Knowledge base best practice guide

In this blog we will explore some of the best practices for creating and maintaining a knowledge base that adds real value to your organization.

In our previous blog we discussed how a knowledge base can help your customer service team be more efficient and provide a better service. We talked about how a well-designed knowledge base can become the central information hub of your contact center solution, containing everything from how-to guides and FAQs to brochures and product information that is more sales orientated. This content helps your staff to provide quick, relevant and consistent responses to customer queries.

Today we will drill into the detail of how to build a knowledge base that is truly useful, both immediately and as your business grows and adapts to new challenges.

It may seem obvious but a knowledge base is only as good as the content it contains. If it is full of outdated information, it will be a hindrance rather than a help to your agents. It is a good idea to have a nominated person in your team who is responsible for triaging new material and managing existing content to ensure that the information is always correct and up-to-date.

Every organization has some content that is aimed at customers, and other material that is just for internal agents and sales teams. To reduce the risk of sending an internal document to a customer you should ensure that content is arranged and labelled appropriately.

The last thing you want is to accidently send your discounting policy to a prospective customer when you’re discussing pricing, or share confidential information about another organization.

Make it easy for your contact center managers and content contributors to upload and store data. They should be able to upload content from CSV files and import directly from a Confluence or SharePoint site. Having multiple ways to upload content makes it easier to keep the knowledge base updated with rich and useful information that is up to date.

The chances are that an agent in mid conversation isn’t going to have the time to dig through a comprehensive document looking for the right snippet of information. Guides and scripts for agents should be written in simple and easily accessible language that sounds natural when read aloud. It is best to avoid technical jargon and unnecessary detail.

By hosting your customer facing content in an easily accessible location, agents can share links directly with customers for a more seamless knowledge base experience. These customers will then be able to self-serve in the future, reducing the burden on your contact center.

Understanding who is regularly getting in contact with your business is a great starting point to understanding what content you should be adding to your knowledge base.

If 99% of the calls you receive are from existing customers, then you shouldn’t be filling your knowledge base with sales material and should instead concentrate on your key customer use cases.

By minimizing irrelevant content, you will make it easier for your staff and customers to find the information they need.

If you keep getting the same queries, then this might mean that there are important gaps in your knowledge base. You will only be aware of this if you keep track of your most frequent queries, which will allow you to put together documentation to help your agents answer these queries quickly.

It is a very good idea to track how often each piece of content is being interacted with. There is no point putting effort and resource into keeping a piece of content updated if it’s simply not being used.

Likewise, if there are certain pieces of content that are accessed regularly, there could be an opportunity to break them up into smaller and more succinct pieces to help your customers get to the detail they require more quickly.

Having a robust and up to date knowledge base with AI capability can be a game changer for your contact center. Understanding customer sentiment and being able to serve the right information, at the right time will make it quicker to find relevant information and make your agents more efficient – saving you costs.

You could even plug a chatbot into your knowledge base that can cover simple queries that don’t require a human agent. This will leave your contact center staff to work on more complex queries and give your customers the answers they require quickly and efficiently.

Hopefully you’ve found this guide helpful. Did you know that with a Conversations enterprise package you now get a free Knowledge Base module? If you’re an existing customer there’s no need to do anything, you can get started right away building a knowledge base that really benefits your customers.

If you’re interested in learning more about Knowledge Base and Conversations, our cloud contact center solution, please don’t hesitate to get in touch to book a demo.