How Can You Make Self-Service More Useful?

Regardless of your industry, a knowledge base can completely revolutionise the way your customers and employees feel about using your product or service. Chances are, you already have a knowledge base. But if you’re getting less than desirable feedback from your employees and customers about using it, you may be wondering: how can I make self-service more useful for my product or service? You’re in the right place! Let’s take a look at a few steps you can take to make self-service more useful to the people who matter the most.

Talk With Employees And Loyal Customers

First, there is no better way to improve your self-service than to speak with those who actually use it. Gather a few of your employees, as well as few loyal customers of your product or service, and have them fill out a questionnaire form about your knowledge base. Be sure to include questions that touch on which topics were helpful, the topics they thought were missing, and allow them to rate the structure of the knowledge base. Lastly, give them the chance to explain how they felt about using it, and any recommendations they would give to help make it better. This information is the first step to helping you make your self-service more useful.

Test Different Structures

Another thing to consider when improving your knowledge base is the structure. One of the most important things to have is a clearly visible search bar, but aside from that, the structure of your self-service program is largely left up to you. You have the option to arrange information by category, or display the most frequently asked questions at the top of the page and focus on categories after. Therefore, testing different structures and getting feedback from customers and employees is essential to ensuring that your knowledge base maximises self-service instead of hindering it.

Cross-Link Articles

Articles in your knowledge base may be related to each other, whether by topic or that user may need an answer to another question after they got the answer to the first one. You can improve how useful your self-service is by cross-linking articles in a logical way. This intuitive process will help to move customers and employees through the learning curve easily, making them feel satisfied with their self-service experience. An easy way to do this is to include a pop-up or widget that triggers after they have scrolled to the end of the page that points them to related articles.

Integrate It With Live Chat

Another easy way to make your knowledge base more useful is to integrate it with your live chat system. Put simply, sometimes certain questions can’t be answered through self-service. By including an easy-to-find live chat option in articles that touch on more technical topics, you’ll be able to enhance the way customers and employees use your knowledge base.

Add Feedback Options

When it comes to business, there is no failure, only feedback. Making it easy for customers to leave feedback on your self-service process will make it possible for you to continue to improve your knowledge base. Collecting this feedback can be done in multiple ways. It can be as simple as adding a “Was this article helpful?” widget at the end of the page with either a thumbs up or a thumbs down sign; or more technical, like triggering a feedback pop-up if they’ve been browsing the knowledge base for more than a few minutes. With this invaluable feedback, you’ll know exactly where to concentrate your self-service improvement efforts.

With these five tips under your belt, you’ll be more equipped to improve your knowledge base and make your business renowned for its effective self-service process.

Originally published at https://knowledgebird.com on May 15, 2019.