A customer’s interaction with your brand continues long after purchase. From the moment prospects stumble upon your website, and long after you sell your products, you need to be available.
All completed transactions are the beginning of a business relationship that can bring in continued profit. So, after the point of sale, it’s very important to continue to communicate with your customers on a regular basis.
Winning over a new customer can cost anywhere between five and 25 times more than retaining an existing one. So, as part of your marketing strategy, your customer service and support must meet their expectations.
Building and maintaining a consistent knowledge base is an effective way of providing high-quality post-sale service to your customers.
When you give your clients access to a library of documents and tools that explain everything about your product, you encourage them to help themselves and to use your product in the best way possible. This will help to ensure that they stay with your business.
What is a Good Knowledge Base?
A good knowledge base is a self-serve customer service library that contains information about a product, service, or topic. It retrieves the appropriate collection of data or information for the customer’s search query.
But there are plenty of benefits with a knowledge base where your customers can rely on when they need support. Check them out:
1. A good knowledge base keeps your customers happy
The most cost-effective way of growing your business is by focusing your efforts on achieving customer success.
You should aim to exceed their expectations by creating a positive customer experience.
A knowledge base gives your customers the chance of solving their problems without your help. You get to answer any questions before they even have to ask!
This is no longer a nice additional idea–it’s just what your customers expect.
Consumers today don’t like to call for support. Most of them prefer self-service over the human interaction.
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A comprehensive knowledge base can significantly reduce the number of phone calls your customers have to make to find answers to their problems.
Give them more free time, and you’ll have more satisfied clients, who are loyal to your brand and more likely to recommend you to their friends and family.
Satisfied clients also buy more often and are even ready to spend more for your services. And better than that? They become advocates for your brand.
In our connected world, word-of-mouth is an excellent marketing tool that can help you increase brand awareness and improve your reputation both online and off.
2. A good knowledge base increases customer retention
When your customers are happy, retention rates increase, and that means long-term business success, consistent sales, and higher revenue.
According to Salesforce, customer retention rate (CRR) is vital to your growth. For example:
- If you increase CRR by 5 percent, you can raise your profits by as much as 25 to 95 percent
- It’s easier to convert an existing buyer into a repeat customer than to turn a lead into a client
- Loyal customers are worth ten times more than a new acquisition
These are the major benefits that a knowledge base can help you achieve, by simply improving your customer retention. It’s a simple, but efficient, way of meeting your customers’ expectations.
3. You deliver more consistent customer support
The core benefit of having a knowledge base is its 24/7 availability. Your customers can access information when they need it, from any device. They don’t have to wait until the morning to call for support to solve a problem they could have fixed with two clicks.
If you have an international audience over different time zones, you can provide all your customers with consistent help at any time of day or night.
Even better, every client in your database receives the same high-quality service fast, and without having to explain their problem to operators.
A knowledge base allows you to hold your customer’s hand even when you sell hundreds of thousands of products every year. Without one, offering high-quality support to every user becomes impossible.
Your brand is your identity. Carry your brand identity into your knowledge base
Request a demoWhen you have how-to guides, tutorials, FAQs, or infographics that guide your customers on using your product, you can provide buyers with all the assistance they need.
According to SmartInsights’ 2018 search engine statistics, more than half of all internet traffic worldwide is mobile. With so many people connected to their smartphones, accessing your website in search of answers should be lightweight and instantaneous.
A mobile-friendly knowledge base brings you closer to your customers and can even exceed their expectations. Customers feel appreciated and respected when they get valuable advice and quick answers when and where they need them.
4. Manage your customers’ problems in a proactive manner
Reactive customer service is no longer enough to earn loyalty and good reviews. Customers want more than just someone who solves their existing problems.
You need to go from being reactive to being proactive.
To make your business successful, anticipate your customers’ needs and come up with innovative ways of helping them reach their goals.
You must work to grow with your customers.
Try to anticipate problems and solve them before they get noticed by your customers.
You also need to add value and teach your clients how to use your product to get the most out of every interaction.
A solid knowledge base that provides information and guides readers to learn more about specific features is an excellent way of bringing more value to the table.
Your clients can interactively learn new features by watching videos or following step-by-step guides. Better than that, they manage to do everything by themselves.
Make information easy to find in your knowledge base application, and both your customers and staff will thank you.
If your employees don’t have to spend time on every client that doesn’t know how to install a new feature, they can focus on more critical tasks. They can help to solve other tickets and provide more people with a positive customer experience, in less time.
5. A knowledge base can help you reduce phone calls
More than half of the people who call to get support have visited the company’s website first. In most cases, a well-documented knowledge base can help you to avoid this situation.
When you take the time to organize your knowledge base and increase its usability, the number of calls decreases significantly.
But for this to happen, you need to organize your articles into categories and subcategories, to make navigation easier.
You also need a killer search function that can recognise misspelt words or partial names of your products.
And, more importantly, you need to give accurate answers and keep your articles updated, to reflect the features of the latest version of your product.
If your customers can find all their answers online, they won’t need to waste precious minutes waiting to be connected to an operator.
You get less calls, which means fewer tickets.
You can cut down your costs while improving your customer support, all by implementing modern communication techniques.
6. It helps you become an authority in your niche
Authority online can bring you more sales opportunities. It’s a sign that you’re trustworthy and shows that you know your business.
When you have authority, search engines prioritize your site, your website ranks higher in search results, and your traffic increases.
You build brand recognition that generates trust and makes people buy.
If you invest in creating an accurate and exhaustive knowledge base software, you’re more likely to become an authority in your industry – the company that customers and even competitors look to for answers.
Self Service Knowledge base software for your documentation needs
Know moreLike HubSpot for inbound marketing or Neil Patel for SEO.
But it’s not something you can achieve overnight. You need to collect feedback, improve your knowledge base articles regularly, keep all the information relevant, and come up with new and innovative content.
Brand authority is a vital sales tool long after you’ve gained your position in the market.
7. You have all your useful information in one place
A solid knowledge base is a useful resource for your employees, as well as your customers.
You gather all the documentation your staff needs when learning about your product in a single place.
Training new employees become faster and cheaper than sending them to a traditional classroom. This is because you can give them direct access to all the information with a single login.
Even your existing employees can go through guides and tutorials as often as they need to solve tickets or to deal with bugs in the system.
A knowledge base is a flexible tool that anyone can use to document old problems or to implement new processes in the company.
Everyone has quick access to information, saving resources and increasing productivity at work.
Final Thoughts
The ultimate benefit of having a knowledge base is that it saves both your customers and customer support team a lot of headaches.
Customers get what they want, when they want, with no need for human interaction.
And your employees have fewer calls to take, spend less time dealing with repetitive tasks and can focus on more important issues.
Cut down your support tickets by 50% or even less with an effective knowledge base
Start free trialIt’s a win-win situation, in which you get to create positive interactions between your customers and your brand while keeping your employees working on creative tasks.
In the end, you get all the benefits of knowledge base: you spend less (thanks to fewer tickets and phone calls) while increasing your revenues (thanks to higher conversion and customer satisfaction).
Are you ready to make use of these benefits of the knowledge base in your business? Get started with Document360 now! Let us show you how!
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