7 Time-Saving Strategies for Building a Solid Knowledge Base
It’s common knowledge that building a solid knowledge base will save you time in the long run. It would lessen the number of support tickets and increase customer satisfaction. The problem is, between onboarding new customers and retaining existing customers, you simply don’t have the bandwidth to build out a knowledge base with all the bells and whistles.
A Forrester study1 found that the number of individuals using help or FAQs on a company website increased from 67% in 2012 to 81% in 2015. A Gartner study predicts that by 2020, 85% of the customer’s relationship with an enterprise will include no human interaction.
In other words, customers don’t want to call customer support. They want to find answers themselves, and they want to find it quickly.
In the same study, researchers found that 73% of customers say that valuing their time is a vital way a company can provide excellent online customer service. Investing in creating a well-organized knowledge base management system early on is one of the best ways you can help your customers save time as they seek out answers to their questions. Simply put, you’ll display some stellar customer service.
Luckily, building a robust knowledge base doesn’t have to sap your company of its resources. Here are some helpful strategies for constructing a solid knowledge base that will save you time and increase customer satisfaction.
#1 Use Tools to Save Time on Screenshot Tutorials
Screenshot tutorials are powerful learning tools, whether for high-level overviews or short how-tos. 3M Visual Systems Division2 reported that using visuals can increase learning by up to 400% and that learners process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
However, creating a screenshot tutorial can take a significant amount of time. Between taking the screenshot, annotating it, and formatting it for the knowledge base, you’ve lost hours of your day. The idea of making a screencast sounds simple enough but it actually involves a number of tedious things right from storyboarding, recording the voiceover, and exporting/uploading the generated files. This means that it ends up taking hours just to create a video for a simple 10-step process.
One way to simplify this process is by using a tutorial builder3. Here’s how it works:
1 – Click capture and interact (browse, click, type) with the app as you normally would.
2 – iorad captures/identifies every action and generates an editable sequence of steps for you.
3 – Automatically publish a printable, searchable, and mobile-ready interactive article to your Freshdesk/Freshservice solution center.
You’ve spent hours copy/pasting screenshots in the past. Now you can see how the iorad + Freshdesk integration works.
#2 Start With a Solid Framework
While it might be easy for you to simply generate new knowledge base articles whenever customer issues arise, if your knowledge base lacks basic navigation structure, your customers will be wading through a mess of confused articles. This ends up wasting time for your team members and your customers.
Instead, begin by creating an overall structure for your knowledge base, focused primarily around the key tasks that your customer performs. Then, as you add to your self service knowledge base articles that address customer issues, you have a clearly organized framework for categorization.
For example, the knowledge base for Act-On Software features 8 different icons to direct a customer, based on the main task a customer performs on the platform.
This not only helps customers find what they need quickly, but it allows your team to easily categorize content and access those articles for updates down the road.
Another time trap for the knowledge bases team occurs when articles need to be revised. If tutorials are in varying places, the knowledge base team members need to jump around to revise the content. One useful feature of the Freshdesk/iorad integration is that when you make a change to your iorad tutorial, it is automatically updated in Freshdesk. This takes no coding or link updating on your part. That means that customers always have access to the most up to date tutorials, no matter where they are.
Creating a framework doesn’t need to be a time-consuming task. Simply think of the primary functions that your customer performs on your platform and then base your framework around those key actions.
#3 Use Support Tickets to Dictate Knowledge Base Content
A significant amount of customer support time is spent answering the same questions over and over again. While the support team could copy and paste all day long, preventing this monotonous task could help them have a lower number of support tickets so that they have more time to devote to the more technical tickets.
To do this, you could base articles on trending support tickets.
The problem is, for many companies, the customer support team operates separately from the knowledge base team.
But here’s a quick solution- have tech support flag tickets that are frequently asked questions. If they find themselves copying and pasting the same answers, then they can flag those tickets. The knowledge base team can use these flagged tickets to help dictate iorad tutorials on what to create next.
#4 Update the Knowledge Base Before Product Releases
Another element that the knowledge base needs is a clear line of communication with the development/release team. Knowledge base content needs to be updated prior to a new release, which means that the development/release team needs to communicate those changes in a timely manner.
Having revised articles up prior to a release prevents the knowledge base team from having to frantically update knowledge base articles while the customer support team is swamped with addressing tickets related to the product changes.
Through the Freshdesk/iorad integration, you can create a draft of the revised article while the current article remains live. Once the new release occurs, you can change the revised draft status to publish in iorad, and it will replace the current live article with the revised article.
#5 Have a Consistent Style Guide
Eliminate the amount of time spent deciding on an article format by creating a consistent style guide that the entire team follows. Stay consistent in the font, size, line spacing, shape and color templates, and other such conventions. Iorad makes it simple by having a single shared style guide.
You may also consider implementing a consistent structure for each article:
- Identifying the problem
- Showing the steps to solve it
- Closing with related articles
- Providing them with a way to contact customer service if their problem isn’t resolved
#6 Temporarily Enable Comments to Receive Customer Feedback
In order to make sure that your articles are effectively answering your customer’s questions, you could turn on the comment feature on your knowledge base. That way, if a customer still has a question after reading an article, they could ask right there. You will then be able to reply promptly, thereby eliminating the need for your customer to contact support. Furthermore, it provides the knowledge base team with helpful feedback on what to clarify in the article.
This doesn’t have to be a permanent strategy. As the knowledge base grows, managing comments on a large number of articles may not be feasible. But it’s a quick and efficient strategy to help you polish up an article to make sure it clearly addresses the needs of the customers, and reduces the time that support would have to spend on resolving those questions.
#7 Use Analytics to Guide Content Revision
Once you get to the point where you turn off comments on knowledge base articles, that doesn’t mean that you are left in the dark on how customers are doing in tutorials. You can use the iorad analytics feature to determine where customers are falling off as they follow the tutorials in Freshdesk. This can help your team determine how to revise the content so it provides more clarity.
Conclusion
Building out a solid knowledge base software is worth the time and investment. But that doesn’t mean you have to pull all-nighters clipping screenshots and writing tutorials. Utilizing the Freskdesk/iorad integration along with these efficient and scalable strategies will help your company create and maintain a fantastic resource for customers. Not only will this decrease the amount of time customer support has to spend on resolving issues, but it will also increase customer satisfaction and retention.
Source:
1 – https://go.forrester.com/blogs/16-03-03-your_customers_dont_want_to_call_you_for_support/
2 -http://web.archive.org/web/20001102203936/http%3A//3m.com/meetingnetwork/files/meetingguide_pres.pdf
3 – https://www.iorad.com/
