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Statistics that Will Convince You to Create Knowledge Base

16 Knowledge Base Trends & Statistics To Consider in 2024

Category: Knowledge Base Software

Last updated on Jan 10, 2024

Since 2017, millennials have become the largest generation worldwide. If you haven’t prepared your business to face the challenges that come with this change, it’s time to speed up the process.

Millennials are unsurprisingly obsessed with smartphones and technology. They’re mobile and expect immediacy and efficiency from the brands they interact with.

But if there’s one thing millennials hate, it’s using their phones to call for support.14 stats

According to a Salesforce survey, almost:

    1. 89% of millennial use a search engine to find answers before making a call to get customer service
  1. 67% of them have increased their expectations in the past year regarding customer support
  2. 78% of millennial customers have moved their business somewhere else after one single poor customer service experience

These numbers speak for themselves. You must provide your customers with excellent support with minimal human interaction to keep them hooked on your product.

You need to give them clear instructions, easy-to-follow user manuals, and an exhaustive collection of FAQs — all wrapped in a modern and intuitive product.

In other words, your customers must have access to a user-friendly knowledge base, where they can find their answers fast, with no need for external help.

Implementing Self-service support is a must for a generation that grew up surrounded by digital devices. Millennials have high expectations from brands, whether they’re looking for information for personal purposes or work.

This approach can help you increase customer retention across all generations, including Baby Boomers and Generation Z.

And here are some more statistics that underline the importance of creating a knowledge base.

People want instant help

4. 70% of customers prefer to use a company’s website to get answers to their questions rather than use phone or email (Social Media Today)

Fact: no one likes to dial numbers guided by a recorded message, hoping to get in touch with a human.

A customer service test made back in 2009 by the BBC showed that customers had to wait up to 24 minutes to access the customer service line of some of the biggest communication companies in the UK.

Today, these numbers would be unthinkable for a business that wants to improve customer retention.people want instant help

Calling or writing long emails is not a good fit for modern customers. Whatever software you’re selling, you need to give people immediate access to information.

5. 31%  of customers want instant online help, while 40 percent of them expect to receive assistance in less than 5 minutes (Econsultancy)

To meet such high expectations, you need an intuitive knowledge base, built with your customers in mind.

Creating FAQ pages can provide easy access to customers or users from any device. Furthermore, visitors should be able to navigate through various topics alone, to get the answers they’re looking for.

You must create knowledge base portal, where customers get a personalised experience, based on their history with your brand.

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Your knowledge base should have built-in insights that allow you to analyse previous interactions. Use this data to give accurate answers to all possible questions and to improve the customer experience.

This way, your customers won’t have to come back for a second interaction with your brand to solve a problem.

Statistics to Support
6. 57% of calls come from customers who visited the company’s website first (Harvard Business Review)

This is bad for business. If your clients have to call for technical support after visiting your website, you risk losing them to your competitors.

Building a company knowledge base is the first step towards better customer service. But you need to update content on a regular basis, to remain relevant.

Do keyword research to see what your customers are looking for in your knowledge base. This way, you can optimise your content to help users navigate faster through your website.

Simply uploading content is not enough to provide an excellent customer experience. 

7. 36% of customers say companies should improve their Search functionality and website usability (Oracle study)

Many companies encourage their customers to check their spelling or to use more specific keywords to make searching easier.

This approach kind of leaves the responsibility on the customer and isn’t going to improve the user experience.

Make things easier for them by delivering a killer search engine that can provide results even when your customers introduce misspelt words or forget the exact name of your product.

Customers prefer using the knowledge base to get their answers

8. 51% of customers prefer technical support through a knowledge base (Econsultancy)

And the number is growing as new technologies help to create knowledge base more interactive and easy to use.customer prefer self- service

The quality of the service is vital. Create a knowledge base as a well-organised helpful tool, available 24/7, from anywhere.

Your customers can access technical support at any hour, straight from their smartphone. This is a massive advantage if you’re a global company, with customers in different time zones.

9. 40% of customers prefer self-service over human contact (Forbes)

Most clients just like their privacy. Or they don’t want to look stupid asking questions.

Sometimes, previous experiences with bored or rude call centre operators (not necessarily from your company) keep people from calling for help.

Create a knowledge base that gives you the chance to provide your customers with answers using a channel where they’re in the driving seat.

This way, people feel confident with using your products, and you gain their trust, as well.

10. 91% of customers would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs (Social Media Today)

A knowledge base software means faster customer service. Period.

People get their answers when they need it, with no time wasted looking for contact information, calling or emailing.

If you focus your efforts on improving your product to meet your customers’ expectations, you’re more likely to have happy customers.

Knowledge base takes your business to the next level

11. Simply improving your Help section can reduce the number of calls by 5% (Harvard Business Review)

Many problems your customers have can be solved by explaining things in 300 words or less.

And, once you write the answer, all customers dealing with the same issue can get their instructions online.Take KB to Next level

This way, you reduce the number of tickets, which means you get to cut down costs and increase efficiency.

By transforming your old FAQ section into a modern knowledge base, you keep up with your competitors (or even step ahead of them).   

12. 54% of companies offering web or mobile self-service have seen an increase in their website traffic (Destination CRM)

An optimised knowledge base can boost your SEO, as more people come to find their answers directly on your site.

If you provide users with high-quality content, they won’t be looking for answers somewhere else. They’ll spend their time on your website, looking to learn more about their topics of interest.

This customer behaviour means lower bounce rates and increased time spent on page, which are indicators to Google that your website is a reliable source of information.

13. 5% growth in retention can increase profits by up to 95 percent (Small Business Trends)

Customer service is vital when you’re looking to keep hold of your clients.

The more you give them, the higher the chances of creating a long-term relationship. So create knowledge base a valuable source of information.

How to Improve Strength to Your Knowledge Base

Publish “how-to” articles, white papers, e-books, and case studies to support your customers with relevant, updated information.

Use all types of content to make sure you draw attention — infographics, video tutorials and also the screenshots that illustrate how your product works.

14. By 2020, 85% of the customer-company relationship will be managed with no human interaction (HubSpot)

The trend is clear: as a knowledge base is a cost-effective way of providing high-quality customer support, more companies are going to invest in improving their old Help Centres.

So if you want to keep up with the market, first of all you must create internal knowledge base that encourages high usability.

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With fewer customers willing to pick up the phone to call technical support, you have to provide an efficient alternative.

15. Self-service is preferred by 67 percent of clients over engaging with a company representative.. (Superoffice)

There is no question that today’s clients are technologically savvy and would like rapid solutions to their difficulties rather than waiting for a support representative to assist them.

People nowadays seek to address their problems quickly by using a self-service knowledge base. With an excellent knowledge base, you can give fast solutions to your clients’ commonly asked questions. This aids in the reduction of customer support requests, the reduction of customer support expenses, and the improvement of customer happiness.

16. By 2021, artificial intelligence will manage 15% of all customer support interactions, a 400% increase from 2017. (Gartner)

AI customer service is revolutionizing how businesses serve the people who support them, collaborating with human employees to deliver rapid, convenient, and personalised assistance.

Also Read : 100+ Customer Service Statistics You Should Know

Final thoughts

All these statistics show that people are ready for self-service customer support. In fact, they prefer it to the old-fashioned methods of getting customer care.

Your clients are looking for faster ways to deal with difficulties. They want answers at the same time when they need them, and can’t afford to waste hours having their problems fixed. Not when they can solve everything by reading one or two articles online.

Don’t quit on your call centre just yet. But, you should use it for more serious problems, not for giving the same answer to four different customers on the same day. You can use your knowledge base for that.

Creating a self-service knowledge base can help you increase customer satisfaction and retention rates, which will in turn increase your profits. Better yet, you get to cut costs by assisting your customers more efficiently.

In simple words, you get to give your customers what they want, while increasing efficiency all around.

Finally convinced about the importance of a knowledge base for your website? Why not give Document360 a try? It’s simple, effective, and ready to implement — contact us today!

Christina Comben

May 8, 2018

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