5 Easy Steps To Build A Support Knowledge Base

However, significant roadblock companies face is the information overload that prevents support agents and customers from locating the correct information at the right time.

This is where a support knowledge base provides a single source of truth for all the information businesses need to help customers find solutions instantly and independently. 

Why is a support knowledge base important? 

A support knowledge base is a content repository containing self-help articles, FAQs, visual guides, and troubleshooting information to help customers find solutions independently.

Today, customers avoid the hassle of explaining their problems and wait until the agents find the right information. They expect businesses to provide the relevant information they can access anytime they want. 

Customer service knowledge base is essential for businesses as: 

• It helps support agents stay productive and efficient 
• Elevates customer experience with a self-service option
• Creates consistent customer experiences across touchpoints 
• Improves agent process knowledge for customer service

Build a support knowledge base with these 5 easy steps

An effective support knowledge base should address the customers’ problems at the first go and provide solutions with minimal customer effort. Here are 5 easy steps to build a customer service knowledge base from scratch. 

1. Identify existing content and build upon customers’ pain points

• Building a knowledge base from scratch may seem daunting at first. However, starting with the existing content can help make the foundation for a support knowledge base.
  
  It is essential to consolidate the existing content and review it for its usefulness in resolving current customer problems. This will help to preserve relevant content and let go of obsolete information. 

• The next step is to build upon customers’ pain points. For this, it is essential to start with the most obvious questions customers can come across. Once all the possibilities have been documented, it is time to delve further. 

• Customer journey mapping can help companies look at their product from customers’ perspectives and identify the core problems they face based on their interaction with the brand.
  
  It is also vital to involve support reps and take their input into identifying customers’ issues, as agents interact directly with customers and get to know their challenges first-hand. A 360-degree view of customers’ journeys is essential to building a successful support knowledge base.   

2. Create easy-to-understand content

After all the problems have been identified, it is time to start with content creation. This is the most crucial stage of building a support knowledge base. The content should be easily understandable by the customers. Here are the following tips for an efficient content creation process: 

• Identify the right content formats for each knowledge piece: Not all information can be incorporated into articles and knowledge base FAQs.
  
  While the simpler guidance steps to resolve a problem can be documented as an article, some complex issues need to be organized as one systematic workflow. Therefore, it is essential to identify the suitable format for each knowledge piece, depending upon the use case. 

• Use multimedia for a better understanding of the text: In the absence of picture and video support, customers can get confused and exhaust themselves by spending time connecting the dots.
  
  With relevant multimedia support in knowledge base articles, customers can quickly spot the root problem and fix it with minimal effort and maximum efficiency. 

• Write in simple language and format for better readability: It is essential to adopt customer-friendly language while writing the content for the support knowledge base.
  
  Language should be simple and consistent with the text rightly formatted into pointers, short paragraphs, and tables for improved content readability. 

3. Select the right knowledge base software

A support knowledge base is not a static content repository. It should help customers reach solutions faster and without any hassle.

Therefore, selecting the right knowledge base software that syncs well with the company’s dynamics is crucial. A support knowledge base software should have these primary functions: 

• Intuitive search: The software should have an intuitive search function to help agents and customers retrieve relevant information without wading through the entire knowledge base. Platforms with intuitive search deliver relevant information instantly by understanding the intent and context of the users’ search. 

• Performance analytics: It is critical to have analytics in knowledge-based software to track user engagement patterns with the content. It is essential to have a knowledge base with real-time performance analytics to meet customers’ evolving needs. 

• CRM integrations: Delivering personalized customer experiences is essential to gaining a competitive edge in the new-age customer service world. A knowledge base software that can integrate seamlessly with the CRM platform creates faster, more accurate, and more personalized customer experiences at scale. 

• Omnichannel Knowledge sharing capability: An omnichannel knowledge base is crucial to maintaining uniformity of content across touchpoints and helps create consistent customer experiences. 

Full-suite AI-powered Knowledge base software like Knowmax streamlines customer support for organizations by helping them create, organize, manage, and distribute content from a unified dashboard.

AI capabilities suggest suitable content types for information and different content modules like articles, FAQs, decision tree workflows, and visual-how-to guides help create an effective support knowledge base.

With micro-segmented analytics to track the performance of knowledge base content, organizations can draw actionable insights for constant content optimization. 

4. Make the content easy to find 

A knowledge base is effective as long as agents and customers can find the content easily. To make the content easy to find, it is essential to: 

• Add relevant keywords for each content piece 
• Make suitable categories and subcategories to organize content 
• Distribute the content to relevant departments and customer communication channels
• Interlink different content types for agents and customers to find content from a unified dashboard 

With an AI-powered Knowledge base software like Knowmax, agents can use the in-document keyword search function to find relevant content faster and more efficiently.

This means they do not have to manually probe through every little detail in the document and can directly read the content most relevant to customers’ concerns. This improves key contact center metrics like first contact resolution(FCR), average handle time(AHT), and customer satisfaction(CSAT).   

5. Continue improving the content to meet evolving customer needs 

• A support knowledge base is a work in progress. The content should be audited timely to identify the effectiveness of content in meeting customer needs. Given that information quickly becomes obsolete and new information keeps on adding up, an automated performance tracker in the knowledge base is vital for content upkeep. 

• It is also essential to take agents’ feedback as they get to know customers’ problems directly and can help fill in the knowledge gaps. With knowledge base management software like Knowmax, agents can rate each content piece for its resourcefulness and share their feedback with supervisors.
  
  The constant content performance reports provide insights into the user engagement patterns of each content module. Real-time analytics help organizations with actionable insights for optimizing support knowledge base. 

Conclusion

As customers’ expectations constantly increase and their attention spans decline, businesses need to strengthen their self-service capabilities to make information readily available to customers across touchpoints.

A support knowledge base unifies all product and process information as a single source of truth and helps organizations improve operational efficiency while containing costs.