How To Get Started With Knowledge Base For Customer Engagement?

Why is a knowledge base important for customer engagement?

Over 90% of customers are willing to try an online knowledge base if it is accessible and matches their needs. Before contacting an agent, customers today are shifting towards independent problem resolutions to save time and effort.

A knowledge base for customer engagement with relevant product information and user guides helps to engage effectively with customers in a growing digital world. 

Here are the 3 ways, how a customer engagement knowledge base can help.

1. Create omnichannel experiences across channels

With a centralized knowledge repository, agents and customers can access relevant information consistently from any channel. Whether a customer avails phone service, live chat, or chatbot for help, they receive consistent experiences throughout their journey. 

2. Enables ticket deflection and allows agents to focus on critical tasks 

A knowledge base enables ticket deflection, which has two-pronged benefits of offloading agents’ work, allowing them to focus on complex tasks and enabling customers to quickly find their answers through self-service, without waiting long times to connect with agents. 

3. Provides 24/7 customer support with self-service 

While agents being humans cannot be omnipresent 24/7, a knowledge base cuts through the barrier efficiently. Deploying a knowledge base helps companies to deliver 24/7 customer support across demographics and time zones, increasing customer engagement across borders. 

Getting started with a knowledge base for customer engagement

Every business is different, and there is no one size fits all solution to building a knowledge base for customer engagement.

However, these 6 easy steps are building blocks for every organization to plan their knowledge management strategy and build a robust knowledge base from scratch. 

1. Start with customers’ pain points and compile them

• Building a customer engagement knowledge base should begin with a deep dive into customers’ pain points. For this, mapping customers’ journeys are crucial to identify the unique problems customers face at different touchpoints. This will help to create relevant use cases for the knowledge base. 
• The foundation of the knowledge base can begin from existing support tickets which will help pen down the recurring challenges customers face. Talking to experienced and top-performing agents will help with actionable insights to create relevant content. 
• Once the use cases have been identified, it is time to prepare the content for the knowledge base. Collect the existing content from disparate files and formats, create new issues and compile them under a single source of truth. It is essential to keep the language simple and easy to understand for a knowledge base to serve its purpose of helping the end-users. 

2. Identify the suitable content formats for each use case 

• Efficient documentation is the difference between a successful knowledge base and another content dump. Not every use case can be accommodated in articles or FAQs. For instance, a technical product glitch requires troubleshooting instructions which should be organized as guided workflow steps. 
• Given the abundant information businesses hold, it is difficult and time-consuming to manually probe each use case and identify the best content formats. With an AI-powered knowledge base software like Knowmax, AI capabilities suggest the relevant content formats for the uploaded information. For instance, a document in Q&A format automatically gets converted into knowledge base FAQs. 
• The bottom line is that to build a knowledge base for maximum customer engagement, each piece of information needs to be matched with the correct content format to help agents and customers retrieve contextual information at the right time.  

3. Add visuals for immersive customer experiences

• Efficient communication is the make-or-break point everywhere, especially in a customer service realm where customers quickly give up on their patience. To align the speed and quality of customer service, agents should be provided with adequate information resources to guide customers efficiently with the troubleshooting process. 
• All text and no visuals delay the resolution process, hamper agent productivity and fail to engage customers. Therefore, adding visual guides is equally crucial for customer engagement as important as the strategy of building a knowledge base is. 
• With a full-suite knowledge base software like Knowmax, visual how-to device guides can be created as a standalone content module. Pictures can also be added within articles or workflow steps wherever needed to create immersive customer experiences. 

4. Integrate with CRM platform to deliver personalized customer service 

• 59% of customers say personalized engagements based on past interactions are critical to winning their business. Customers like to stick around with brands that customize their experiences and do not merely treat them as numbers. 
• To deliver personalized customer support, integrating a knowledge base with CRM helps agents with a 360-degree customer view and equips them with the actionable knowledge they need to identify the root challenge customers face while customizing the experience for them. 
• With a knowledge base software like Knowmax, any step in the guided workflows can be linked with APIs to fetch customer data from the CRM platform. This eliminates the need for customers to repeat the company’s information and helps agents fast-track the troubleshooting process. 

5. Share knowledge consistently across all channels 

• Customer engagement with a brand improves when they receive consistent experiences across touchpoints. Given the multiple channels customers use to communicate with brands, they expect to switch from one channel to another without hassle. 
• Integrating multiple channels that work as a single unit requires an intelligent knowledge management solution to create and share information consistently across all customer contact channels. 
• An omnichannel knowledge base like Knowmax helps companies to create content and share it across relevant departments and channels from a unified dashboard. To create an engaging knowledge base, it is crucial to implement an intelligent knowledge creation and sharing platform that can help maintain the consistency of information across channels. 

6. Track the content performance regularly and make improvements 

• A knowledge base for customer engagement should be reviewed regularly to ensure that content stays relevant in helping agents and customers solve their problems effectively. 
• However, given the rapid pace with which new information increases within organizations, it is crucial to have robust analytics to measure and track content performance regularly. 
• With an AI knowledge base like Knowmax, the in-built micro-segmented analytics assess the health of the knowledge base by delivering timely content performance reports. These analytics track the time spent on each content piece, top searched keywords, and the overall usage of each content module. The automated data generated for these metrics enable companies with actionable insights to optimize the knowledge base to fit the evolving customer needs.  

Conclusion 

To build a knowledge base for customer engagement, it is crucial to start with the challenges customers face across different customer service channels and dive deep into what customers expect from businesses today.

It is essential to build a content strategy that best fits the organization while considering the primary steps mentioned above to create a successful knowledge base.