Investing in a robust knowledge base for your customer support team can benefit your firm in many ways.
Some of the pros include; reduced workload, improved customer service, and consistency.
If you have a good knowledge base, it must be able to find information and solve sophisticated clients’ problems quickly.
Managing and maintaining self-service systems is not easy. The content in a knowledge base are ever-changing as you can add, revise, or even archive information. You must update them as your products or services evolve.
If you notice that at the end of the day, your customers don’t get the help they need from your knowledge base, the something must be a mess. And you should identify the underlying reasons and find solutions to them before your clients fly off the handle.
Red Flags Your Knowledge Base is Failing
To enhance your self-service offerings and provide better support for your customers, consider leveraging helpjuice to build an effective knowledge base.
Here are five warning signs to identify whether your knowledge base is failing and how to fix them.
1. Frequent Replacement of Employees.
The majority of workers leave their jobs when they feel the working environment is not conducive.
Think of it; how can you quit your job when you have all the tools you need and supportive team members?
So if you find the rate of turnover increasing your company then the problem might be you. A high turnover can be triggered by several reasons, such as burnout, ineffective tools or poor work-life imbalance.
Fostering relationships with employees can help you find out issues affecting them and figure out solutions. You should also listen to the factors affecting your staff.
Some organizations have more than one knowledge management software to help staff get support ASAP and without a hassle. Another way is to build teamwork among your staff members. It does an excellent work in increasing commitment to work.
Involving your staff in all decisions affecting them is liberal way to work. Offer the employees incentives like insurance and flexible hours to motivate them.
2. The Continuous Need to Hire More Staff.
If you have a self-service system, and you still find that you want more employees then something must be out of place.
And the culprit could be a poor knowledge base. Useful knowledge management software makes it easier for clients to get solutions.
When customers do not find answers concerning a product from you knowledge base, they contact the customer support agents— which further increases the number of support tickets, emails, and calls to your customer support agents.
You can avoid all these by taking the initiative to invest in better knowledge base management.
Training your staff can help reduce the need to hire more employees. Making sure your team has the right skills improves the services they offer to clients.
Invest in a robust knowledge base software that both your employees and customers will find easy to use, and always update all information to remain relevant.
3. Low Adoption of the Technology by the Clients.
Having a robust knowledge base does not guarantee that customers will use it. To know if the adoption of your product is high, you consider factors like daily or monthly logins.
The amount of time a customer actively uses you self-service systems indicates how much they are adopting that method of customer support.
One reason behind low user adoption of a knowledge base is not putting links and search bars in your portal.
Undetailed information and few answers to problems contribute to a dormant knowledge base. A majority of the clients might as well not know how to use self-service systems and need enlightening.
You can fix this problem by re-establishing a connection with your clients. Contact them directly and discuss the knowledge base in depth, including how it works.
Also, improve the knowledge in your database so that your customers can get detailed information when looking for answers.
Try to figure out the specific sets of knowledge your customers need. You can figure this out using the questions users searched, but never found answers.
That way, you can guide your maintenance staff to learn the exact sets of knowledge to include in the platform.
4. Quality of articles you include in your knowledge base.
Not all articles have the same quality. You should choose all knowledge base content wisely.
Agents who deal with customers directly can mine valuable insights and use it to maintain the content in their knowledge management software. This is so because they know much more about the needs of the clients than the management.
If the management does not involve the customer support team, the result could be a knowledge base with irrelevant or half-baked ideas.
Administration officers should motivate staff to contribute all the relevant information they have to the knowledge base
Every time you have new features in your product, update, and publish self-help articles immediately. Customers get curious when they learn there is a feature release. Publishing articles improve the adoption rate.
5. A Low-resolution rate at the first level.
A service desk’s effectiveness to offer support to a client can be measured in at least three levels.
First level staff should make sure issues do not escalate to other levels. Referring customers to the next levels increases cost since cost increases at each successive level.
Including short undetailed descriptions in your knowledge base can cause a low-resolution rate. A knowledgebase can cause a low-resolution rate if the current information is not relevant to clients’ queries.
You should make sure your Level 1 staff have enough training and experience to come up with high-resolution rates.
You must find a way to know whether your users are not using the knowledge base or some content is missing. When level 2 gets back to level 1, they should include resolution codes. Resolution codes help discover the weakest area of your knowledge base.
In a nutshell
Nowadays, everybody wants quick access to information. Investing in a robust knowledge base is the key to better customer service. It saves your support team a lot of time answering the same questions.
A knowledge base that is accessible and has high maintenance is fundamental for self-service systems, it should include all the FAQS, processes, definitions, and even demos. Structuring and arranging content precisely is key to a thriving knowledge base.
It’s never too late to find your enterprise an efficient knowledge base. Whenever you see any indications, it is unsuccessful, find ways to fix them by initiating knowledge management.
