want to make your customer service team excel in their work, equip them with Saufter. We can help them with order management to automated workflows. Our customized pricing plans are designed to keep your business model first.
So, what are you waiting for?
