Often, business owners spend heavily on attracting new customers than focusing on their existing ones. In doing so, one of the many things they miss out on is whether their customers are happy or not. It’s true what they say, a good service can make or break the business. Exceptional customer service can make your customers happy and eventually your business.

In this article, we look at how the knowledge base achieves customer excellence.

Knowledge base software is largely used in organisations to help their end-users. It offers a comprehensive solution that enables businesses to create a knowledge base that suits their needs and their customers alike. Traditional documentation and collaboration tools also facilitate information management but having an exclusive knowledge base for the business is a game-changer altogether. 

Importance of Knowledge base

Customers are loyal to businesses that are committed and provide value for their money. An organisation’s success depends on how effectively they convert their audience into a community.  To build a community, a business needs to provide value-added service along with the standard product or service they are offering. They should educate and provide consistent updates to their customers as well as employees. Organisations can reduce the workload of the customer service team by providing a centralised information pool that should take care of all the generic queries. Most often, businesses cater to a global audience and are required to provide 24/7 support to their customers. 

A knowledge base can create and publish articles effortlessly. Having a self-service knowledge base guarantees first-class customer support and they can even customise their knowledge base according to business requirements. With the help of knowledge maps that are stored and linked in the knowledge base, the support team can discover new information which further boosts customer service. A knowledge base has now become a necessity for the new hybrid/remote work model as it facilitates easy collaboration. Along with ensuring clarity between the isolated teams, their powerful features can increase productivity in any organisation.

Achieving customer excellence through Knowledge Management

Let’s say, you have an amazing product but if your customer service is unhelpful or inefficient, your customer wouldn’t be happy. Subsequently, frustrated customers will end their association with you, and your hard-earned reputation gets ruined in the process. This occurs to small, medium, and large corporations alike. Having a robust knowledge base can help in this scenario.

Here are a few ways in which knowledge bases can contribute to creating customer excellence.

User-centric customer service

Customers are the focus of any business, hence providing stellar service to them should be an important aspect of business success. To achieve this, you need to create fine user-centric documentation. User centricity is realised by answering customer queries along with writing descriptions of the product. Using tools like Document360, organisations can create great product descriptions that cater to customer needs. 

Self-help

According to a recent survey conducted by HBR, it is reported that 81% of the customers prefer solving their problems themselves. The public knowledge base allows companies to create self-help resources for the users. You should create online FAQ pages in such a way that they can troubleshoot customer problems without any human intervention. In addition to creating new documents in the knowledge base, technical editors should take into account past customer queries as well. Customers shouldn’t even have to leave the page to troubleshoot their issues. Help resources should be made available wherever they are. Moreover, self-service is scalable and the future of doing business. 

Information repository

Product knowledge is crucial in customer service. Service personnel should be able to discuss product features and various use-cases with the customers. Knowledge bases aids in employee training which will further equip the support team to provide needed assistance to the customers. If the team is well-trained, apart from solving customer problems, they can provide further recommendations that can elevate the value of customer service. Centralised information enables employees and customers to find the relevant information with much ease. 

This is particularly useful for businesses that have huge customer support demand.

Higher response time

Fast and timely response to customer queries goes a long way in customer service, especially the ones which are time-bound. Knowledge base search’s intelligent algorithm provides faster search. The functionality gives suggestion recommendations while creating documents. Along with the article, the algorithm can search article titles, article tags and supports partial fuzzy matching in case a word is misspelt. Articles published can be shared and linked for easy collaboration. 

Conclusion

Customers are the reason for your business and it is important to retain them for a longer period of time. As the famous American Educator, Mr. John W Gardener once said, excellence is by doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. The same theory applies to customer excellence too. It’s always the small things that matter the most. Therefore, investing in a scalable knowledge base tool is a very practical move in achieving great results. Moreover, by doing so, businesses can elevate their customer experience.