The customer support industry is changing rapidly. Most of the time, customer service reps are overwhelmed with the number of requests they get. With a swarm of customer support tickets, it's hard to build a strategy to handle this growing amount of requests. Especially, when you know that there are questions that are being asked over and over again.
If you want to master customer support, then you need to build a knowledge management system for your business.
When you build a knowledge management system, it can help you with:
- Decrease the number of support costs.
- Increase customer satisfaction rate.
- Improve overall customer experience and customer success ROI.
The biggest benefit of using Knowledge management software is the ability to answer customer questions in real-time. That’s not all, when you have a system in place, you can teach your customers the value of DIY customer service.
Following the steps mentioned in knowledge management system articles, customers can fix small issues with ease. As customers tend to improve their technical skills, they’re less likely to call up customer support for basic questions. The saying “Knowledge is Power” is more than true.
Statistics About Knowledge Management Systems
If you’re wondering why you need to set up your knowledge management system, then here are some stats to look at:
- 70% of customers want a company’s website to include a self-service option.
- 85% of all customers never interact with an enterprise they’re in a relationship with.
- 90% of businesses are competing in marketing by offering incredible customer experience.
According to a survey conducted by Gartner, it’s expected that 85% of customers will interact with a bot when talking to a customer.
If as a business you’re able to provide what customers want, then you’ve solved all the issues.
What is a Knowledge Management System?
According to Wikipedia, the definition of knowledge management is “Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization.”
If you want a simpler definition, knowledge management helps people utilize available knowledge to achieve a task.
A Knowledge Management system is the perfect solution to grow your customer experience, and help your customers learn about basic troubleshooting.
When your customer support agents have all the information on their hands, they can answer questions in real-time. Thus, reducing the troubleshooting time.
Not all knowledge management systems are equal, there are different types. But all these types share some common characteristics, such as:
- Forum or community feature
- FAQ content
- How to articles and tutorials
- Certificates
- Case studies
- Webinars
Examples of Knowledge Management Systems
As we’ve told you that there are different types of knowledge management systems, and each of them serves a specific purpose.
Here’s a look at Tableau’s Knowledge Base
Tableau’s Knowledge base has put priority on the search functionality. Users can get answers by typing in specific keywords. There’s also a product-specific navigation option. Plus, the Tableau community helps users discuss issues and other ideas, it also includes other customer education features like classroom training, e-learning, videos, and webinars.
Another example that you can look at is R Studio. R Studio is more community focused instead of a knowledge base. It includes articles that address common customer support issues.
On the bottom, it includes a brilliant feature. There are important links to learning, resources, and training. This feature is incredibly helpful for products that are highly technical.
Here are some other examples of Knowledge Management Systems:
- Optimizely: Optimizely’s knowledge base offers a wide range of features. These include the academy, community forums, certifications, developer documentation, and more.
- SurveyMonkey: This particular knowledge base allows users to learn by searching for keywords or by topic.
- Microsoft: Microsoft’s knowledge base is organized in helpful videos and training. The best thing about it is that users can talk directly with the product manager.
- Google Analytics: Google Analytics has its own knowledge base, and it offers its own predictive search engine.
Benefits of Knowledge Management Systems
One of the best benefits of using a knowledge management system is that the best practices are available to customers to solve their issues. Customers who are happy with the customer service keep coming back. Knowledge management systems tend to offer a lot of value for businesses.
If you’re able to offer a self-service customer service portal, you’ll be able to reduce customer support costs.
It is extremely expensive for businesses to have a customer talk with their customer response team. Talking with an agent can cost anywhere between $6-$12 per call. But if the customers are talking with an automated bot, it costs much less.
When you create a valuable knowledge management system, you’ll be able to free up your customer support staff. There are tons of knowledge management software that can help you build a custom system for your business.
The advantages of a knowledge management system definitely outweigh the time and money you spend on it. Having knowledge management software makes it easy for potential customers to make a decision.
How to Build Effective Knowledge Management System?
If you want to build a knowledge management system from scratch, then you need to follow some basic steps.
1. Source Information for Your Knowledge Management System
The first thing you need to do is to find information to add to the knowledge management document.
Here’s how you can determine which information you need to keep in your knowledge management system:
- Go Through Support Ticket System: If there are some questions that customers keep asking over and over again, then you need to add those into the knowledge base. You need to answer the most commonly asked questions.
- Figure Out What Issues Come Up Frequently: Get your support team together and ask them for ideas. It will help in covering all the topics that your customer support team has to deal with the most.
- Use Google Analytics: Another best option you can use is to rely on Google Analytics. You can simply go to Behavior>Site Search>Search Terms to see what people are searching for.
- Use Social Media: 89% of all customers end up talking about their experience with brands on social media. So, you can use those platforms to learn a lot about what customers are talking about. You can fix a lot of customer issues by adding solutions to their questions in the knowledge base.
2. Organize Knowledge Management System
If your knowledge management system isn’t well organized, it won’t offer any value. Here are some best practices you need to follow for organizing your knowledge management system:
- Stuff all the articles into topic categories (it’s a good habit to make between 4-6 categories).
- Distinguish between the most frequently used elements on the homepage.
- Include frequently used and open links within article content to other helpful and related links, videos, and trainings.
- Add a sidebar that contains all the important links such as charts, community, and courses.
- Include a feedback mechanism so you can understand how customers are responding to the articles.
- Include a variety of content in your knowledge management system (text, images, and videos).
3. Analyze and Optimize
Managing your knowledge management system is a whole another challenge. You need to know which articles aren’t performing well. It will be a bit more difficult to track the metrics of these articles as there are no clear numbers.
The best way to track if your articles are doing the thing they’re supposed to be is by adding a satisfaction survey. You can use other tools, but there’s nothing as great as having a customer tell you if your article was helpful to them or not.
While a feedback form may not help that much, it helps in understanding which pages aren’t performing well. So, you can update those articles.
4. Keep Your Knowledge Management System Up-to-Date
Operating a knowledge management system is as crucial as building one. Your responsibility doesn’t end after you’ve created a knowledge base. Keep updating information based on the questions that customers ask. Things that customers are searching for on your site.
One way to make sure you’re on top of customer queries, add a feedback form everywhere that asks customers to leave a question that they couldn’t find on the website.
Final Word - Let Your Knowledge Management System Help You Out
A knowledge management system can help you increase customer satisfaction, decrease customer support costs, and increase customer success ROI. Regardless of the type of knowledge management software you make for yourself, it will do the same thing. It will help your customers to educate themselves to fix small problems.
Tags: Knowledge Management Software, Knowledge Management System