How Knowledge Management Tools Can Help Ease Customer Support Jobs

Did you know that according to research, a staggering 91% of customers won’t willingly do business with your company if they have had a bad customer experience? Plus, Gartner predicts that 64% of customers find customer experience more important than price when it comes to making a purchase.

Long story short, delivering a superior customer experience (CX) is the lifeblood of every business today. And one all-purpose tool that can extend a lending hand is a: Knowledge Management Software. In this blog, we will look at how organizations can wow and woo their customers with a robust self-service knowledge base from the get-go. To that end, let us start with the basics. 

What Is A Customer Support Knowledge Base Tool, Anyway?

Essentially, a knowledge management platform acts as a centralized place to capture and store customer-centric information that the agents can use in real-time. More importantly, they can access the information on-the-go and at their fingertips, serving customers with speed and efficacy. Now that you have a clear understanding of what a knowledge management tool entails, let us deep-dive to understand how it can be used to augment your customer support team’s responsibilities and requirements.

Top-4 Ways To Use A Knowledge Management Tool To Elevate Your CX

1. Seamlessly collaborate and organize customer-centric data for your agents.

Think about this for a second: A customer asks a question about your brand’s return policy to a new agent on his first day. Not knowing the answer, the agent asks the customer to wait–a big mistake. In today’s age, customers want answers to their queries instantly. This is where a knowledge management tool comes in handy. It can help your agents in the following ways:

• Organize internal information and capture detail critical that educates the customer support agent and employees of the organization
• Creating the SOPs can help customer agent can take place uniformity in action 
• Collate important resources in one place and make them accessible to the support agents 24x7x365. Here is an example of Lyft’s knowledge base, which offers a separate section called “Tips” for drivers who wish to learn how to better their customer experience:

Empower customers to self-serve by finding answers themselves and, in turn, reduce the number of customer support calls and the time to resolution.

Key takeaway: Knowledge management tools can facilitate seamless communication and collaboration, both internally (between agents) and externally (between customers and agents). It also ensures that all customer-centric data is captured in real-time.  

2. Empower your customers to self-service.

Tying back to the previous point, resolving issues quickly stands at the top of the list for 69% of customers when defining what constitutes to be a ‘good’ customer experience. This is where a customer knowledge base truly shines. 

One, it empowers customers to tackle simple issues at their own convenience. Two, by integrating your knowledge tool with powerful search capabilities, you can save on your agent’s time. Here is Yoast’s knowledge base page that organizes diverse content into neat categories and offers customers the ability to search for their issues:

This ‘saved time and effort’ on the agent’s part ultimately allows them to concentrate on more complex tasks that require creative problem-solving. Three, by accelerating the resolution time, the customers feel valued and appreciated by the brand–an advantage that can boost customer retention as well as loyalty.

Key takeaway: All in all, this self-service knowledge base tool puts the customers in the driving seat and enables them to seek answers quickly and efficiently. According to a survey done by American Express, over 60% of US customers would prefer to use self-service channels such as a company’s website or smartphone app for simple customer service tasks.

3. Offer your customers a personalized knowledge hub, complete with all the resources.

If, as a business, you need to establish yourself as an authoritative figure in your industry, creating an in-depth and comprehensive knowledge base with customized content is paramount. Take a look at Asana’s knowledge base page that neatly categorizes the content into three main sections: the basics, the features and functionalities, and leadership tips:

Notice how the content is simple and takes on a warm and friendly overtone. The idea is to provide your customers with all the information they might need in the form of useful FAQs, how-to video tutorials, case studies, recorded webinars, etc. You can also outline important information by having an “In this Article” section (or a table of content of sorts) designed into the overall content as the Rail Europe’s knowledge base page demonstrates below:

Another interesting example worth considering is Dropbox’ knowledge base page, which highlights the customer’s pain-points which is demonstrated in the form of common questions:

At the end of the day, there is no shortcut or standardized template to how you can customize your customer-facing knowledge hub. You can use images, tailor-made content, videos, etc., to spruce up the page and communicate important information that’s updated, useful, easily-accessible, and practical. 

Key takeaway: An overwhelming 91 percent of consumers would not mind using an online knowledge base if it can cater to their needs in a personalized capacity.

4. Build an immersive and engaging customer community. 

Using a knowledge management tool can help your agents monitor and build a host of informational touch-points that can be useful to customers. These touch-points include websites, forums, social media communities, and apps. Basically, these communities allow customers to help each other out, thereby reducing the load on your customer support agents and instilling a sense of belonging among your loyal customers.

Oftentimes, these community groups and pages can also throw light on emerging customer pain-points, offer insights into new solutions to the customer’s problems, and help your brand identify information gaps that can be addressed by building blogs and a knowledge base around the identified topics.

Wrapping Up: The Writing Is On The Wall

In 2021, customer experience will be about delivering support with speed, scalability, and satisfaction, especially if customers continue to shop, work, and, well, live remotely. In other words, investing in a customer support knowledge management software will take center stage.

Customers today don’t mind helping themselves if that means that they get information within seconds and with relative ease. So whether you wish to inform, motivate, and educate your agents or whether you wish to entertain and engage your customers, a knowledge management software can prove to be your best bet yet.