8 Knowledge Base Best Practices To Follow In 2024

Knowledge management requires a great deal of attention, engagement, and concentration. It is all about holding up jargon yet keeping your solutions simple to a layman’s understanding. Rapid revolution in markets is the major influencer for changes in one’s knowledge base and communication practices to suit customers’ needs and cater to their queries.

Need for up-gradation tips for knowledge software

Knowledge is ever-changing. Introducing one new fact is an addition to some sections while laying down the foundation for change in other sections. Slight changes in customer tastes over a vast period of time might not seem different when studied in continuity but have drastic effects when looked up for interval periods.

Launching a new gadget, change in the product model, easy-to-use technology, self-saleable schemes, policies, and much more constitute a major impact in various industries and thus require proper documentation for SMEs and other departments.

The historical record of such information is essential in training, studying paradigm shifts, and creating a projective analysis. Preserving data is thus another organizational requirement.

It thus establishes the importance for enterprises to teach their employees how to handle data smartly without letting a highlight slide by.

Let us walk down the path of improving your knowledge base structure and learn new hacks to creating a better knowledge management practice with ease of working.

8 Tips & practices for a good knowledge base

From the agents’ viewpoint

1. Learning-based

A knowledge base must be created keeping in mind the learning process of agents. It might be possible that they follow a different hierarchy in collecting information than how you have prepared the flow of content.

This might throw them off as their way is well-rehearsed and practiced thousands of times on the floor. The trainers should develop a framework to be followed by content developers.

2. According to the scenario

The circumstances are essential for agents. Each script must be made keeping in mind all possible reactions from the person on another end of the line. A script can be too long and not have all circumstances laid out one after the other, as it may cause duplicity and confusion while on call.

The knowledge base software must thus be created to incorporate outcomes of various scenarios in one tone.

3. Focus on performance

Trainers and supervisors must keep an eye on agents’ performance levels. There might be some recurring mistakes common among all or some complex questions that are hard to resolve for amateurs.

All such situations need expert guidance and support, not just by words but by correctly scripting the knowledge base.

4. Regular monitoring

All comments, ratings, feedback, and messages forwarded from the agent side of your users are usually not taken seriously. It is an absolute mistake to think of these as the regular whining of employees.

A patterned criticism of some articles asks for immediate attention as a faulty script can certainly lead to agent error and incorrect information circulation.

From the customers’ viewpoint

5. Self-saleable content

The customers are always in a rush, and a complicated piece of content is no help. The knowledge base must always treat each article, FAQ, blog, and post as a process to stimulate institutions’ onboarding in the capacity of leads and potential customers forming long-term alliances with your product and services.

6. Regular follow-up

The feedback from customers is really important. Some details often get left out to control the length of a form, but regular follow-ups do the trick of opening up a customer and helping them connect with the organization’s representatives sharing views, opinions, and suggestions unbiasedly.

7. Omnichannel support

Customers can find any channel to register a complaint or seek a solution. The mere presence of an enterprise on any social media platform makes it inevitable for the organization to attend to each issue with priority.

Instead of an instant solution (if not possible), at least a conversation should be started to get them engaged in a loop and prevent them from jumping ships with your competitor.

8. Quickly findable

Solutions drafted must always be optimized by the SEO search mechanism. It makes the solution easily visible on all platforms, whether a website or mobile app, just via Google search. The faster a solution is found, the faster the process of execution, closing tickets quicker.

With self-service platforms, speedy resolution is an important metric to raise your NPS, CX, and CSAT scores.

8 Handy tips for knowledge base practices

1. Team meetings

Team meetings are an important part of the organization’s operations. It establishes the role of each employee and each department in an important sense.

Once the roles and targets are specified, it is easy for creators to plan and formulate the content accordingly without having multiple people assume one job or none, assuming the others must have followed through.

2. Break the monotony

The life of an agent is as follows:

•       Raise ticket
•       Resolve ticket
•       Close ticket

Leading such a monotonous schedule affects an agent’s concentration and attention span. A good knowledge management system is required to break this monotony by changing templates or fonts in bits while still keeping the brand image intact.

3. Track your competitors

Maintaining a healthy relationship with each element of your environment is important for better survival. Competitors are an essential part of the market ecosystem.

Tracking their activities, returns, strategy, etc., helps create an enriched knowledge base platform with all essential components to help your workforce fight competition yet retain customers on a happy note.

4. Sustainable knowledge base

The knowledge base created cannot remain the same for any period of time. Regular addition of knowledge and updating old information is as essential as fighting the competition.

However, a sustainable knowledge base anticipates a change in direction and keeps its content flexible enough for quick changes without much ado.

5. Plan for long term

Every company is fundamentally built on the principle of ‘ongoing operations.’ To beat hurdles as they arise, it is important to be prepared for contingencies and ready for long-term changes and developments needed around the same.

Strategies and plans should be developed keeping in mind the possibility and extent of the market and customer-related dynamics. Expert advice must be taken to deduce a pattern and make a long-standing knowledge base available.

6. Seasonal changes

Though the knowledge base requires strength and stability for the long term, the foundation is laid by intelligent steps taken with the turn of the wind. Seasons are important in determining customers’ purchase behavior.

A thorough study of this report helps determine the nature of the change required in the knowledge base.

7. Skimmed content

Details are required while training an agent on various situations, but not while an agent helps a customer navigate a problem toward a solution. Skimmed content has its own place in a knowledge base system and must be provided at the required spots.

Content, when shortened, helps highlight important steps, thus speeding the resolution process by making explanations quicker and execution better.

8. Interlink the content

It is not always possible to incorporate every aspect of one topic under a single head. Knowledge articles can then become quite extensive and lose their importance.

Interlinking various knowledge pieces and creating content hierarchy helps the user sort through with heads and subheads and elastic search results prompting relevant solutions through AI intent recognition.

The extensive use of digital channels over calls is why an organization should optimize its content and interlink them wisely.

49% of customers are willing to switch platforms and service providers altogether owing to poor customer service. Good customer service is largely and evidently, dependant on the service quality and SLAs delivered by customer-serviced executives.

Listed above are various tips and hacks to quickly draft a good knowledge base that comes in handy for all departments of an organization and proves its utility to users, both internal and external to the enterprise.