Did you know 78% of customers have switched providers because of one poor customer service experience? If your company is seeing a high turnover rate, this might be the culprit.
This is where building a knowledge base can save you. Allowing customers to find answers on their own and meeting the needs of our self-service world will help with customer retention and support team organization.
Follow our how-to on building a knowledge base with customers in mind.
Getting Started with Your Knowledge Base
Before you begin building your knowledge base, it’s essential to understand what exactly a knowledge base is.
You may already have a lot of information stored in your head or documents and spreadsheets. Still, a knowledge base can help organize that information into something easier to access and use. This includes:
- What products/services do you offer, and how customers can access them.
- How to best support customers who need help or have questions about your product or service.
- Other vital details about your products, like subscription renewals, repairs, and returns.
By creating a centralized place where all this content lives, you’ll be able to make sure it’s easy for people across different departments at work (or even within your own work environment) to collaborate on answering questions from customers.
1. Plan and structure your knowledge base.
The first step in creating any knowledge base is to know what you want to achieve. If you haven’t done so already, this is the time to develop a vision for your knowledge base and establish goals that suit it.
Customers visit the website first before making a call or contacting customer service in any way. Don’t give them the runaround when it comes to getting help. This is your chance to focus on preparing your site and all company/product documents for easy access. Remember, we’re in the age of transparency. Customers want the information.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Who will be using my content? What kind of audience do I have in mind?
- What are their needs and interests? How can I meet them where they are with my content (instead of forcing them to come to me, i.e., calling customer support)?
- What types of things am I hoping people will learn or understand from reading or watching my work (e.g., how-to tips, background information about a topic, etc.)
Once these answers have been determined, it’s time to plan out how much content will be needed for each subject.
This is a key element of Korra, marking the transition between a simple knowledge base and a user-centric knowledge discovery platform. Korra not only analyzes your existing assets but also monitors file locations (Dropbox, NAS drive, etc.). This allows your data to always be up to date.
2. Create content for your knowledge base.
When you’re ready to create your content, start by creating a list of topics. Make sure that the topics include all the information your users might want to know about, and try not to focus on one specific aspect of each topic (e.g., “how” vs. “who,” or “what” vs. “why”).
Most knowledge base creation tools utilize keywords and tags in order to formulate search results. But this isn’t the only way (more on that in a bit).
If that’s the route you’ve chosen, create a list of keywords for your articles. This will help you form the basis for your titles, tags, and meta descriptions later on. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Moz for insight.
Then, write the content!
The other—re: better—the solution is to use an AI knowledge discovery platform. Forget keywords, tags, and the other static markers that are used to run the world of search. Semantic search is the future. With Korra, your knowledge base works with natural queries, not manipulated ones. Give customers the ease of finding answers instantly with the speed only AI can provide.
3. Design for an effective customer experience.
When building a knowledge base, it’s crucial to think about the user experience. You want your users to be able to find the information they need quickly and easily.
The most effective customer experience is a natural one. You need to make it feel like the user is talking to another human being, not a machine. That means you must create accurate, engaging, and authoritative content without sounding robotic.
The interface should make sense for both new and experienced users. That way, you’re not neglecting any segment of your customer base. A uniform, simple experience is best. Not too minimal but not overwhelming. You need the Goldilocks of knowledge base designs.
4. Add visuals to your knowledge base articles.
Images are good, but video is the future. With video, viewers get an active look at how actions are performed, how products act and react, and a realistic sense of what to expect. According to this report, 66% of consumers prefer video when learning about a product. That can easily copy over from marketing to knowledge discovery.
Adding visuals is one of the best ways to make your knowledge base easier to read and find information. Images can help you illustrate concepts, which will help customers understand your content more easily. They also help you engage with customers by making the content more visually appealing.
If a customer is searching for an answer, they may not know what it looks like or how it works. In this case, adding an image of the product or feature can be very helpful in helping them find what they’re looking for quickly.
36% of customers want the companies they buy products for (or might buy from) to improve search on their site. Again, this ties into customers visiting the website for information before calling or contacting. Make your search simple, accessible, and user-friendly.
Korra excels in this area of building a knowledge base. It features a video stream for every article/page/answer that appears before the customer. Forget what you know about static video. Korra not only makes video interactive but also searchable. Our AI can find answers within video files and showcase the exact timestamp to searchers. In fact, Korra finds answers across most file formats: PDF, DOC, video, images, HTML—you name it, Korra reads it.
Korra redefines knowledge discovery for both companies and customers. Our easy-to-use, robust platform scales as you grow.
As you grow, your knowledge discovery platform should too. Don’t let accessible information fall behind when company growth is soaring. Otherwise, you can expect profits to plummet and customers to ditch your product for a company that values the user experience.
We hope this article has given you a good overview of building a knowledge base and how one can help your company. Knowledge discovery platforms are more than just lists of facts or instructions; they’re meant to create an experience for customers. By aiming for the future of semantic search, you can provide customers with a platform that answers their questions immediately.
Building a knowledge base doesn’t have to be a burden for you or your team. Let artificial intelligence do the work for you with Korra. Try it today for free!