How Can Your Team Contribute to a Customer Service Knowledge Base?
A well-developed and content rich knowledge base makes customer service easier and more successful. It allows a high-level of customer service and support while saving time, and offering an abundance of organizational know-how for other teams to benefit from. An appropriately structured and content rich knowledge base lets customers quickly access answers to their questions and assistance for their problems. It also provides access to assistance from customer support reps. However, when well done customers have the satisfaction of getting their problems solved immediately via the knowledge base.
Developing this caliber of knowledge base requires ongoing input from the people responsible for day to day operations — company departments and teams. Ideally, this begins with planning the structure of how your team’s knowledge base is organised. It also incorporates customer feedback and questions, encountered by your team, to create a robust and useful tool for internal (your colleagues) and external customers.
Use these guidelines to help your team build a strong knowledge base with your contributions:
Know your team audience
While a primary audience exists for your company, there is also an audience specific to what your team provides. Furthermore, there is a customer audience specific to your team role. Use the content of your most common support queries—your customers’ concerns, questions, and problems in their words—to develop the beginnings of your team knowledge base.
Templates and Style Guides
Most likely, your marketing team will have style guides for customer-facing content. Make sure you apply these to articles, charts, data sets, and other contributions to the knowledge base, because they can be published to self-service. A simple and consistent template makes the creation and discovery of knowledge base articles much easier. As well as the problem statement or topic, which service or product it applies to, and the clearly written answer, you may also find that your team needs to add criteria specific to your operations to the template. A field for root cause, for example.
Content Organization
It’s important to organize your team’s component of the knowledge base in a way that makes sense for your audience. While it will have a home in the greater infrastructure of the entire knowledge base, it also needs a coherent substructure. In short, knowledge bases require consistent collaboration to develop and function effectively. Make an effort to offer input regarding what your team contributes and where it sits in your team’s portion of the knowledge base.
Knowledge Base Permissions
As with any library of information, access permissions help maintain the integrity of the library. There are administrators with full access to add, overwrite, reorganize and delete files, others who can publish, and some who may only create drafts. Learn where you are on that spectrum of permissions. If you do not have direct access to add to the knowledge base, know the process for making recommendations or contributing additions and updates to the knowledge base. A strong knowledge base requires input from every team member.
Quality Checks
Even if it’s not part of your role or you can’t contribute directly to your company knowledge base, you still have the capacity to support its development. Any time you have reason to use the knowledge base, review any articles you come across as if you were an external customer. Were the steps clear? Do all the links work? Are there typos or outdated information or images? With a little time spent or a quick comment, you could prevent a major customer service issue.
Effective knowledge base development and implementation depends on the collective knowledge and experience of a company and its teams. Along with the larger departmental infrastructure, teams need to contribute directly to the substructure of the knowledge base to ensure its usefulness and accuracy. As a customer-facing team member, you are among those best equipped to contribute relevant content and to assist with the development and maintenance of your company’s self-service knowledge base.
Learn the Keys to a Kickass Knowledge Base.
