Customer knowledge base helps you increase customer satisfaction
As the general public is becoming more and more tech-savvy, online users simply prefer to find answers on their own. Several studies have shown that 67% of consumers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative and 91% of consumers said they would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs.
Having a customer self-service knowledge base also lowers the burden of your customer support team. As your users can now find answers to more standard questions via your knowledge base on their own, your support agents can focus their time on handling complex queries and in turns, reduce time-to-respond and enhance support quality.
What to include for your customer knowledge base:
- What are the core things that a new user of your product should know? Add a section to group all the getting started guides to help new users get to know your product more easily.
- What are the common questions that your users ask? Check your customer tickets to look for the repeated questions that your customer support agents often receive. Provide answers to these common questions so your agents can focus their time on handling more complex inquiries.
- What are some common struggles or bottlenecks that your users might have when using your product? Check out your product usage analytics or use tools like FullStory to find out the common struggles that your users might have. Other than improving your UI, consider to add tooltips that link to the relevant knowledge base articles.
- What are the things that your users usually search for in your knowledge base? Look at your reports, are there topics that your users often search for but there are no relevant knowledge base articles yet? Also check out the terminology that your users use to help you insert more relevant keywords when writing your knowledge base articles. For example, if you use Kipwise to house your help articles, we provide search terms analytics to help you improve your knowledge base.
How to structure your customer knowledge base:
Add a Getting Started section with content divided by roles
To help first time users locate important resources for them, it’s useful to add a Getting Started section right at the top of your help center. This should include the core information that a first time user should know about your product in order to get started.
To make the content more concise and easy to digest, it will be helpful to create different getting started guides for different roles (e.g. admin vs. normal users vs. read-only users) so that the user can concentrate on information that matters most to them.
Separate topics using different parts of the platform
After creating the getting started section, then you can then go deeper into each core elements of your product.
For example, some sample topics include:
- Integrations
- DIfferent core features
- Managing users and access rights
- User settings
Need some inspiration? See how we structure our own Kipwise Help Center.
Best practices when writing your knowledge base articles
Other than using an organized structure for your folders, there are best practices that you can take note of when writing your individual knowledge base articles to help your customers find the information they need much more easily.
Use numbered headings and subheadings
When writing customer knowledge base articles, try to divide the sections using headings and subheadings and number them (e.g. add “A, B, C…” in front of Headings 1 and “1, 2, 3..” in front of Headings 2. With structured headings, it’s much easier to scan through the articles. And by numbering the headings, it’s much easier to direct customers to a specific point in the article when answering customer tickets (e.g. you can check out point A2 of this help desk article).
If you are using Kipwise to house your help articles, we will automatically generate a table of contents based on your headings and you can link to a specific heading easily to help your customers more efficiently.
Add visuals to your content
Other than text, adding visuals is a great way to help your users really see how something works. Add screenshots or GIFs or even video tutorials to create more information documentation. Some useful tools in capturing screenshots and screencasts include Awesome screenshots and Record.it.
Include keywords to optimize search
To help customers find the information that they need more easily, it’s a good idea to include varieties of keywords that you believe your users will use to search for the information. And you can always keep improving your content when you identify situations where your users used a certain keyword to search but didn’t find the information they want. If you use Kipwise to house your help articles, we provide search terms analytics to help you improve your knowledge base articles.
