7 Min
We all remember what it was like to be young, don’t we? That age of 8-15 years old when we were carefree, and not a single responsibility met us.
Speaking of that golden age, do you also remember how you would lose a sock or a pencil; how you would turn your room upside down and still find nothing, but the moment your mother started to look, voila! It was right there, staring at you.
Similar is the case with your knowledge base! Whenever you need a piece of information, you can never find it, but the moment you stop looking, it is right there.
As hilarious as it may sound while reading, the feeling of losing time and positive scores by the second is a frightening experience and need to be eradicated.
When handling multiple complaints, it becomes difficult for an agent to remember the exact location of any document. However, remembering a signature excerpt from the document is always feasible.
The question of the hour is,
“How can Google helps agents reduce response time?”
Yes, it can. Type up a contact name from your smartphone in your search bar, and you will see that the name pops up. Your contact is not a popular Google search. This pop-up resulted from you syncing various apps and your mail ID together.
When you sync your knowledge management in a similar but more efficient manner, each solution, problem, use case, and help article is tied to a context. This contextual knowledge is further tagged into categories and sub-categories, which provide better visibility.
Now, this entire information is compiled with a customer database, updated data, real-time analytics and insights, feedback, comment, rating, interaction history, communication logs, etc.
This all is uploaded on a cloud platform that shall now be programmed to display relevant results. Security is ensured through APIs, firewalls, and encryptions. Only authorized persons can see the data they are meant to instead of accessing all information uploaded.
Did the above-mentioned paragraph pinch nerves in your brain?
A Google-like elastic search result is automated and can process the above-mentioned functions in merely 3-5 seconds.
Table of contents
5 Knowledge Base Hacks To Reduce Agent Response Time
1. Bold search bar
The search bar is a shortcut for your audience. They can type the problem in when they visit the platform instead of searching for the topic.
The roaming around is not carried by the customer’s choice making the session long, tedious, and uncalled for. The search bar in the knowledge base should thus be bold enough to catch attention and must be placed in the first fold of the page.
2. Smooth UI
The user interface for a knowledge base should be easy and smooth. The visitor, be it a customer or an agent, thus, can find the divisions like categories, forms, sub-categories, etc.
A guided tour can help them get engaged despite receiving the resolution at once. The tips and aids from experts and a follow-up add to the user’s convenience.
It is understandable if your customers find issues with your knowledge base. Use the feedback responses to figure out top queries and mend the issue. Once the user visits again and finds the issue corrected and other amends making usage easy, your knowledge base and brand will gain visibility.
3. Content segmentation
A nicely tagged and segmented section of content directly and positively impacts the findability of the knowledge base. With the help of crawlers and bots, Google uses elastic search results to find a list of all related content and keeps filtering them by each letter you type.
You should be amazed that you can deploy a search-by-text service with a good knowledge base software.
4. Emphasize on title
The importance of a good title is not just in getting attention but in getting the attention of your target audience. If you are writing a helpful article to activate your credit card and the title you chose is, ‘How to remove flaws from your banking services?’ well, hardly any view will benefit you.
Those who read your article would leave before they get to the second paragraph, and those who are looking for credit card issue support, well, they shall never even reach near the solution with such a title. The title of a solution FAQ, grid, decision tree, or video must always be.
5. Contextual knowledge
Imagine you are in a supermarket. You have all the products you need and beyond. The only challenge you shall be facing here is that the entire stock is piled up on the floor in the middle for the people to come to search and pick freely whatever they need, pay for it, and check out.
Was this a place you would revisit even in your imagination?
When you read ‘supermarket,’ you imagine shelves and organized goods on display by quantity, customer preferences, quality, section, etc. Similarly, each time your knowledge management software is accessed by anyone; they want a sorted page, a clear head bar, a tutorial mode for a short tour, etc. To deliver all of this is not even tough.
The content created should be optimized and must be tagged. The section and category must be pre-decided. Each piece of content must be published only as contextual knowledge.
All your users need to do after is merely enter the knowledge base in a cloud format as a central repository serving all relevant articles in a layman’s language, facilitating understanding and easy navigation from the point of problem to the point of the solution, avoiding as many bumpers as possible and mending others soon after.
Conclusion
Maintaining a knowledge management system is largely a part of customer support. Neither the marketing nor branding department needs it directly.
However, a vigilant enterprise shall always be able to connect the dots between customer satisfaction, agent satisfaction, and SLA adherence. It is easy to generously accept your mistake when pointed out and correct it over arguing to prove yourself right.
Train your agent in tactful handling of customers, encouraging them to go online and search for solutions without making it look like a delay or postponement.
Another bold step that could be taken is to remove your customer service contact from the primary fold of the customer support page. Put your social media handle, website/app link, or mail address to be contacted. Removing the contact number helps progressively deviate petty queries to self-service platforms for users to independently search and execute solutions.
However, an important aspect of creating a visible and satisfactory knowledge base is to keep it proactive. Assign a query to an expert as soon as a customer renders it unsolved through automated channels and make sure the ticket doesn’t get tossed from one desk to another but is closed as soon as possible.
