Organize Customer Service Content With A Knowledge Base

Though organizations have begun identifying the need for a knowledge base, the complexities of creating one that’s efficient and easy to use are often harder to grasp.

With careful planning, an openness to reinvention, and continual monitoring, you can organize your customer service content to benefit agents and customers equally.

4 Measures to take while organizing your customer service content

While each organization must craft and follow its unique content strategy, there are a few overarching guidelines from which every organization can benefit. These are:

1. Start with your homework

To identify the kind of content you need and how to organize your customer service content, you must first identify how to meet your customer’s needs. This doesn’t just mean listing FAQs and jotting down their answers – you need to focus on searchability & findability of information.

Consider this scenario: As a company that offers E-Commerce Solutions, you’ve hired a team to write articles about your offerings daily. However, the articles appear on a micro-website in a grid format, without any other discernible system for searching (see Figure 1).

From a customer or agent perspective, this means endless scrolling until the right topic comes along. Even with a search functionality enabled on your knowledge base, the truth is that customers will still find it challenging to discover the right content piece for their needs unless they type in the appropriate key phrases.

Now, consider Expedia (Figure 2). By segmenting customer service content into easily identifiable categories, the brand allows customers and agents to quickly navigate the knowledge base and pull up the desired solutions.

Once you understand the type of content you want to put in your knowledge base, you must:

• Decide how to group your content based on relevant themes and subcategorize information.
• Identify how content pieces can relate to one another and, based on that, interlink them.
• Make the repository future-proof (that is, you should be able to add new content or content groups as your offerings grow).
• Understand how consumers and agents interact with your content.

2. Build a technology plan

As indicated by Figure 3, 81% of customers searched online to find products or services. While e-commerce search results showcasing your product certainly have their place in decision-making, the value of a knowledge base cannot be discounted while driving decisions.

Your customer service knowledge base should be accessible across different technologies – including FAQs for customer service, how-to guides, PDFs, and more.

3. Develop meaningful content

Once you have the right customer service content, a good UI, and technological support, the next challenge is to ensure that your content offers value to customers and agents. To do so, your content must:

• Be written concisely, and offer solutions quickly.
• Have clear titles, SEO hygiene, and accurate categorization.
• Include visual elements like step-by-step diagrams or infographics that your customers and agents can leverage.

4. Ensure easy-retrievability

It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that your agents are just as dependent on your customer service content as your consumers. So, the content should be easy to retrieve during phone calls, ensuring that customers can quickly walk away with their solutions.

To enhance the customer service experience, you can also employ a call center agent scripting tool that buys the agent time to look for solutions without keeping the customer on hold.

5 Things to keep in mind while selecting a customer service content software

1. What deployment do you prefer?

Customer care software is available in many forms. One of the primary factors to consider is whether you prefer on-site Software as a Service (SaaS) deployment or an open-source platform. The former allows you to store your data at your campus while also enjoying software ownership. Conversely, the latter only requires you to log in via your browser.

2. Identify the features you require

Many customer service software offers a plethora of features; however, complicating the system to add features you rarely use can only serve to confuse your agents and slow down the service process.

Ensure that the software you choose is scalable and can enable automated solutions when you need them.

3. Prioritize software that lets you offer a self-service model to customers

The right contact center tool can help your customers retrieve vital information while troubleshooting without wasting time. The software should also be able to accommodate frequent changes to your customer service content as your team continues to add new items to the library.

4. Offer a good agent experience

The best way to determine which works for your organization is to gain valuable insights from the people who must use the software. If your software facilitates call center scripts, ask your agents:

• How easy is it to access the scripts?
• Do the scripts offer any value?
• Can you access other content while scripts are open?

Similarly, ask a group of reviewers to test the software from the customers’ perspective. Find out:

• How hard is it to search for solutions?
• Are there functions in place to contact live agents?
• Is the platform in itself easy to use?

Finally, speak to your customer service leaders and ask:

• How scalable is this product?
• When the need arises, can you integrate modern technologies (such as sharing on social media, using AI, etc.)?
• What are the gaps in the software’s offerings?

Evaluate the software with your team and determine which one ticks all the right boxes for your organization.

5. Offer personalized customer service content

Each customer is an individual and thus requires personalized solutions that align with their needs and personas. The software you choose should allow your agents to access personalized content created based on the customer’s habits.

Benefits of having a centralized knowledge base

Integrating a call center knowledge base undoubtedly adds value to your organization by making your customer service agents more efficient and customers more satisfied. Your organization can stand to gain the following by leveraging customer service content through a knowledge base:

• Greater efficiency – with effective solutions that can be accessed quickly, your call center agents can get the job done faster.
• More customer loyalty and trust – when customers perceive brands to be helpful, they are more likely to return for future purchases.
• Better consistency in content marketing – creating regular posts on your products and services while adding value for the readers is half the battle won in content marketing.
• Reducing overheads and costs – creating a self-service format for customers to troubleshoot can reduce the need for a large customer service team.

Conclusion

Developing & organizing customer service content can be the most significant effort undertaken by organizations in an age when ‘self-service’ is a consumer mantra.