This is a guest post by Nunzia Falco Simeone, Marketing Manager at Deskero and editor-in-chief of Deskero corporate blog. Deskero is a simple yet effective way to offer great customer service, and to take it to its next level through seamless integration with social networks. Follow at @deskerocare.
Allow Customers to Self-Solve with an Excellent Knowledge Base
When customers need an answer the best thing that you can do is to help them to get it very quickly. Even if you already offer a great customer support, you can further improve it by adding a knowledge basesystem, which will allow your customers to solve the most common issues by themselves.
#1 Self-Service Portal
A self-service portal might be exactly what you need to speed up your customer service strategy. If you don’t know where to start, follow these tips to build a great knowledge base!
#2 Listening
Listening to what your customers ask is the key to build a well-matched knowledge base: what are the questions they most often ask? First and foremost, your self service portal should offer a solution to those. You should also ask them if the solutions you proposed are adequate and satisfying and you should give them the chance to propose their own.
Your customers should be able to browse the solutions and find quickly what they’re looking for, so make sure that the database is neat and well-organized and place the most common questions in a privileged position to make them more accessible.
#3 Keep it Simple & Intuitive
Organize content intuitively, by tagging the articles with labels and sorting them into groups and areas.
Categories are a great way to organize your knowledge base, but be careful on how you choose them: too many categories are useless and too few categories are not enough.
So plan ahead and add some subcategories if necessary, but do not exaggerate, remember to keep it simple.
Every article should follow the same template and be similar to the others, to give to all the project a sense of coherence and continuity.
#4 Stay Up-to-Date
Constantly update your knowledge base, make it grow with new articles and new categories, relying on the feedback received from your customers.
And, of course, remember to update it when you update your product: you don’t want offer old content!
#5 Create a Path
Last but not least, think of all the articles as part of one unique document, so link them one to the other in order to create a path to follow.
And don’t forget that the knowledge base is made by you for your customers, so be sure that what you write makes sense to the reader and is user friendly.
