8 ways to improve your knowledge base and increase customer satisfaction
Helpful tips that you can readily implement to make your knowledge base more effective and increase customer satisfaction.
An effective knowledge base is the first line of defense for your support team, and the best way to retain your customers. A study by Forrester research shows that 70% of customers prefer to use a company's website to get answers to their questions rather than by phone or email. This improves customer satisfaction and reduces the number of calls and support emails.
A good knowledge base acts as self-service for support and gives users what they want without asking multiple questions. In other words, it solves customers' queries instantly. However, the knowledge base does not thrive longer with a one-time effort - it requires consistent efforts to keep it up-to-date and user-friendly. To understand the basic structure, requirements, and benefits of a knowledge base, read this article.
Here, we'll look at some of the most effective ways to quickly improve your knowledge base.
1. Make your knowledge base user-friendly
To ensure that your knowledge base is user-friendly, you need to optimize it for your users. This will help them find the information they need quickly and easily. Here are some tips on how to do this:
- Make sure the navigation is clear and simple. Your knowledge base should have an intuitive structure that makes it easy for users to navigate through the content. If there are too many links or categories, users may feel overwhelmed and leave without finding what they're looking for.
- Make sure each article in your knowledge base has a title that is clear and informative about its contents. A good title will also help people find articles by searching for keywords related to their query.
- Add a table of contents at the beginning of long knowledge base articles so users can quickly see where each topic fits into the overall structure of your site and jump directly to an article if they want more detail on a certain topic than what's provided in the summary paragraph at the top of an article.
- Add a video to summarize the article, especially when the article is a How-to guide. Videos with voiceover are more user-friendly and preferred by users rather than long text-heavy articles.
2. Make your knowledge base searchable
If you want people to be able to find the answers they're looking for in your knowledge base, you need to make sure it is easily searchable. You can do this by making sure your knowledge base contains relevant keywords and by setting up filters and categories to help people narrow down their search results. You can also consider installing a search plugin or add-on to make searching your knowledge base even easier. When choosing software for a knowledge base, this can be one of the factors to keep in mind. WowTo offers an extensive search that also searches inside the videos and is blazing fast at the same time.
3. Add FAQs as a category
The frequently asked questions (FAQs) category answers common questions that customers have about your product or service. These are the most likely topics that people will be searching for when they visit your website. By adding a FAQs category to your knowledge base, you can provide your customers with quick and easy answers to their questions. This will improve your customer service and make your customers happier.
4. Keep your knowledge base simple
It is important to keep your knowledge base simple. This applies to the overall categorization as well as to the article structuring. If the knowledge base article is long and complicated, you risk losing the reader's attention before they get to the end of the article. Instead, keep it simple and straightforward so readers can easily understand what they need to do next.
Here are some examples of well-organized and simple knowledge bases:
Calendly - The knowledge base is very broadly classified into 5 categories, and they have a separate video tutorials section. The user can search from the main page or go inside a specific category and browse through or search for articles or videos.
Canva - They have a very clean and elegant interface for their knowledge base and very well categorized, including a category for ‘Troubleshooting.’ Additionally, they have a section for the top searched articles.
Softr.io - Here, they use Airtable for their knowledge base and have the categories and the article list under them on the main page itself to enable users to navigate easily. They also have a separate video guides page to host their video tutorials.
MockFlow - Here, the knowledge base has 2 levels of categorization. This is a good approach when you have a lot of support articles. Also, each article is a short one leading to the next one keeping the user focused on one point. They also have an extensive video knowledge base.
A common trait you can observe is the inclusion of video tutorials or a video knowledge base as a part of the help center or the traditional knowledge base. Did you know that you can create a free video knowledge base for your site with WowTo?
5. Keep it up to date
Make sure that your knowledge base is always up to date. This means that you need to regularly add new articles and update existing ones. By constantly updating your knowledge base, the support tickets and calls can be reduced, which in turn helps reduce costs related to customer support and improve customer satisfaction.
Here are some points that will help you keep your knowledge base updated:
- Keep track of new features and add categories and related articles immediately.
- Maintain a dependency matrix of features to support articles for updating existing articles on any product update. For example, a table that lists a list of support articles related to the product dashboard will instantly help you identify which articles need to be updated when there is a UI update in the product dashboard.
- Use customer feedback to add content to your knowledge base. This can help you identify gaps in your knowledge base and improve the quality of your articles.
If you rely on video for your knowledge base, then check out WowTo, as it makes it a snap to update your videos without re-recording.
6. Add images and videos
Adding images and videos to your knowledge base can help improve engagement and understanding for your users. Adding multimedia can also help break up longer articles, making them more digestible. When choosing images and videos, be sure to select ones that are high-quality and relevant to the topic at hand. Creating video tutorials as a separate section or having a video knowledge base is also greatly preferred by customers nowadays.
7. Multilingual support
When catering to a global audience, it is important to also keep the language as a factor for your knowledge base. A study by Intercom states that 35% of users will be willing to switch products for support in their native language. Letting the user choose their preferred language to view the knowledge base can be very helpful in improving customer satisfaction. With evolving artificial intelligence, translation has been made quite feasible. Suppose you have a video knowledge base and are wondering how to incorporate support for multiple languages; In that case, you can check the solution offered by WowTo, where the video player has the option to switch the voiceover between different languages.
8. Share your article on social media
Sharing your articles on social media allows you to reach a larger audience and get feedback from various people. Additionally, it can help to promote your articles and get them in front of more potential readers.
Now take what you've learned and improve your knowledge base
The knowledge base is a critical component of any organization because it represents the collective knowledge of the organization. It is important to make updates to improve the knowledge base so that it remains a valuable resource for the organization and its customers. By taking the steps mentioned above, you can ensure that the knowledge base is performing to its best capacity.
