In a SaaS business, retention is just as necessary as gaining new customers, and most of the time, the best way to deliver satisfaction is to meet and exceed customer expectations. This is particularly important when it comes to communication and support. If a customer has taken the time to reach out, then you can bet it’s important to them, and so the issue needs to be dealt with ASAP. Businesses who recognize the need to go above and beyond for their customers are the ones who truly succeed. A knowledgebase can help companies achieve this ambition, improving customer satisfaction while also reducing the resources required to meet their expectations. Sounds almost too good to be true, right?
Delighting Customers
Many businesses struggle to use their information effectively. They have the answer to the questions their customers are asking, but no efficient way of getting the right information to the right people. This is where the knowledge base helps, by giving customer support staff access to a comprehensive library of information, they can find what they need fast and relay that to the customer. This means they can help customers faster and reduce waiting times. Beyond these obvious efficiency improvements, there’s also the added bonus of consistency, as all information is sourced from a single location. This is more important than ever as customers talk with companies across multiple channels. The business needs to be able to give consistent answers at every opportunity.
Self-service
Over the years, I’ve seen customers change and evolve, as wider society has become more technologically focused, customers, have increasingly wanted more choice and power to overcome their problems. So, offering a self-service knowledge base option makes good sense, and a knowledge base helps companies do just that. By definition, self-service gives the customer everything they need and more. But just what is self-service? Well, it’s basically what it says on the tin, a self-service customer support offering allows customers to access the system where the information is stored directly. In most cases, this takes the form of a database, directory, or knowledge base. Customers can find the critical information they need quickly and easily. Everything from the simple UI and branding to comprehensive search capabilities, interactively. When it comes to self-service, you can’t afford to offer anything but a seamless experience. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that unless the process of finding information is simple, easy, and stress-free, self-service shouldn’t be an option. Realistically, there should only be two types of self-service; good self-service and no self-service at all. This is why choosing a platform that has the critical capabilities necessary to meet and exceed customer expectations is so important. Many companies use knowledge base software like Document360 for their customer service knowledge base, and it’s allowed them to not only diversify their customer support offerings but has reduced the resources required as well. By giving customers the power to find their answers, in their own time, fewer human resources are needed, and this helps support teams to answer customer queries faster and invest in solving more complex problems. All in all, self-service helps a business improve their support, reduce the investment required to meet and exceed customer expectations, and gives customers the power of choice; everyone’s a winner.
Help customers do more.
Tagging plays a vital role, a knowledge base with easy-to-use tagging and filtering capabilities will improve the customer experience. With the tagging features available, it’s easy for content to be categorized and then found by the right people at the right time. Without tagging, everything is reliant upon keywords in the content, and this can create discoverability challenges. Arguably, one of the weaknesses of a knowledge base is that it requires the company to know what their customer’s problems are before they can be solved via self-service. Fortunately, this isn’t often an issue for long; a knowledge base should be thought of as a living breathing asset. It lives, it grows, and it improves over time. To guide this improvement, data and usage analytics capabilities are required.
Business needs to be able to see what their customers are looking for (via search) and the common problems they experience with the product. With access to this information, companies can guide the evolution of their knowledge base, so it’s customized to meet their customer’s needs. This customer-focused approach ensures the value delivered by the knowledge base is always growing.
